No. There was a very specific question he was encouraged to ask that led him down a very specific path of enquiry, but the nature of the question, as I recall, was one that only he could ask -= I don't recall the details but I'll try and hunt them down at some point as I have time.
I think I can save you the trouble. He had even brought an "O-ring" to the congressional committee hearing and cooled it (ice water or dry ice?) showing how it no-longer sealed well as I recall.
Reagan had no idea who Feynman was, or probably anyone else on that commission. He was having trouble remembering the names of his cabinet by that time, and was falling asleep during briefings. His schedule for negotiating with Gorbachev was being set by his wife's astrologer, according to his horoscope and the omens of the planets. For all I know Reagan and his chosen representatives believed that - maybe some insider looking at the abyss that was Reagan's agenda told him that story in an attempt to get him to help Gorbachev, knowing that he would believe basically anything. That is quite plausible, although unnecessary - ordinary explanations suffice, for Reagan's behavior. But Reagan's administration had no interest in ending the Cold War. The Republican power base was making a ton of money, and expanding their political hold - it was all good for them. They also did not want nuclear power or weaponry discredited, and seem to have bought into the delusions about it and the USSR they were themselves marketing - like good car salesmen, they believed their own pitch. That's my nomination for the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of Chernobyl caught them so completely by surprise, and so badly underprepared. So far, it looks like they can't - a least, not on a human civilization time scale. The rate of boost is too high, and the consequences are overwhelming them. Hence the overall problem, and also the risk of runaways at some scale - whatever that risk may be, so far not even plausibly estimated beyond "not impossible, mechanisms exist and are in operation".
Fascinating insight Billy T! Years ago as part of my research I had informal discussions with people (x2) who had intimate knowledge [ actually worked as engineers ] in USA reactors at the time Chernobyl's catastrophic reactor failure. The premise of the inquiry was that : "If Chernobyl reactor had suffered failure all industry specialists world wide would have been informed almost immediately [internally and by normal media] of the potential for issues in their own individual work places. That they would almost automatically start checking and rechecking their situation to ensure their installation would not suffer similar due to unknown causes. The presumption would normally be that up until the disaster the reactors would be deemed to be safe however after reports of the disaster started to appear that presumption would have been severely tested. The result of that inquiry strongly suggested that the hypothesis I was researching was incorrect. That there were no known fluctuations in reactor performance that would suggest geomagnetic or other global environmental anomalies that had impacted on nuclear reaction at the time of Chernobyl's reactor failure. That no immediate changes had been instigated to staff procedures etc as a direct reaction to the disaster. So I was left with a hypothesis floundering and put it aside until I considered the possibility that the USA and Soviet reactors may have been very different in design leaving the possibility that the Soviet system was more vulnerable to global environmental issues than those the USA employed. The hypothesis also extended to the difference in technology regards nuclear weapons programs that may have led to the same vulnerability. The question is not about superiority of design but merely the differing approaches used. ---- [If I am not mistaken High altitude nuke testing had revealed significant effect amplifications due to magnetic field EMP effects possibly a major factor leading to the threat of the "Star wars" SDI campaign 1983 which Reagen apparently was an enthusiast of] No doubt one could speculate that the SDI, later changed to BMDO in 1993 by Carter administration has quietly matured since then. However this relied upon USA superiority in the delivery of satellites and other space platforms, care of the space shuttle program which was mothballed for an extended period after the S,Shuttle Challenger disaster that occurred on Jan 28th, 1986. No doubt one of the tasks of the Rogers Commission was to rule out espionage due to the pivotal need of the space shuttle program to promote the SDI [The Cold war was still existent at this time] Chernobyl incident occurs on April 26th 1986 [approx 3 months after the Challenger disaster.] So check the time line: SDI program started March 1983 Challenger disaster Jan 1986 [human error-blamed] Chernobyl disaster April 1986 [human error-blamed] OK no big deal and then we see the shelved space shuttle program was also responsible for the delay in launching the Hubble telescope with it's massive error [ again human error ] SDI program started March 1983 Challenger disaster Jan 1986 [human error-blamed] Chernobyl disaster April 1986 [human error-blamed] Hubble telescope launched 1990 Flawed mirror* [human error blamed] *Hubble Error even after extensive opportunity for testing due to launch delays caused by shelving of the Shuttle program. ...and of course the number of unprecedented events, climate, world health and other have continued ever since culminating in what we are seeing today with a lot more yet to come. so I smell a rat...sorry but I can't help it... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Billy T Just fishing Billy T, but if as you say "the hotter the core the faster the reaction rate" would this not make the core susceptible to potential overheating if environmental factors such as the hypothesized geomagnetic /Earth COG instability were to occur? How would this differ to other reactor systems? Would they be as sensitive to gravitational COG instabilities as the USSR systems may have been? Keeping a hypothetical in mind that if the Earth was enduring a magnetic COG type event then all matter and substance may also... Gravitational Constant sourced instability [ re: cosmic metric expansion which Hubble telescope was supposed to confirm *? etc ] edit: the thought is that the reactive or dynamic nature of the core may have ramped up unbeknown to the plant operators at the time, which may have dramatically reduced the "actual" safety margin for their testing they say they were carrying out at the time.
