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Seven great games to play with civilian nukes

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old Russian nuclear bombHey, guess what – nuclear bombs can be used for more than just annihilating entire cities!Wired has an article rounding up a selection of seven proposed civilian deployments of nuclear weapons, most of which (unsurprisingly) leverage their ability to make a very big hole in something. [image by mikelopoulos]

But how’s this for a counterintuitive idea – why not use nuclear weapons to dispose of nuclear waste!

This scheme was originally proposed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. A hole is bored beneath the waste processing plant, and a nuclear bomb is set off in the hole. Then the radioactive waste is poured into the subterranean cavity so formed, over a 25-year filling period. The wastes heat up through their own activity, boil dry, and eventually melt themselves and some surrounding rock into a glassy ball. The cost is quite uncertain but was judged to be extremely attractive.

If you’re anything at all like me (i.e. not a nuclear scientist), you’re probably thinking that’s a batshit stupid idea. But apparently not:

“For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material,” Nordyke said.

But despite the technical success of the Plowshare program, Nordyke doesn’t see nuclear weapons being used for excavation or mining anytime soon because it doesn’t seem politically feasible.

“I think its time came and went,” he said. “I think reconciling it with the enhanced environmental concerns today and the inherent association with weapons is difficult.”

My reaction proves his point, I suppose. Nukes are a Pandora’s Box technology, in that we can’t just pretend we don’t know they exist (which is one of George Dvorsky’s points regarding the risks of nuclear disarmament), but because we’ve been predominantly shown nuclear blasts doing things which are deeply nasty and lethal we have this knee-jerk reaction to the idea of them being used for a more creative purpose.

Then again, there’s a trust issue as well – a government-commissioned experimental mega-engineering project involving not just nuclear waste but nuclear weapons? Even if you could show me the calculations and experimental data that proved it could be done, I’m not sure I’d feel at all confident in the ability of a government – or a corporation, for that matter – not to screw up by cutting corners somewhere.

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The Future Fire webzine announces feminist SF issue

Heads up, writer and readers alike – post-cyberpunk webzine The Future Fire has just started reading submissions for an issue dedicated to feminist science fiction, which will be published some time around the turn of the year. From their editorial:

An old slogan defines feminism as “the radical idea that women are human beings”. This is an important statement, the more so because it has to be explained in what sense this idea is radical. If we merely said that “women are human beings,” nobody would disagree; it’s an easy platitude. But that isn’t enough: feminism is the recognition that true equality, true freedom for both sexes requires the more radical idea that full human rights still need to be fought for. The rights of women are up there with the rights of minority religions, the rights of disadvantaged ethnicities, the rights of the poor, the rights of queer and transexual and polyamorous people, the rights of unbelievers, the rights of those who disagree with you. And the rights of men. And they all need to be fought for. (Just see the recent “Race Fail” controversy to see how wide some of the misunderstandings still are.)

Partly as a result of these thoughts, and partly because it’s something that has always been close to our hearts, we have decided to run a themed “feminist science fiction” issue of TFF toward the end of this year or the beginning of 2010 (as long as it takes us to acquire the requisite number of stories). By “feminist” we do not mean stories necessarily written by women or featuring female protagonists; what we are interested in are science fiction (or speculative) stories that address issues of gender, sexual identity and sexuality; stories that take the “radical idea” and do something about it; stories that can engage, empower, educate, and inspire men and women alike. And of course stories that challenge our expectations, that avoid cliché, that are beautiful and useful, that are social, political, and speculative cyberfiction.

Be sure to check out The Future Fire‘s regular submission guidelines before sending anything off… but otherwise, break a leg! TFF picks some pretty strong stories at the best of times, so this should turn out to be an issue of considerable interest. [via Feminist-SF]

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Editing the memory movie

pre-silicon memory aidWell, looks like we can chalk up another predictive success for a Futurismic author! This time it’s the turn of Marissa Lingen, whose “Erasing the Map” seems eerily prescient of recent research at Oxford University into the selective editing of memories:

Wired.com: How selective will memory editing be?

Sandberg: Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we’re probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them.

[…]

Wired.com: It seems that it would be easy to test “tip of the tongue” drug effects on the sorts of small things one recalls on an everyday basis. But what if it’s old, infrequently recalled but still-important memories that are threatened by side effects?

Sandberg: It’s pretty messy to determine what is an important memory to us. They quite often crop up, but without us consciously realizing that we’re thinking of the memory. That’s probably good news, as every time you recall a memory, you also tend to strengthen it.

Wired.com: How likely is the manipulation of these fundamental memories?

Sandberg: Big memories, with lots of connections to other things we’ve done, will probably be messy to deal with. But I don’t think those are the memories that people want to give up.  Most people would want to edit memories that impair them.

Of course, if we want to tweak memories to look better to ourselves, we might get a weird concept of self.

Indeed we might… but I’d say the odds are good that people will try to do exactly that. The street finds its own use for things, right? [image by ebbdog]

But what will happen if you try to edit a memory that is false – the repressed memory of abuse that may not have actually happened, for example? If memories are interlinked, what might you lose along with the bad stuff? And if memories can be expunged, could they also be inserted? We’re deep into Philip K Dick territory right here…

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O NOES! Infrastructure hakz0rz!

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network switchesSo, the big red-hot knee-jerk story of the week is surely the suggestion that there’s a possibility that maybe some foreign countries are thinking about whether it would be worth hacking the poorly-secured United States power grid infrastructure with computer intrusion techniques. Maybe.

… multiple countries are believed to be behind the attacks, including both the Russians and the Chinese. Some of these were apparently detected and stopped before any damage could be done, while the remains of others (and tools designed to trigger failures) have been found in other areas. The article doesn’t give specific information on where issues were and weren’t detected, or which infrastructures were contaminated, but the list of “at-risk” institutions include electric plants (particularly nuclear ones), financial networks, and water management/treatment facilities.

Credit where it’s due, Ars Technica isn’t going to flap its arms and panic like some other news sources:

The Internet is merely the latest—and by most measures, the most benign—means by which one country could attack another. Personally, given the choice between ICBMs, chemical weapons, “the bomb”, or V-2 rockets, I’ll take the Internet.

Amen. Bruce Schneier agrees:

Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers.

Right. And why worry about complex hacks when a crew with some industrial tools can wipe out the data grid for a whole region?

Ten fiber-optic cables carrying were cut at four locations in the predawn darkness. Residential and business customers quickly found that telephone service was perhaps more laced into their everyday needs than they thought. Suddenly they couldn’t draw out money, send text messages, check e-mail or Web sites, call anyone for help, or even check on friends or relatives down the road.

Several people had to be driven to hospitals because they were unable to summon ambulances. Many businesses lapsed into idleness for hours, without the ability to contact associates or customers.

The dogs in your own backyard are more likely to bite you than your neighbour’s. [image by jonbell]