US Nuclear Sites in Harm's Way

Bestselling Learn Guitar on Android! bit.ly Not one, but two US nuclear sites are under threat by natural disasters. As of Tuesday, June 28 2011, both the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska and the Los Alamos nuclear weapons facility in New Mexico are in harm's way. The Nebraska plant, located along the record-breaking flooded Missouri river, is currently surrounded by about two feet of water. The facility is designed to withstand at least eight more feet of water, is reportedly dry inside and shut down. Officials are downplaying comparisons to Japan's Fukushima meltdowns, despite having lost power briefly on Sunday. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, the Los Alamos facility is shut down as raging wildfires inch closer to the site. The Las Conchas fire has already created a small fire on Monday on the nuclear lab's property near Technical Area 49 — which was once used for radioactive explosives testing. According to a US Forest Service press release: "About one acre burned and the Lab has detected no off-site releases of contamination." money.cnn.com www.washingtonpost.com abcnews.go.com nmfireinfo.wordpress.com www.cnn.com

Watch this and other space videos at SpaceRip.com From NASA Astrophysics and Goddard Space Flight Center. Every day or two, on average, satellites detect a massive explosion somewhere in the sky. These are gamma-ray bursts, the brightest blasts in the universe. They're thought to be caused by jets of matter moving near the speed of light associated with the births of black holes. Gamma-ray bursts that last longer than two seconds are the most common and are thought to result from the death of a massive star. Shorter bursts proved much more elusive. In fact, even some of their basic properties were unknown until NASA's Swift satellite began work in 2004. A neutron star is what remains when a star several times the mass of the sun collapses and explodes. With more than the sun's mass packed in a sphere less than 18 miles across, these objects are incredibly dense. Just a sugar-cube-size piece of neutron star can weigh as much as all the water in the Great Lakes. When two orbiting neutron stars collide, they merge and form a black hole, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process. Armed with state-of-the-art supercomputer models, scientists have shown that colliding neutron stars can produce the energetic jet required for a gamma-ray burst. Earlier simulations demonstrated that mergers could make black holes. Others had shown that the high-speed particle jets needed to make a gamma-ray burst would continue if placed in the swirling wreckage of a recent merger. Now ...
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