Ironic....

found it on FB ! Smart Monk

First was on cracked:

http://www.cracked.com/article_20050_6-real-cyber-attacks-straight-out-bad-hacker-movie.html

I don't think it actually damaged the hardware, but it cost them time, because they were happily humming along for at least two months not knowing anything was wrong.

According to Wikipedia did destroy some machines at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Statistics published by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) show that the number of enrichment centrifuges operational in Iran mysteriously declined from about 4,700 to about 3,900 beginning around the time the nuclear incident WikiLeaks mentioned would have occurred.[72] (ISIS) suggests in a report published in December 2010 that Stuxnet is "a reasonable explanation for the apparent damage"[73] at Natanz and may have destroyed up to 1000 centrifuges (10 percent) sometime between November 2009 and late January 2010. The authors conclude:

which makes me doubt that was written by a 'nuclear professional'. Fission doesn't occur in the centrifuges; what happens is that a uranium compound which is a gas (uranium hexafluoride) is put in centrifuges, where the slightly lower density of the U235 compound, compared to the U238 compound, means they separate, slightly. You do it time after time, and you gradually get higher concentrations of the fissionable U235.

There will be a design speed for a centrifuge, and spinning it faster than that could harm it, it's true; but it's also true that centrifuges designed to run faster will cause the gases to separate faster. And why the person is going on about time dilation, I can't tell. And you can't measure time dilation in units of a second, on its own; it's a ratio. I suspect the writer is not a nuclear scientist at all.

factually correct statement, LOL. Afterall, I found it on FB ! You are probably correct, but do you really think Paul Ryan knows what YOU <or anybody> knows about nuclear centrifuge spinning ?

Thanks for the fact-check of the fact-check !!

The purpose of a centrifuge is enrichment, not initiating fission. The graphic is an embarrassment from a physics perspective and if you shared it on FB I'd recommend taking it down.

here ! Now I do.. thanks for the "schooling".

Who knew DU was full of Einsteins?! Kudos to you all !

Fission in the centrifuge would be a bad thing. A very bad thing.

Fission can only occur when a critical mass (enough by weight) of fissionable material is brought together into one area that is sufficiently small.

The amount of fissionable material that is separated and concentrated in a centrifuge at any one time is tiny (pico or micro grams) and far, far below the amount needed for critical mass. You would need the finished products of tens or hundreds of thousands of centrifuge runs in order to separate and concentrate enough fissionable material to be accumulated into a critical mass.

If fission did occur in a centrifuge, it would be a disaster of the highest order, but it has never and will never occur, the very notion is laughable.

OT, Paul Thomas Anderson was on the Daily Show last night promoting his new film The Master, and they ran a clip in which a character intones:

“I am a writer, a doctor, a nucular physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

It wasn't intentional, but it was unintentionally funny.

Playing a smarty-pants ain't easy.

An actor as good as Phillip Seymour Hoffman does everything intentionally and a director as good as Anderson wouldn't let an actor unintentionally mispronounce a word. I'm sure it was a choice.
The character is based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who claimed to be a nuclear physicist. He earned an F in the one course he took in atomic and molecular physics. Hubbard pronounced the word "nuclear" correctly in real life, but I'd wager that Hoffman made a deliberate choice. It tells you that the character is something of a fraud.

Now I actually want to see the movie.

Kudos.

What they were talking about.

Centerfuges separate fissile material because of the different atomic weight of the various components- ie U235 vs U238, fr instance. The goal is to separate out the one which can be used in a bomb, ie 235, from the more common 238. Fission is not supposed to occur in the centerfuge at all.

Spinning them faster is ridiculous, yes, but i suspect Ryan (and far be it for me to defend him) was speaking metaphorically.. And i dont know where these people got "time dilation" out of any of it.

Ryan's an idiot, but this almost seems like a fb headfake to get people to look foolish by sharing it. :tinfoil:

of two elements that are extremely close in molecular weight.

Spinning them faster, within the limits of the mechanical design, seems logical to me.

PS: Ryan is still a dick LOL.

Centrifuges are designed to spin as fast as they safely can. They can be slowed, but unless they are infected with a computer virus, they will not spin faster than the limits imposed by their physical design which are calculated very carefully an written into firmware.

When used to concentrate fissionable material, a centrifuge is always operated at full speed, hence it simply cannot go faster without literally exploding due to centrifugal forces. They keep designing faster and faster centrifuges, because the process of separation and concentration of fissionable materials is extremely repetitive and time consuming, it takes many, many thousands of centrifuge runs in order to create enough mass to achieve fission. No lab would ever intentionally decrease from the full speed of a centrifuge used for this purpose, time is money, and this is already an extremely time-consuming and expensive endeavor.

but there is little nuclear physics expertise involved in the explanation. The person knows enough to make a scientifically correct "sounding" point.

