tinyE: What lake do you live on/near?

tinyE: If you want to visit a shipwreck, come to my place.

The John Jacob Astor (name for the guy who died on the Titanic) is about two miles from my place, in about ten feet of water. :P

jonridan: To visit the freaking Titanic... Talking about wishful thinking u.u

tinyE: Serious answer, I haven't kissed a girl in 24 years.

I'd like to do that again before I die, but I think the odds are better that I'll walk on the moon. :P

GameRager: I wonder if it's even still SAFE to dive that wreck....what with all the rust/structural faults now from being underwater for so long? :\

Or if there's even much to still look at that hasn't been messed up(again) due to being submerged for so long?

I guess we'd need a structural engineer/deep diver/etc to weigh in on this to get detailed info.

scientiae: Don't they celebrate the New Year in Michigan?
scientiae: There's a whole flotilla of Imperial Japanese Navy ships at the bottom of a bay in one of the smaller South Pacific nations (can't remember which one off the top of my head; might be the Solomon Islands? near Guadalcanal — which the locals call Isatabu).

This is a problem because the ships were sunk without removing all the diesel in their tanks, so there will come a day when they start to leak. It would be expensive to clean up these wrecks now, since it isn't clear who should pay to clean up the mess — the US Navy sank the fleet during WWII, helping to save the local country and the rest of the world from the Imperial Japanese forces, who filled them with fuel.

Think about how expensive it will be when the hull of one eventually ruptures, polluting the local reef/s and potentially the coasts of nearby countries (like the north island of New Zealand and Australia's eastern seaboard).

Then again, oil pollution is only a temporary blight. (I remember the Florida beaches had spots of oil on them when I was there.) Even the worst spills* without any human clean-up have recovered very well after only a few years. (Of course it's not much fun for the wildlife for a season or two.)

* My information predates the most recent BP Gulf catastrophe. I presume Georgia and Louisianna locals might have a different view …

GameRager: BTW Offtopic even more, but: Did you hear about the bikini atoll/pacific (iirc) "dome" of waste from nuclear tests that is weakening under the ocean and might lead to an environmental disaster if it is ever breached? Yes, we stored nuclear waste from tests in the ocean near the original sites, which could bite us later on. :\

scientiae: I'm not sure what you mean by a "dome of waste" (rubble piled atop the waste?) but even so it wouldn't be a problem, unless you are a local. Ambient radioactivity is not a health hazard, unless it is above a critical amount (a dozen millsieverts a second or something — happy to be corrected by someone who has the correct dosimetry), in fact there are a couple of naturally radioactive places, like Iran, where the ambient radiological conditions promote good health (presumably by priming the immune system).

If the calamity you describe actually happened, it would be similar to the pollution from the Fukishima reactor damaged in the tsunami of 2011, which has caused precisely zero casualties. Any radioactive substance would be dissolved into the ocean. (Apart from the crabs, which were a delicacy for the indigenous population who now cannot eat them, any life affected by the nuclear testing would have died long ago. The crabs absorbed the radiation and kept living and breeding, hence are now dangerous to eat.)

The nuclear power industry has actually prevented more death than it has caused (primarily because it has reduced air pollution). About seven million people did not die from complications of air quality because the pollution was not produced since the energy was created atomically.

GameRager: 1. It's literally tons of nuclear waste under a manmade dome under the ocean.

Afaik it's to such a degree of radioactivity/such a big amount that if it leaked out it;d cause a mass die-off in the area around it for many miles.

2. It's actually much more amounts of material/higher radiation levels than Fukishima iirc.

3. Good info, and I am not trying to scare people away from nuclear power(if anyone read my post as such)....I am just bringing up a point about a possible environmental problem in the making.

scientiae: As you say, a local tragedy but de facto remote toxic storage for the rest of the world. (I'm not condoning the original pollution, merely pragmatically and opportunistically identifying its effect.)

My point was that the ocean would dissipate any threat before a day's travel distance from the site. So we concur. (There are millions of tonnes of gold in the oceans that scammers have tried to refine / mine, for instance, but the sheer volume of water makes this impossible — for the purposes of economic viability at current commodity prices.)
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Incidentally, In one of those moments that Jung termed synchronicity I saw a Catalyst program on extraterrestrial mining a couple of days ago. Dr Graham Phillips reported that the University of NSW had investigated low-gravity mining, specifically for the Lunar regolith (which is basically identical to powdered basalt). Down at a depth of about a foot, this powder becomes compressed into a significantly dense solid that defies low-gravity excavation because the size of mining equipment would be prohibitively expensive to launch out of Earth's gravity well. (Explosions, which everybody naturally jumps to next, would create a cloud of debris that would not dissipate for weeks.) Instead, the boffins have devised a type of vacuum cleaner that uses a high pressure nozzle and a low-pressure storage receptacle linked by a tube to "dig" very effectively. ^_^
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As for insulation, their solution was to sinter the regolith into blocks. They would protect against the cosmic radiation AND continual micrometeorite bombardment.

These blocks also acted as perfect (thermal) batteries in the negligible atmosphere (almost no convection to diminish the heat), which would supply enough heat to power equipment during the lunar night (which lasts a fortnight); approximately one cubic meter would provide a kilowatt.

edit: typo

GameRager: …
Sounds interesting....btw if you are ever wanting to post space news/weiod news I now have a thread for that in general(hint hint). ;D

It reminds me a bit of, btw, TinTin on the Moon....great book/film, imo.
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More good info, but that power method likely wouldn't be able to sustain/power more power hungry equipment on a large scale/support fully a massive sized colony/site as the site grew. It could help with supplemental power though.

scientiae: If you posted a link, it would assist me posting to the thread (hint hint).

The battery is a phenomenal achievement, should it be realized, since it is completely recyclable (reheat, repeat). Scaling it up is a second-order problem, and much less of one.

GameRager: I didn't want to do much self promotion and figured it'd be visible on page 1 of general, but here:

Weird News Network

(Don't mind the "low rep construction"....some trolls and alts are doing their usual work on my account)

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Sounds good

scientiae: As far off-topic as we are I will add an important observation that (still) seems to lack general acceptance, despite my attempts to counter it. Whatever happens to be the current state of social media (like the first page of a forum) these scribblings are permanent (in the virtual ether of the interwebs) and so said state is not guaranteed to be the actual state in the future. Someone reading this thread later would have no way to find the link if it wasn't posted.

My overriding desire in writing anything in the public domain is to make it as legible as possible.