UK and France agree to joint nuclear weapons tests

[Phantasee]

Why the fuck do we still have retards wanking to project Orion in completely unrelated threads? Seriously, you don't need to blow a load every time someone says 'nuke'.

[Rabid]

Why the fuck do we still have retards wanking to project Orion in completely unrelated threads? Seriously, you don't need to blow a load every time someone says 'nuke'.

Well, I think it goes like this :

"Shit blowing up is cool" therefore "Nukes are awesome" therefore "Nuke-propelled interplanetary spaceship is Awesome turned up to eleven"

This, obviously, fall in the "Awesome but impractical" scale of things. But people don't do the research, or just lack basic 'common sense', so, it 'helps' them failing to see that this Orion shit is absolutely useless.

There is, however, a "shit blowing up" mean of propulsion that seems practical and efficient, somehow (with the right magitech) :

Take a little sphere of deuterium-tritium, hit it hard with frikkin' LASER BEAM !! And the shit blow up, reasonably.
Repeat several time per second.
[...]
Make money.

I saw it in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" Trilogy, if you want reference. I still have doubts on the viability of this stuff, though...

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[Sea Skimmer]

Well, in fact, they are some sort of nuclear bomb, somehow, as far as I know. If I remember well, they consist of a little gold shell containing a mix of deuterium and tritium, initiated by what will be, I think, the most powerful know set of laser (the 'Laser Terajoule').
The goal is to study in detail the thermonuclear initiation process.

Something like that yes, is one of the tests they do, it’s a simulation of a fusion stage and it produces an actual nuclear radiation yield if a very tiny one. The thing is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty bans any kind of [ii]fission[/i] test, and an operational bomb will use fission to ignite the fusion stage. So a whole lot of other very complicated tests and computer simulations are required to simulate the function of the fission stage without actually doing it.

The French aren’t part of the CTBT, and that treaty is not in force anyway because so many key signatories have not ratified it but the established nuclear world, but mostly people are following it because it helps the anti proliferation movement.


The tricky subject comes from hydronuclear experiments and other low yield fission experiments. France didn’t join the CTBT because they wanted to retain the right to use these kinds of tests. The US and China also had objections if more limited ones, France had the poorest pool of nuclear data to work off of. That’s why they did those late 1990s tests, to try to fill in some gaps quickly.

With hydronuclear experiments, basically they blend down U-235 so that non chain reactions take place. The high explosives fire, and some nuclear radiation is released but it stops immediately. It’s almost, to make a terrible analogy, like creating the nuclear weapon equivalent of a flash bang. The result is a nuclear yield of only a few pounds… BUT if that works then you know if you had placed a warhead spec U-235 core in place of the neutered one the nuke would have worked. This is not just important for testing the ability of the nuke to go off, it also allows for full scale safety experiments. If any nuclear yield occurs you know you failed. Since the yield is so low and so certain to be low you can use a bunker in a lab complex to do them, rather then going out to the salt flats. The hope today is supercomputers can replace this process.

You’ve also of course have endless other tests you have to do on all the other components of the weapon, particularly the high explosives. The end result is you easily need 10 billion USD worth of facilities to sustain an active program. Most of the facilities people have today, the US included are old and not only obsolete but just in physically bad condition since the buildings don’t last forever. The British are already spending IIRC 5 billion pounds on the new facilities which will be shared, and are retaining some old stuff.

[Sea Skimmer]

How is that irresponsible? They would just be demonstrating the reliability of the deterrent. Plus were I a betting man, I'd bet that the total radionuclide release would be less than what China's coal plants liberate into the atmosphere every year.

Intensity matters a very great deal besides total release. Nuclear fallout is far more intensive then anything raining down from a coal plant. It’d also totally destroy anti proliferation movements, which is the real irresponsibility, and only testing a single nuke is almost pointless anyway. A useful test program is going to need dozens of tests, just like a missile or a plane has to work more then once. This is why so much effort is being focused at simulations and tests which don’t produce nuclear yield. It makes for tests which are easily repeatable so you can gain actual statistical proof of things. Now if Iran goes and lights off a couple nukes, then we may stop caring so much and declare the cause futile, but for the moment the western world has damn good reason to act like the CTBT is real.

[Big Orange]

Dont you mean "EDF" : Electricité de France ?

Yes, EDF, that's the one.

But yes, I think that is true. It seems to me that Britons are more interested by business than by holding a grip on their own strategic sectors (armament, energy, etc.). I hope for them I'm mistaken, though.

