> The design of current glass-tower skyscrapers encourages glass fragment > blowthrough by the shockwave, which will result in massive injuries > (simulated on pigs in wind tunnels it abraded flesh to the bone in > seconds, it would certainly kill you by blood loss or at least maim > badly).
ARGH! Taking back my previous comment about light injuries by flying glass. Thought about the typical downtown brick-and-mortar buildings that have more robust construction with real inner walls. (Don't ask me what I think about the glass towers.) > It is very worthwhile to establish a duck and cover instinct at > the first signs of the flash. Duck behind anything that can stop/slowdown the shards. A table should do. > If you're paranoid, a small cheap terror kit stored in office/car > trunk/home could considerably enhance your survival chances, and > minimize subsequent health risk. Or in each of the places. If it's small and cheap, it can be multiplied. It's a bit stupid to spend time and effort preparing a terror kit and then have it in the car when you need it in the office. > Suitcase nukes missing (the only weapons without PAL codes/PAL codes > issued to people in charge of them, all other weapons won't assemble > without PAL encoding the assembly timing) are apparently a canard. In any > case, these are are high-maintenance weapons, and no by now no longer > operable/only capable of a fizzle, so only useful for salvaging the > fissiles. If they aren't boosted, if they don't need tritium source, why they would deteriorate? Are the pit cores with fast-decaying isotopes (like the Be-Po ones developed during the Project Manhattan) still in use, or were they fully replaced with arc-discharge neutron generators (or how's that thing with deuterium gas inside which gets ionized and accelerated against the target called)? > Latter could be easily leached by purex process from black > market low-ashes fuel (high-ashes fuel is much hotter and has the wrong Pu > isotopes, so you'll get a hotter core with higher background neutron flux > which will make it go off before full assembly can occur, thus seriously > reducing yield). Not only that. Pu-240 is fissile, like Pu-239, but it doesn't produce free neutrons, thus acting as de facto a neutron poison. AFAIK, this is the main factor lowering the yield of energetical plutonium. I suppose it is rather hard to find low-ash spent fuel. The main interest of power plants is to get the most megawatthours from every rod, thus to keep it in the reactor as long as possible. The replacement of fuel in the most common VVER reactors requires shutdown of the plant block, which not only lowers efficiency of the plant, but also attracts attention of the inspectors (who don't need anything more than a thermal camera to see that the transformers handling the plant's output are colder than they should be - from miles away, very likely even from the satellite - not talking about the likely lack of vapors from the cooling towers, visible by naked eye). Other kinds of reactors - CANDU, or RBMK (which were so popular in the USSR mainly for this feature) don't have to be shut down for fuel exchange, but then they are much less common.