If the centrifuges go too fast, they break, that's all. The idea was to destroy the machinery. In the process of breaking down, there may have been a small release of radiation. That's the only "nuking" that would have happened.

Realize that this is from last month but it bears repeating, especially in light of the upcoming foreign police debate.

Thanks for that explaination. It really shows how lyin' Ryan just makes stuff up to make his lies sound better.

and then fucking up e=mc^2

Ryan is undoubtedly full of shit, but the critique is off-target. Ryan is implying that by allegedly spinning the centrifuges faster they are enriching uranium at an accelerated rate, reducing the time it will take to have enough to build a bomb. Ryan is not making the idiotic claim that fission occurs in the centrifuges.

The "professional" analysis is crap. Centrifuges do not cause fission to occur, they cause U-235 to separate from U-238.

First, the VP candidate who thinks he's Jimmy Carter and Jack Kennedy. As well as the silly person who thinks that it causes fission.

My God, teh stoopid hurts.

He probably meant to say that they were bringing more centrifuges on line faster.

Where this time dilation crap came from, I have no idea.

It's like watching the big bang theory and star trek have sex.

And then being painted as not knowing what they are talking about.

Maybe im paranoid.

Someone else on another thread postulated that the reason why Ryan was drinking so much water was to distract the attention of the audience away from Vice President Biden's words.

I mean, that gives whole new meaning to the word desperation.

There's just enough real but utterly irrelevant physics to suck someone in who knows a little physics but not much about fission reactions.

Centrifuges spin out different isotopes of uranium, which are heavier than one another. The heavier isotopes are spun out to the edge, the lighter ones to the middle.

Olympic figure-skater.

Keep it simple.

1. Centrifuges spin at the speed they are designed to spin, or they fail.
2. Biden said the Iranians have some Uranium (making centrifuge point moot), but they don't have a delivery system.

North Korea has nuclear material (though poor quality), but they have no delivery system. Are you losing sleep over this fact? NK is much closer to the US. But, they're just communists. We all know communists aren't as scary as 'hte muslims'.

So, if you enjoy being a scared about Iran, shooting first and asking questions later and other fear based religious beliefs about the United States government, Ryan must appeal to you. Those Iranians get scarier and scarier every day! Oy vey!

But, if you enjoy being brave, smart and telling the truth about things, Biden would be a role model.

PS - The nuclear wonks criticizing the details of this graphic are showing their stripes. Rather than reading the message (i.e. that Ryan is clueless), they want us to know they are smarter than a political graphic. I love wonks, I love learning and I love smart people. I love corrections of details. But, don't suggest the poster should be embarrassed that s/he doesn't know as much as you do about nuclear science. Be even smarter by recognizing that the message of the graphic is true, even if the details are fallible. You don't have to be a nuclear scientist to know Ryan was out of his league and fear-mongering. Let go of your pride so over-simplified messages can have a better impact. If you want to be critical and have the knowledge to do so, also support the good-intentions and correct message of someone with less knowledge than you.

The North Koreans actually have nuclear fission capability and they have tested it. Whether they have a weapon in compartmental form is conjecture, though it's not a difficult next step, so they probably do. But like you said, they have no reliable delivery system. They have missiles but they are so unreliable they may just end up nuking themselves. Nuking themselves may not sound so bad to some, but it would be devastating to a large portion of the worlds population in the vicinity. It is extremely dangerous for any country to have nuclear weaponry at a stage that is of borderline stability. It's not just a matter of having the bomb or not having the bomb.

Iran with the capability of fission weaponry is probably more dangerous to itself than it is to anyone else... until they could deliver such a thing to a target. That's hard to do.

If you want to criticise someone by 'fact-checking', then you have to make sure the facts you put forward yourself are correct. What we're saying is that the unknown person (not K Gardner) who has claimed to be a nuclear professional has made mistakes that make their claimed profession look unlikely. Which, itself, can do more to destroy the anti-Ryan message.

was laughing his ass off. Ryan may be (and I emphasize maybe) entitled to his own opinion, but he sure and hell isn't entitled to his own "nuclear" science.

Geesh....could this guy and his constituents be any dumber.....please don't answer that, it kinda scares me.

That explains everything.

I didn't realize that you could "literally" laugh your ass off.