DUSEL immune to EMP weapons, solar flares

Dakota Midday is a great show, that and Statehouse are the last programs standing for ip at Bill Janklow's idea of public radio. Yesterday, Paul Guggenheimer hosted a segment when:

former Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney talks about the documentary "Iranium." It is showing next Tuesday in Sioux Falls. Gaffney is also a part of the national security panel leading a discussion after the film.

The guy is an Islamophobe and a whackjob of the nth order, but I think he's got the weapon right:

Electromagnetic pulses (EMP) are oversized outbursts of atmospheric electricity. Whether powered by geomagnetic storms or by nuclear blasts, their resultant intense magnetic fields can induce ground currents strong enough to burn out power lines and electrical equipment across state lines. The threat has even become political fodder, drawing warnings from former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a likely presidential contender. "We are not today hardened against this," he told a Heritage Foundation audience last year. "It is an enormous catastrophic threat."

EMP weapons have been part of the US arsenal for decades and are likely being deployed in Libya right now. Knowledge of their operation has been coming home steadily in the minds of radicalized warriors where in a remote scenario they could be built in Ryder trucks to be randomly detonated near grid junctions. Solar events and asteroid strikes are more likely events.

Let's flash back to 2000 where the future looked like:

Dark Angel, an American biopunk/cyberpunk science fiction television program created by James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee. Dark Angel premiered in the United States and Canada on the Fox network on October 3, 2000, but was canceled after two seasons. The show chronicles the life of Max Guevara (X5-452), a genetically enhanced super-soldier, portrayed by Jessica Alba as an adult, and Geneva Locke as a child.

Then September 11 and the anthrax attacks happened. Bill Janklow went on his idea of public radio where he and a caller created DUSEL.

Here are the geothermal gradients (pdf) of the deepest rock in the former Homestake showing potential for the steam power necessary to generate lighting and life support for large numbers of people sustainably if the planet's surface became a hostile environment. Ceramics could support and insulate the miles of stopes in the old mine connecting a network of gardens, living and work spaces.

Episode one.




EcoRover brings some stunning pictures of the Big Hole.

Radiolab host Robert Krulwich on the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut for the forthcoming book, Starman:

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."