You seem to have left out a whole slew of human errors that created unexpected failures of equivalent scale and potential - Three Mile Island, a couple of major plane crashes (including the Concorde! So the French are in on it.), the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the BP oil rig disaster, the Japanese nuke wreckage outside of Fukushima, satellites from every major satellite launching outfit unexpectedly falling out of the sky, the loss of live nuclear bombs by the US, and so forth. The notion that spectacular disasters associated with complex new engineering projects are "unprecedented" seems unsupported, however. The first Egyptian smooth face pyramid fell down near completion, an early version of the Aztec aquaduct system was destroyed by water surge, the biggest Scandinavian warship foundered at launch, the Titanic suffered mishap in its first voyage, New Orleans joined the dozens of Chinese cities drowned under levee failure over the centuries, the list is long and historically venerable. Werner Von Braun summed things up as follows: "If you are going to make rockets, you are going to blow things up". Books with titles like "To Engineer Is Human" can be bought from the retail shelves. As every single one of the disasters you name has been investigated, and the human errors involved have been not only labeled vaguely as "human error" but specifically described down to mechanism and sequence of event, the attribution of all of them to a single unknown and undescribed cause without mechanism and without explanatory necessity seems - how to put this - unlikely. Rats are damn common - smelling them is not much of a clue. That did not happen. They weren't "testing", they didn't have a proper containment shell for the reactor they knew they had, they were cutting corners on known procedure, they screwed up. Similarly at Three Mile Island, with the key difference that TMI did have a containment shell - an expression of gratitude toward the lefties and hippies and anti-nuke troublemakers that have plagued the nuke industry with their silly paranoias would be appropriate here. Not the invention of new and unsupported paranoias of one's own.
Oh I see our point with out a problem... however rats are also very common also... especially when dealing with cold war politics and policy. But all the same I agree that my thoughts may appear to be out of order except there is more in the back ground that I haven't mentioned that also point to this particular time in human history. 1985/86 as being pivotal. Example: Significant satellite generated solar luminosity data that mysteriously disappears shortly after publication showing a significant gain of 2% per an. starting from 1985/6 over and above normal fluctuations. Significant seismic data that shows similar. But wait there is more... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Perhaps you would care to offer an alternative explanation for the obvious gain in seismic tension/pressure we are experiencing and how that relates to climate change and CO2 then again it all may be mere coincidence that my paranoid mind may be having a field day with....
By the way, don't trust the graphs I have provided... go look for yourself and reach your own paranoid conclusions....
Alternative to what? Do you have an original explanation for how fluctuations in earthquake intensity "relate to climate change and CO2"? I'd go with plate tectonics for the earthquakes, and anthropogenic boosting of CO2 levels for the climate change, and fossil fuel burning for the anthropogenic CO2 boost, on the grounds of sufficiency and mechanism and data agreement, but if you have something else let's see it.
If you are happy with your position by all means be so...it is not for me to burst your bubble so to speak...the worlds future "unprecedented" events will do that quite well all on their own and quite quickly too. IMO.
A rhetorical test question: If the world miraculously was able to cease anthropogenic CO2 production today, how would that effect the situation regards climate change tomorrow? In other words even if we as race stopped CO2 production immediately how long would it take for the weather to stabilize?
Well, it would take about 50 years for 50% of the CO2 to be reabsorbed, about 100 years for 70%. So 100 years or so to get rid of most of the CO2. It would also take time after that for temperatures to return to previous levels due to thermal inertia.
This is rot, at least by my recollection. Soviet RBMK reactors are well known for developing hotspots hidden from view. The test they were conducting the night of the 'accident' involved operating the reactor in conditions that it was never designed to operate in (low power output causing Xenon poisoning IIRC). The final blow came when they scrammed the reactors - the control rods had graphite tips which absorbed fewer neutrons than the water it displaced resulting in a power surge as the control rods were inserted. I'm still mystified as to why the russians thought it was a good idea to have potentially red hot graphite in an environment where coming into contact with super-heated steam was even a remote possibility.
