In Response To: Re: "HOLY CRAP" doesn't BEGIN to cover it... (scarab)
: I knew that it wasn't fair of me to ask someone to read it all which is why I
: added the highlights so that people could skim it and get the gist of it.
: But, in my defense, it did grow as I wrote it. It wasn't supposed to be THAT
: big. :-)
: But if you have time then at least check out the first link to the Thorium
: reactors. I had no idea about this stuff until yesterday. It turns out
: that the Chinese government have just launched a program to build them.
: They may be able to service the entire world's energy needs for the next
: 1000 years and make much of the current AGW climate debate irrelevant. It
: won't matter if the climate problems are caused by carbon emissions or not
: if we can just drop burning fossil fuels because they have become
: irrelevant.
: Also the Gabon natural reactors are fascinating.
: Torso sized, natural nuclear reactors that:
: ran for about a million years
: are the products of natural processes created without intelligent agency
: stayed in balance for a million years without going boom
: bred their own fissiles including plutonium
: we are able to know how they operated and for how long even though they
: operated 2 billion years ago!!
: Its the half hour on, two and a half hour off cycle that I mentioned in the
: screed.
:
: I always try to make sense of stuff. Its hard to stop.
: I'd be interested too.
: Thank you :-)
The only think that I see as amiss in your hypothesis is/are the lekgolo found by the covenant in debris orbiting a planet, and also the lekgolos use in exploring the forunner dreadnaught in High Charity. (See Contact Harvest) I fail to see a way in which lekgolo would survive long periods on nothing but forunner scrap metal. There has been to my knowledge no indication the the normal alloy has anywhere near the necessary volatility to keep the reaction going. This wouldn't be an issue if the lekgolo hadn't been there long, however the novel implies that the organisms had been eating the wreckage for quite some time.
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