waagnfnp

[Note: In light of the enormity of the firestorms happening in Southern California, we are reposting James’ Firestorms for those who missed it previously, or who have something more or new to say. And we send our very best wishes to those suffering from and fleeing from the flames.
-Oaktown Girl, Minister of Justice, WAAGNFNP]

So fires always produce an updraft. In truly big fires, the question becomes how the updraft interacts with the local weather. If the local winds are stronger than the updraft, and the fire is big, uncontrolled, and uncontained, you have a conflagration. If the fire creates its own winds, you have a firestorm.

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If you try to light a match under micro-gravity conditions (we all got used to “zero-g” so some smarty pants had to go and call it “micro-gravity”) and just hold it in one place, it will self-extinguish. The match will use up enough of the oxygen in its surrounding volume of air to extinguish the flame. It doesn’t have to use up all the oxygen, either; most flames go out in air that still has enough O2 in it for people to breathe—barely.

Depending on the fuel, (e.g. hydrogen needs less oxygen to burn than methane does), the usual figure given is that 14%-16% oxygen is needed to sustain a fire. People can manage on a bit less; Biosphere II dropped below 14% before they pumped in some additional O2, but they didn’t have to contend with elevated CO2 levels; in fact, what they’d been losing was CO2, by absorption into their nice new concrete structure, with bacteria converting soil organics and O2 into CO2. They’d had a bit of a “slow burn.”

Your basic candle flame is fed fresh air by gravity, specifically, the air coming in to replace the hot gases that have become lighter than air in the hot flame. That’s called the “fire draft” and fireplaces exist to direct the fire draft upwards, so the smoke doesn’t choke the people warming themselves by the fire. The chimney/flue of the fireplace also accelerates the fire draft if you build it right, and both Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (Count Rumford), invented some tricks that are still in use.

So fires always produce an updraft. In truly big fires, the question becomes how the updraft interacts with the local weather. If the local winds are stronger than the updraft, and the fire is big, uncontrolled, and uncontained, you have a conflagration. If the fire creates its own winds, you have a firestorm.
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[Note: The Ministry of Justice had long been seeking a handy, portable, and effective means of “correction” and to aid in the re-education process. Bringing offenders only in need of modest correction all the way to MOJ HQ was neither cost nor time effective. We were therefore ecstatic when Party Patriot, Kiera, stepped forward a few months back and introduced The Trunk.
- Oaktown Girl, Minister of Justice.]

Howdy, folks. It’s your MOJ Sheriff Kiera, here to give you the lowdown on the criminal justice system – WAAGNFNP-style.

Basically, a crime in our community is whatever the Minister of Justice says it is. Since she is personally guided by Gojira and advised by 3Tops, I’m not going to question that (and I strongly suggest that you don’t either). Now, we all know that in an ideal blog, if you do the crime, you do the time. Here in WAAGNFNP land, “time” consists of being put in THE TRUNK, or in the case of repeat offenders, being RETRUNKED. In the case of someone the Minister of Justice thinks might be about to commit a crime (or for general attitudinal adjustments): PRE-TRUNKED.

Now, what is THE TRUNK, you ask? Well, it’s a trunk, of course, on a mid-sized car…at the moment, a Kia Optima. Why is this punishment? After all, a Kia’s trunk is fairly roomy so far as car trunks go. Sure. But you have to share that space with the Sheriff’s “stuff” (and sometimes a few rather large eggs – more on that later). Okay, so it’s a little crowded, big deal, you say. Ah…but that’s only half the punishment. The other half is the location of THE TRUNK.

THE TRUNK, and the car that it’s attached to, is normally parked almost dead center in the State of California. When people think California, they usually think palm trees, cool breezes, and surfing. But that’s only on the coast. This is the Central Valley, also called the San Joaquin Valley, which, before a massive irrigation system made it agriculture central, was divided between a desert (low desert) and the snow covered mountains (high desert) of the Sierra Nevadas…the range that ends in “Death Valley”. In the Sheriff’s part of the Central Valley, only 15 minutes of travel separate the two, making it very convenient for all-season correctional TRUNKING.

What does this mean to WAAGNFNP criminals?
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[click cartoon to enlarge]

Sometimes they were called “blasters, ray guns, or even zap guns,” although that last one was sometimes also used for the “stun gun” the puny sibling to the much mightier Death Ray. Asimov had one called a “Disinto.” Hugo Gernsback was sure they’d be either radio waves or powered by radium. Fritz Leiber imagined the “fission pistol,” that had all the nuclear reactions in the gun going in the same direction. A. E. van Vogt used light to “conduct” nuclear reactions to the target, at least on the Space Beagle. In Slan, it was just raw atomic power. Once in a while the death rays were “sonic.” More frequently they were “electron guns” which actually exist in television sets, but for something else entirely (though one may argue that TV is something of a stun device). H. G. Wells began the whole thing with the “heat ray.”

And we wanted them, maybe as much as we wanted to go into space (which is maybe why I wasn’t as interested in the things as my fan boy brethren). And it wasn’t just us.
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New blog banner by longtime friend of the Minister of Justice, Serafin.