I just realized an error in an earlier post. #227 Increase in solar luminosity was at a rate of 0.2% per an. above the historic normal compounding consistently from 198586 through to the end of the data period which if I recall was 2006 so the graph was indicating a rate of 2% per 10 years which I found at the time to be totally staggering in implications. possibly the data was pulled from publication because it was found to be in error...[I have a print screen copy of it archived on a remote hard drive somewhere...but am reluctant to spend the time looking for it]
Could be related to the fact that nearly half (possibly a little over if we include Tohoku 2011) of the energy released by earthquakes has been released by three events (four including Tohoku) that have occured since 1960: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Indicating, to me at least, that the core components employed could have been extremely vulnerable to any major environmental shifts in COG or magnetic fields as suggested by the graph posted originally by sculptor. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! note 1985 spike
No. The RBMK reactor was just a bad design, it was inherently unstable, it was a pyramid on a corner waiting to tip over. There were so many things wrong with the set-up that night, and they ran the experiment on the worst reactor design they could have picked. Scramming it even under ideal conditions still causes a power surge, and the conditions that night were far from ideal - they should have let the reactor die from Xenon poisoning and taken the rap for having to do a cold restart rather than trying to salvage the output.
If you believe the story about what happened on that night and that it was caused by human error yes your assessment would stand. I am hypothesizing that the anomalous movement that appeared to have occurred in the geomagnetic fields and COG may have further exasperated an already tenuous and risky situation. To make the mistakes that they apparently did especially after a history of melt down [reactor 1; 1982 partial core melt down, reactor 4 was commissioned in 1983] and the supposed experience gained beggars disbelief in itself. However the geomagnetic environment may have been enough to tip the balance so to speak. [ a bad decision made even worse ] just thoughts... [perhaps a mixture of human and natural conditions?] To clarify : How sensitive were the 2nd generation RBMK reactors to geomagnetic pole shifting? Do they still use RBMK reactors and if so have they been modified to accommodate geomagnetic fluctuations since the end of the cold war?
Like I said - if you have explanations other than the standard ones so thoroughly supported by the info available to ordinary laypersons such as myself, let's see what they are. Listing a few fairly well known and apparently well investigated (although still protected, as in the Hubble - apparently the second, not the first, big mirror satellite telescope to suffer its problems) high end tech project screwups does not threaten anyone's worldview except those who believe in the infallibility of agenda driven technocrats. Here, for example, is the standard Wikipedia layout of the Chernobyl disaster. What do you find mysterious and in need of "alternative" explanation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster Note that many people such as myself find flaws in this officially approved account, such as the too easy dismissal of the high end casualty estimates. But there appear to be no major holes in the mechanistic account of the accident itself. You appear to have an exaggerated view of the strength of the earth's magnetic field in the first place. How, exactly, do you think any fluctuations in it would have affected anything other than a finely balanced compass needle inside the reactor building at Chernobyl ?
There are a number of reasons, some of which I have already mentioned. I offered an alternative causation for global warming that suggested non-anthropogenic causation. [Earth mass heating from in -out, and not, out in] I was asked to explain further why I thought that this might be the case. I explained that for reasons I can not disclose there is reason to believe that the Earths COG was destabilized around 1985/86. Sciforums poster, "Sculptor" then to my surprise, offered the graph on pole shifting that strengthened suspicions that events of 1985/86 had in some way been influenced by geomagnetic pole shifting. If the Earths center of gravity had been destabilized so too had all matter/substance (including organic) universally due to the universally shared nature of the universal constancy of Gravity. So if the Earths COG was impacted so to were the individual nuclear elements of all nuclear devices. [right down to the atomic structures] I also believe that the stability of magnetic fields is directly related to the constancy of gravity. Gravitational instability is harder to detect than magnetic on smaller scales [ except universal scales such as cosmic expansion etc. - Hubble telescope ] Hypothetically temperature gain would also be an indicator. The magnetic fields that made up the core elements of reactor 4 may have become unstable leading to higher reactor core instability than would have been able to be anticipated by the engineers at Chernobyl. [t'was only theory as Billy T stated] Thus with the high risk testing procedure combined with hidden geomagnetic COG variables a core failure may have resulted. Basically because the atomic structure of the materials used were being pushed already to extreme tolerances, the destabilization of the materials inherent binding magnetic fields meant that the tolerance levels were possibly exceeded in that sort of reactor. ..and thus hypothetically the USA was needed to provide tech support to help stabilize the Soviet nuclear program to prevent global catastrophe and the cold war ended to facilitate it as the geomagnetic COG situation was trending towards further extremes. Naive thoughts: "Positive temperature coefficient" mean that once the temperature starts to climb so to does reaction. There was no way they could control a melt down once it started because hypothetically all known tolerances where out the window due to factors well beyond theirs and any ones control. Which is more or less what I am suggesting about climate change... that climate change is and always has been beyond any ones control. Therefore the need to hide the truth becomes immediate, urgent and compelling. (ELE cover up conspiracy) btw the Kyoto protocol expired in 2012 and hasn't been replaced if I am not mistaken. Governments can not act properly because the data that IS available is not conclusive enough so confusion reigns supreme as they say. IMO
