Russell McMahon wrote: >> I think you over-estimate the abilities of sane quantities of anfo. >> a decent concrete bunker with a fair bit of thickness to it, 10-20 >> meters of steel + concrete in a plug would do the job well enough that >> the semi of anfo could be better applied to a local seat of government. >> > > Maybe :-). > It would help if you can tie the "plug" of concrete out into local bedrock etc. > Maybe > > or just encase it in the concrete, hell why not just use cast steel, its cheap enough and small enough that its not going to be too large physically. layers of cast steel, cast iron and gravel would do the job nicely, and not much short of a nuke would crack it ;-> >> You *could* blow it with less stuff, but your going to need more bang >> than thump (ie something other than anfo), >> > > ANFO is a true detonation. > It does need confinement to get going well, but farmers remove the > largest of tree roots with ease. And this is just another large root > ;-). Efficacy is about 0.4 TNT (which is not to be sneezed at) and you > can get better results with Aluminum powder and/or Nitromethane. > Perlite may be useful if ... what say I stop there. Wikipedia knows > far too much already anyway ... :-) > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO > Point I was making is anfo has a low brisance meaning its good for moving the side of a mountain (or a tree), not so good for smashing solid concrete, it'd move it before it broke it. you want something sharper like an RDX derivative or something. > > Its all moot anyway, Any terrorist with half a brain if they were out to cause damage would just get a bunch of pingpong balls and a slingshot, add some magic chemicals and drive around town. cracking a hardened power plant is going to be much harder than cracking a few tens of petrol stations, and the petrol stations look much better on the news. > And James Newton is on record re taking a few cubic meters of concrete > around a nuclear waste source as a heat supply for his section on > similar terms. I'd even consider that if there were enough of them to > spread the risk of mine being targeted. > I'd rather they re-processed the waste into fuel and made electricity I could run my pic programmer on ;-> > >> Personally I think fusion power is the answer to most of the problems we >> face and is worth any amount of money to get. >> > > That's long been my thought too. > Once the desperation levels get high enough, strip mining the lunar > surface is expected to turn up enough He3 to supply the world's energy > needs with relative ease. Getting the technology working for He3 > fusion is left as an exercise for the student. > > I think the effort involved is too high, If you have fusion power it's easy enough to deal with the low level waste left behind in the reactor body after 30 years or so. launch it into the sun ;-> Personally I'm looking for something to simulate inertial confinement fusion but there doesn't seem to be any open source/free codes for it, given the amount of study done on the problem it seems odd. I guess its probably that whole "other" use of inertial confinement that they are trying to keep a lid on. I'm thinking of trying to write one up using CUDA, In my house now I have ~300 processors (in video cards) which are really good at that kind of processing, I'm wondering if it'd be possible to work at the atom level (well proton + electron) and get results in a sane time. If your running at that scale it seems the problem becomes simpler intellectually at the expense of computation as you don't need to worry about trying to simulate fluid flows of bulk material and such like. They are already doing atomic scale simulations of protein folding which seems a much more complex task. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist