DV8 2XL

What I think is happening is hat the attraction that the spinning magnet will feel when the poles are aligned PLUS the attraction that it will feel when the poles are at right angles to each other adds up to a net attraction.

It stands. The relevant passage is here:

I still think it is an error to continue to think of these individuals as terrorists instead of warriors. The 9/11 attack was a textbook example of hitting a high-value economic target, and a high-value military target. An act of war, not terrorism. This is not to say I think invading Afghanistan and Iraq was the proper response, just that dismissing this action as the work of fanatics is myopic.

Surprisingly that works. The trick is to leave the items in the hot wax long enough to come to the same temperature. If you don't a light film will be left on the parts afterward.

Actually it is transcendental - the term exact value is not quite right in this context. However it is a constant and any theory that claims otherwise must add other entities to support that contention drawing a charge of violating Occam's Razor.

MEK is my favorite to remove wax. But boiling in hot water to float the stuff off works well too. Mind you you now have the pot to clean....

Ya, I kind of like it too. It would be very handy if this model holds as it would make the job of large-scale simulation a lot easier.

So what do we have? A used fuel bundle made of zercaloy filled with mostly UO3 perhaps. To start off with you can't get near those things without soaking up a lethal dose of radiation, and they are hot with plain old heat to boot. Now what cover it with some C4 and set it off - chunks over what? Half a block? To hurt someone they would have to pick it up an keep it in their hands. The fact is you do need a lot of the stuff and it needs to be in a fine powder to do much harm and doing this is just too hard to make it attractive to any terrorist. The West is full of big fat high-value targets that any well trained commando (because that's what the 9/11 strike force was) can make a bloody mess of with less fuss and bother than trying to smuggle in enough hot nuclear waste to contaminate a few streets in New York. We have got to wake-up and realise that we are not dealing with a threat from a handful of religious fanatics - this is true asymmetric warfare carried out by military or military trained operatives that have the resources, the logistical infrastructure, and the strategic planing behind them to make them a very efficient and deadly enemy. When they choose to strike they will do so to produce the maxium economic and social impact and kill as many people as they can. Nuclear is just not worth the trouble for this sort of force.

Believe it or not the stuff has application there too.

Na, to start off with high level waste is even less fun to play with than refined Pu. Second it's not that easy to make a device that will reliably aerosol the product over a wide area. Recall that this was seriously looked into during the Manhattan Project as an alternative to making the bomb. thirdly look at just how much of the stuff would be required to make such a thing effective - you can't run around with several hundred kg of used fuel core, assuming you got your hands on it in the first place, without drawing a lot of attention. This is a non issue. Like I said above, you can get a lot more bang for your buck without the trouble of handling radioactive material.

You know what might be a hot topic for you? Zeolites. We have just scratched the surface of what this class of material is capable of. I have thought that there was a science fair project somewhere in that stuff for some years.

Oh, picky, picky - you know what I mean

There is a good deal more than slapping two chunks of highly enriched uranium together to make a super-critical assembly. The technical problems are an order of magnitude greater for an implosion device. Acquiring the material is also non-trivial and unlikely to escape notice or at the very least to acquire without leaving a trail. There is no entity outside of a State that could carry out such a project. In the end terrorists are about leveraging a small amount of force to do a maximum amount of damage to demonstrate to the target population that they are vulnerable to attack from unexpected avenues. Nuclear weapons on the other hand elicit fear through the threat of action because the effect of an attack or its location are unknown. Witness the fact that despite decades of effort by military planners all over the world, no one has yet tabled a credible first-use doctrine for this weapon that does not involve responding to a dire threat. I am not yet convinced that the security situation in civil aviation has changed sufficiently (nor will it ever) to made another 9/11 attack impossible. Nor am I convinced that there are not other systemic vulnerabilities out there that some imaginative terrorist could exploit; but nuclear weapons are very low on that list.

The other thing that makes me laugh about the terrorist n-bomb boogie-man is the size of a crude device. These things would have to be huge. The small Davy Crockett size warheads have an incredible amount of engineering to fit in such a small package,

If we were going to go to the trouble of overhauling the system of measurements let's go straight to Planck units instead of playing games with round numbers.