Comments welcome.

If you try to light a match under micro-gravity conditions (we all got used to “zero-g” so some smarty pants had to go and call it “micro-gravity”) and just hold it in one place, it will self-extinguish. The match will use up enough of the oxygen in its surrounding volume of air to extinguish the flame. It doesn’t have to use up all the oxygen, either; most flames go out in air that still has enough O2 in it for people to breathe—barely.

Depending on the fuel, (e.g. hydrogen needs less oxygen to burn than methane does), the usual figure given is that 14%-16% oxygen is needed to sustain a fire. People can manage on a bit less; Biosphere II dropped below 14% before they pumped in some additional O2, but they didn’t have to contend with elevated CO2 levels; in fact, what they’d been losing was CO2, by absorption into their nice new concrete structure, with bacteria converting soil organics and O2 into CO2. They’d had a bit of a “slow burn.”

Your basic candle flame is fed fresh air by gravity, specifically, the air coming in to replace the hot gases that have become lighter than air in the hot flame. That’s called the “fire draft” and fireplaces exist to direct the fire draft upwards, so the smoke doesn’t choke the people warming themselves by the fire. The chimney/flue of the fireplace also accelerates the fire draft if you build it right, and both Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson, (Count Rumford), invented some tricks that are still in use.

So fires always produce an updraft. In truly big fires, the question becomes how the updraft interacts with the local weather. If the local winds are stronger than the updraft, and the fire is big, uncontrolled, and uncontained, you have a conflagration. If the fire creates its own winds, you have a firestorm.
Continue Reading »

This post is about the GNF. That is to say, it is at one and the same time, silly, serious, sacred, and utterly beyond mortal comprehension. It tells about a remarkable event that became manifest on 4 December 2006 in the sacred habitat of 3Tops.

As you know, her most sublime visage is outside the East portal of Bergen Tunnel in Jersey City. Here’s a shot of the tunnel I took just s few days ago:

I was in that area on 4 December taking photographs just before sundown. I was standing near the mouth of the tunnel and looked in, as I had done many times before. This time I saw, to my great surprise, a yellow light shining some undetermined distance inside the tunnel, like this (note also the white light coming in from the far end of the tunnel, the Western end):

Please excuse the blur. I was far enough inside the tunnel that the light was fairly dim. I had no tripod to steady my hand for a long exposure, so things are a bit blurry. But the essential phenomenon is clearly visible: There is a light shining within the tunnel at some undetermined distance. I’d been to this tunnel several times, walked inside it too, and this was the first time I saw that light. Couldn’t figure out what it was, but guessed - against all logic - that there might be some kind of air shaft through which light was entering. (If THAT was it, then why hadn’t I seen it before? That question didn’t occur to me.)

So I walked into the tunnel to investigate, figuring that when I got below the shaft I would take a shot up through it. No shaft appeared. I did take this shot once I’d gotten well inside the tunnel to the point where the light seemed to hit the tunnel floor - say 50 or 60 yards.

You can see my shadow in the middle. Look how long it is. Count the number of ties my shadow crosses. Well, doing that’s difficult, they blur together further out and, of course, the shadow doesn’t start with my feet, more likely somewhere near my knees. But there are a goodly number of ties there, at a distance of, say, 16 inches from center to center. Whatever light that is, it’s hitting me at an oblique angle. It can’t possibly be coming in from an overhead shaft. It must have been coming in from behind me. But what light could that be? There are no street lights or other artificial lights in the area.
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Hot gingerbread and dynamite
Boy, I drink nothing but that each night
Back in Nagasaki/Where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo!

It was a lovely morning In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came.
Can’t you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day?
And behold the mighty city broken in the dust again,
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again.

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion’s walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh’s wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

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By James Killus

So I had this little essay entitled, “The Neutron Dance,” because I’m a fan of both neutrons and The Pointer Sisters (June Pointer RIP, 11 April, 2006) and I sent it to the Minister of Justice as part of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party’s ongoing campaign for a Free Nuclear Zone.

Or something like that. And there’s the rub. Because the Minister of Justice responded by asking me to make some changes, give some context perhaps, add some background and “say a little something about where you’re going with it and why we should care.”

Fair enough, albeit with a soupçon of “are you really sure you want to get me started?” Because I can go meta in six different directions before breakfast and twelve after lunch, to say nothing of übernerd posturing, name dropping, and doing my little Smartest Guy in the Room dance at the drop of a hat.

One tempting tangent is the fact that when I was a lad, the universe was protons, neutrons, and electrons to make stuff with, and photons to make it glow. Sure, there were these cool things called “neutrinos” that had been predicted in 1930 and not actually seen until 1955 and the discoverers were lucky they were young and long-lived, because they didn’t get their Nobels until 40 years later, a full 7 years after the later discovery of the mu neutrino, there’s no justice in the world, I’m just sayin’.

There were also, when I was a lad, these things called “mesons” which are pronounced meh-son, mee-son, or even may-son, provided you want to make puns like “meson jar” or “Meson-Dixon Line.” But those were primarily good for getting funding for particle accelerators and shooting down giant birds from outer space.

But soon the particle accelerator guys got enough money to create something called The Standard Model which they insist is close to a Theory of Everything, (ToE) if by “everything” you mean “a few dozen particles and physical constants.” I mean, I’ve checked, and there is not one word in String Theory, or any of the other proposed ToEs that explains who put the bop in the bop she bop, or even where babies come from.
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By James Killus

There are reasons to suspect that science and engineering took a very different path over there: their limited understanding of nuclear weapons—they seem to think that nukes are roughly as easy to build as bottle rockets—suggests that nuclear fission may never have been developed on their timeline. – Twilight Zone by Gregory Cochran, on evidence that members of the Bush Administration are from a parallel universe.

Just how hard is it to build a nuke? And what is the smallest amount of plutonium needed to build one?

The smallest nuclear weapon ever designed was the Davy Crockett, aka the W54 warhead, weighing 51 pounds with a variable yield supposedly from 10 to 250 tons of TNT equivalent. It was the last weapon ever atmospheric-tested by the U.S. and in its two tests, (Little Feller I and II) it yielded 22 and 18 tons of explosive power. At those yields, however, the explosive power was pretty much unimportant compared to the radiation the blast produced, lethal to 50% of unshielded personnel at 400 meters, 100% lethal at 300 meters.

There’s not a lot of unclassified information about the actual design of the W54, but some conjectures can be made about it just from the nature of the nuclear chemistry involved. A “bare critical” mass of plutonium, for example, weighs roughly 10 kg, but a neutron reflector reduces this by maybe a factor of two. A uranium reflector/tamper can also increase yield because some fast fission will take place in the reflector itself (at the cost of a time delay in the return of the neutrons to the explosive core). Beryllium also multiplies neutrons, undergoing “light fission” on exposure to high-energy particles of any kind, including neutrons, to produce, well, more neutrons. This is also at the expense of slowing the neutrons and thus retarding the rapid increase in neutron population that make a bomb go ka-boom.

But slowing neutrons is called “moderation” and slower neutrons tend to react more easily with nuclei (have a higher capture cross section) than fast neutrons. This is a consequence of quantum mechanics, where fast particles have a more certain position than do slow ones. Think of the slow neutrons as being more “fuzzy,” virtually bigger, if you will. So if there is a nearby nucleus that is “sticky” for neutrons, a slow neutron is more likely to glom onto it.

That is pretty much the principle of nuclear reactors, where neutrons are slowed down to better react with the fissile elements in the reactor. A mass that is sub-critical for fast neutrons can be more than critical for slow neutrons.

The result is that, with a thick beryllium reflector, the critical mass of normal plutonium can be reduced to less than 20% of its “bare” critical number. The thickness of the reflector in the Davy Crockett was probably dictated by the limit that is reached when adding more reflector increases the overall mass of the design rather than reducing it.

The variable yield of the W54 looks like a signature of a variable fusion boost, but I’ve seen statements to the effect that D-T fusion doesn’t get going until you reach the 100 ton range, so the W54 may have had multiple fission core compositions. Still, the upper limit of the W54 is within the fusion boosting range, so a design modification could possibly have boosted its potential yield to a full kiloton.

A reasonable question arises, is the implied 2 kg core the minimum amount of plutonium (or U233, which has a bare critical mass of about 16 kg) that can be used to make a nuclear weapon, even one of such a low yield as the W54?
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By James Killus

A buddy of mine from the air biz used to work at Lawrence Livermore Labs, and he was once at a luncheon where Edward Teller was holding forth. Since there were several atmospheric scientists at that particular lunch, at one point Teller speculated on whether it would be possible to set up a series of nuclear explosions that would cause atmospheric particulates to precipitate out of the air.

My friend was a little nonplussed, because this was a truly loony idea. But after thinking about it for a while, he chalked it up to Teller having a little fun with his own reputation. He had, after all, basically invented the thermonuclear bomb, and had then spent much of his remaining career overseeing its refinement, and looking for some place to use it. From proposed massive canal building projects to attempts to get more natural gas out of geological formations, Teller always had that single tool that he was trying to use: the H-bomb.

Later, when we all heard about the Teller’s backing of the Strategic Defense Initiative (called “Star Wars” in the popular press), some of us immediately wondered, “Where’s the bomb?”

We learned soon enough about the proposed X-ray (or gamma ray) laser, which was supposed to be pumped by a thermonuclear explosion, so there you are and bob’s your uncle. I didn’t expect that to work, for technical reasons, and it didn’t.

SDI did not die with the gamma laser failure, however. We’ve had various debates about the feasibility of “hitting a bullet with a bullet” vs “smart rocks” or “brilliant pebbles,” (or “sentient sand” for all I know). In any case, there’s really no idea so lame that a DOD bureaucracy won’t champion it, but there are some things that generally don’t get said, so I’m going to say them here.

The fact is that there are certain paths of least resistance in engineering. Some ideas, no matter their soundness or unsoundness, will never happen, because something else that is technically easier will happen first. It’s important to know what it is that will happen first.
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