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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (313968)	12/4/2006 11:58:37 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1573690

"The variable is a gazillion tons of CO2 that have been put into the atmosphere and are continuing to be put into the atmosphere." Yep. The amount of coal that is burned is truly phenomenal. I did some research on that a few months back. I was exploring how practical a Project Orion type craft would be. With ice at the poles of the Moon, it would be nice if we could mine that and open the solar system up. Now an Orion style craft could put a complete system from the Earth orbit stuff, to the stuff in lunar orbit and what is required on the Moon's surface, all in one shot. The problem? About 300 low yield nuclear bombs to get to LEO. If you loft the craft with a couple of dozen of shuttle SRBs, you can get it high enough where there is minimal fallout, but you still have the radioactives from the pulse units themselves. But if you look at the radioactive content of coal fly ash that is produced outside of the developed countries, you realize that is more radioactive than those 300 bombs. There is a lot of coal burned in the world. Six billion tons per year. For each ton of coal, 2.7 tons of oxygen are consumed to produce almost 4 tons of CO2. Now admittedly, the mass of the atmosphere is around 5 trillion tons. But we produce 24 billion tons of CO2 per year from coal alone. Now, true, only about half of that actually stays in the atmosphere any length of time. But that is more than the total CO2 content of the atmosphere.