Is your proposal basically to burn away nuclear waste? Why is the gasoline important?
Few issues I see:
I don’t think such waste can be disposed safety by incineration. Because if it could, we’ve have done so already. It’s probably the go to solution when it comes to waste disposal, apart from just burying it or dumping it in the ocean.
The main problem is the safety and handling of such radioactive waste. You do not want it anywhere near people and that’s why it’s isolated. They are highly dangerous. Do you want such a substance sitting in your vehicle, garage, gas station with high traffic, etc? The radioactive substance doesn’t just go away when you add gasoline to it.
Even assuming we can get past the safety issues, the said mixture will likely not work in vehicles at all, or would destroy your engine.
How would this reduce carbon emissions? You are still burning gasoline except it’s radioactive gasoline.
Well it’s serious in that I would like to know how radioactive 2 million kilograms of nuclear waste mixed into 500 billion liters of gasoline would be.
I guess it’s 4 milligrams per liter. So a grain of sand per liter. My car is in the garage with a 40 liter gas tank. So 40 gains of sand worth of nuclear waste. How dangerous is that? Is it like evacuate the neighborhood, or is it don’t plan any long road trips.
I’m not sure why you think dispersing nuclear waste into our environment instead of isolating it is a good idea.
If it’s just a thought experiment from a mathematical / chemical perspective, maybe someone else would like to take on the question and do the math.
From a sociological and logistical perspective, it’s just not gonna happen. Pretty sure people’s tolerance for radioactive materials anywhere near them is zero. There isn’t any amount of radioactivity / danger that is considered socially acceptable.
Adding lead to gasoline didn’t reduce carbon emissions. Why do you think some other toxin would? You’re just poisoning the atmosphere for funsies. Skip the convoluted steps and just detonate bombs in the atmosphere. Inject it right into gothams water main, ya genocidal supervillain.
That doesn’t sound unreasonable. I didn’t know the main diet of hammerheads was found on the ocean floor?
Edit: So according to the article linked by @TokenBoomer you’re partially right, apparently it also makes them more agile, which I guess is good if you’re trying to snatch things as they pop off the ocean floor.
Just like there are “islands” of relative stability predicted, there are also some islands of instability where the geometry just won’t line up correctly no matter how you arrange it. Think of an atomic nucleus like a soccer ball – A soccer ball has a specific number of pentagons and hexagons that fit together (almost) perfectly. You can’t make any such shape with hexagons alone. If you have even one too many or one too few, it might still make a mostly spherical shape, but no matter what you do it will have a weird wrinkle, flap, or gap somewhere, and that’s the kind of thing that will cause instability, it won’t balance correctly, it won’t fly true, and if the flaw is big enough eventually the inconsistency will tear it apart.
The patterns of various numbers of two dimensional shapes that can form a seamless sphere is not intuitive or obvious at a glance and the math required to compute it is reasonably complex, but the result is straightforward. Some combinations of shapes work easily for this. Others only work in very specific arrangements. And some simply won’t work at all. The same sort of idea seems to apply to atoms, although we can’t say we completely understand all the nuances of the forces at play, the principles and outcomes are easy to measure. This is of course still an area of significant research and study, because it is important and has implications and potentially applications ranging from deeply obscure astrophysics and cosmology questions to very potent energy technologies that could change our society. But no matter what we discover, our observations of the outcomes are quite consistent and very repeatable, and the atomic patterns that we call Technetium simply don’t stay together very long.
Lots of stuff about patterns that tile or do not tile into regular shapes does not make much intuitive sense, just like prime numbers and irrational numbers do not follow any obvious pattern we can predict, and indeed modern cryptography is dependent on the fact that prime numbers do not follow any particular pattern. Patterns that look like they should be trivial to fit together do not, like intuition might suggest that the square root of 2 should be at least a rational number if not a natural one. And things that look impossible to tile can snap together seamlessly when placed with some careful attention and planning. Technetium is like one of those mathematical or geometrical patterns that looks like it should be trivial but no matter what you do the pieces just will not fit together into any useful shape. At least not for very long.
