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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • We rolled out the Patriot when it was still in a prototype, half-baked stage in Iraq, too – just that it was all we had that might be able to intercept a ballistic missile, and we really needed the capability right then – and it didn’t fare well either.

    About 9% intercept ratio during Desert Storm, which was 30 years ago, but both the Patriot and the Al Hussain missiles were pretty much brand new. S400 is a decade and a half newer than ATACMS though.

    Patriot did (a lot?) better in Iraqi Freedom, but the exact numbers are all over the place.











  • I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that’s significantly more than I’ll use in my lifetime.

    I’d gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It’d make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.

    Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml


  • Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.

    And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.