I'm afraid you're not far off the mark: Dover could be sold off to a French consortium (the actual place is a dump, but I wouldn't just give away a strategic transport hub), we've sold off a major stretch of modern train track to Canada for 2 billion pounds (it's nothing to do with the "evil" EU and sold to a "friendly" Commonwealth nation, but still quite short-sighted) and there's a huge shitstorm over the sell-off of our public forests.

Also there was a huge student's protest-cum-riot in London a couple of days ago triggered by indiginous students paying more tuition fees than foreign exchange students (it would unwise to stop foreign talent getting in, but there has to be a balance).

[TC27]

I'm afraid you're not far off the mark: Dover could be sold off to a French consortium (the actual place is a dump, but I wouldn't just give away a strategic transport hub), we've sold off a major stretch of modern train track to Canada for 2 billion pounds (it's nothing to do with the "evil" EU and sold to a "friendly" Commonwealth nation, but still quite short-sighted) and there's a huge shitstorm over the sell-off of our public forests.

And what exactly are these foreign consortums going to do that would poise a strategic risk to the UK? I assume they have T&Cs to comply with and in the fairly unthinkable case that the country in which their head office was based became hostile (Canda and France..really??) then Im sure stuff could be nationalised at the drop of a hat.

I am not a massive fan of privitization of infastructure - it is in some cases short sighted! But getting all het up about the money coming from overseas is silly.

[Teebs]

Also there was a huge student's protest-cum-riot in London a couple of days ago triggered by indiginous students paying more tuition fees than foreign exchange students (it would unwise to stop foreign talent getting in, but there has to be a balance).

I'm not entirely sure how you get domestic students paying more than foreign ones from that article.

[Big Orange]

And what exactly are these foreign consortums going to do that would poise a strategic risk to the UK? I assume they have T&Cs to comply with and in the fairly unthinkable case that the country in which their head office was based became hostile (Canda and France..really??) then Im sure stuff could be nationalised at the drop of a hat.

I don't think France would want to sell off parts of their TGV network to other countries. While most of it can easily be taken back in dire circumstances, I'm not a fan of privatization even if the corporations have head offices in the UK: British Gas, really Centrica and BG Group, are British based companies that have assets in dozens of other countries however that doesn't stop them from fucking UK citizens by jacking up the heat utility bills.

I am not a massive fan of privitization of infastructure - it is in some cases short sighted! But getting all het up about the money coming from overseas is silly.

Maybe I'm getting a little OTT, but we shouldn't look at a gift horse in the mouth if we have good products and services from overseas, but there should be more strategic thinking and caution involved to contain potential corporate damage and abuse (when we look at how badly BP behaves in America and Nigeria).

[Big Orange]

Also there was a huge student's protest-cum-riot in London a couple of days ago triggered by indiginous students paying more tuition fees than foreign exchange students (it would unwise to stop foreign talent getting in, but there has to be a balance).

I'm not entirely sure how you get domestic students paying more than foreign ones from that article.

OK, I've misread the article; it says that fees for foreign students (who originally paid four times as much as indigenous students) will remain stable while the tuition fees for UK students will quickly rise, with a proposition to even "outsource" university classes to India if the students couldn't get to Britain, but the real answer is for nobody to ultimately not pay tuition fees at all.

[Teebs]

OK, I've misread the article; it says that fees for foreign students (who originally paid four times as much as indigenous students) will remain stable while the tuition fees for UK students will quickly rise, with a proposition to even "outsource" university classes to India if the students couldn't get to Britain, but the real answer is for nobody to ultimately not pay tuition fees at all.

Well foreign fees are remaining stable because they're already paying the true cost of their education. Personally I would have cut the NHS (which has been preserved from any cuts at all) before education (an area where IIRC UK spending is relatively low) and am generally not a big fan of raising fees, however, if you're going to have high fees then the UK system is pretty unobjectionable within that.

Students get an interest free loan to cover the fees and only have to repay it at times when they are earning over £17,000 a year, so effectively it works as an extra income tax bracket until it's paid off. There are also bursaries and such available for poorer students on top of that.

[Bernkastel]

Ah, this is very good news. I am personally a big fan of boosting Britain's ties with the powers in the EU. It also increases the actual independence of our nuclear deterrent.

At the same time though, I find myself with the irrational feeling that this is somehow going to fail. Still, I'm keeping my fingers crossed in the hope that we stay in this course of development in our relations with France.