sjbradshaw

Comment Threads

• Greg. Tingey commented on Wow
  Whatever happens, 19/20 October next year is going to be very interesting, from an astronomical-observation viewpoint, isn't it?...
• george.herbert commented on Wow
  Constantine wrote, in part: a) he says that the "reactor" was "tamped" by the overlying rock but doesn't provide any calculations to support this (and for all I know forgot that Mars has lower gravity than Earth, so pressure is lower at a given depth). That's a fairly critical part of the scenario that we just have to take his word for. I think that I mentioned some expertise in this. In this case, tamping is the correct term of art for material intimately in contact with the fast fission "pit" or mass of reacting fissile and fissionable material, which...
• Constantine commented on Wow
  Thanks george - to clarify: I'm not doubting that that tamping is a real thing, it's more the claim that "Because of the size of the ore body, and its burial at kilometer depth, the reaction was inertially confined or “tamped” so that explosive disassembly was delayed until a high degree of fission burn-up was achieved." If that's the case, I would expect to see some numbers and calculations to demonstrate (a) that this actually is at kilometre depth, (b) whether the depth is actually enough to "inertially confine" the reaction, and (c) why it's such a big explosion that...
• paws4thot commented on Wow
  Yeah, I'd slipped magnitudes when I tried to do a re-normalisation in my head....
• zhochaka commented on Wow
  That's the original paper's claim, but papers at conferences can be rather flimsy pieces of science. This one doesn't hold up to informed examination....