Some further reading on patterns like Aperiodic Tiling might also be of interest. Lots of fun stuff down such rabbit holes.
We could know about it in only 26,000 years due to the speed of light and gravity waves. However I’m not sure how it would affect us at all …
Perhaps there’s a burst of particles going less than the speed of light. We would know about it before those particles got here.
Perhaps you mean the disappearance of the strong gravity well at the center might affect us: I imagine any changes to the structure of the galaxy or it’s movement would take much much much longer to affect us
I am probably at a similar experience level to OP and have wondered the following: is there a commonly used, or agreed upon repository for identity verification with PGP or similar? It would be a useful thing to use, the problem is that if you’re posting something to a public space, not everyone may have access to your public key for verification. Including the key in the message doesn’t seem like it would help much, since someone else could just generate two new keys and still claim to be you without any affiliation. Am I wrong about this? Thanks.
Key signing parties used to be the thing to do at conferences - imagine a line of people, sheets of paper listing all their key fingerprints, and people showing ID to each other.
If this is some kind of messaging board, you’d probably put your public key in your profile (I assume that since OP is talking about the dark web that the posters there would rather not share their actual identity).
Let’s talk about Alice, Bob and Eve. Alice is an active poster on a dark web forum. She puts her public key on her profile and uses the corresponding private key to sign her messages. If Eve wants to pretend to be Alice, Eve can simply put her own public key on her profile and sign messages with her own private key. But Bob is smart. Rather than just looking at the profile of the poster and copying their key every time, Bob saved it in his key store and assigned it to Alice (possibly even marked it as trusted). When Bob sees a post by Eve, he’ll try to validate it. This validation might succeed (if Bob has access to Eve’s public key), but it will be clear that the message wasn’t signed by Alice’s key.
Of course, this all assumes that Bob has quite some knowledge of how this works and is vigilant enough to perform all these validations correctly.
As for the regular internet, there are some services where you can share your public key: keys.openpgp.org is one of these. Of course, as /u/[email protected] says, there’s still the matter of trust. You need to make sure that the public key you’re using is actually from the right person.
That’s exactly my point. The gold standard would be a key signing party, but given that humans don’t tend to talk to each other in meat space much these days, it’s more of a rare occurrence than it used to be. I don’t really know what the ideal solution would be that would be a good mix of trust, privacy, and ease of use though.
The short answer is that it’s ultimately down to the number 43 (the number of protons technetium has) and the number of neutrons that could potentially form stable isotopes being atomically weird numbers.
The picture below shows relative stabilities of isotopes of different elements. N represents the number of neutrons, Z represents the number of protons. As a starting rule, moving above or below the N=Z line (creating an excess of protons or an excess of neutrons) tends to decrease overall stability.
You can see for lower atomic numbers, the most stable isotopes closely follow N=Z because protons and neutrons “balance” each other in the nucleus. But as you increase the atomic number (and therefore the number of protons), the protons begin to repel each other more strongly, which means additional neutrons are needed to make the nucleus stable. This is why the “line of stability” (the line of dark red “stable” elements) increases above the N=Z line as you increase the atomic number. Deviation from this line means an atom is less “beta stable” (and therefore more likely to beta-decay).
There are certain “magic” numbers of protons and neutrons that are more stable than others because they comprise a full shell. These occur at 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This means nuclei that have (or are very close to) one of these numbers of protons, or neutrons, or protons + neutrons, are inherently more stable. If you look at the other stable isotopes on the graph, you would expect a stable isotope of technetium would need around 55 neutrons to follow the line of stability.
As it turns out, the combinations of 43 protons and 55 (± a few) neutrons just can’t form a stable enough configuration to not beta-decay.
You need to socialize the isotopes with other atoms when they’re young. Otherwise they don’t learn to behave normally. Like dogs. Trust me, I’m a scientician.
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