The Perfect Plate for the Nuclear Family Car

In what must be a dream come true for some, Nevada has approved a License Plate commemorating the Test Site and the connections Nevada enjoys with Nuclear weapons in the United States. The Associated Press article on the subject notes that a lot of people are up in arms about the new design, as Nevada is embroiled in controversy over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility. The license features an atom. a mushroom cloud as the background and the equation E=mc² on the plate.

I was unable to find a picture of the plate on the web (I saw it in my morning paper). I'm sure a picture must be on the web somewhere. I'll leave it to slashdotters to suggest the best personalized lettering for the plate. My entry: DUKNCVR?

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How about a /. plate?

[elflet]

You too can request a custom plate design, if you can get 250 Nevadans to promise to buy it:

A number of charitable organizations and causes have proposed special license plates which may or may not actually be issued, depending on public demand for them. These are called "Letter of Intent" plates. Motorists interested in seeing the plates produced fill out a Letter of Intent stating they would purchase a set. A given type of plate will be produced if the Department receives more than 250 requests for it before the date listed on the form.

(See Nevada License Plates [state.nv.us])

On the other hand, you'd have to get the Legislature's approval...

Re:My Entry

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll do the math, your casualties vs. our projected dead, and if you come up on the short end, enjoy the view.

Ahem, the only math involved when your dearest politicians resolved to nuke Japan (even if it was on the edge of a surrender) was: your civilian casualties vs our projected military ones .

Re:Most plates are designed to attract tourism...

[MillionthMonkey]

I wonder how Nevada could be proud of being the official "most worthless place on the continent" as judged by the government which decided that if some place must be irradiated, it might as well be Nevada, because it's not really much of a loss.

Nevada relies heavily on tourism. Of course there are the idiots who go to Vegas, and the people who are attracted by Nevada's marriage and prostitution laws. Aside from that, Nevada has a strong appeal as an extremely desolate place- and it's the right kind of desolation, with Indian reservations and weird rocks and nuclear testing grounds. Not flat desolation like you see in the Plains States.

If you're wanting to see the Milky Way, or you're wanting to take some pictures with your new Canon D-30, or you're looking to justify your SUV purchase (and you don't realize that your Ford Explorer is going to need a tow truck), you could do a lot worse than Nevada. Of course, the nearest large population center is the west coast, and California itself has a lot of cool places to visit. Nevada's problem is that it's surrounded by states with similar terrain and features, so it doesn't get the fair share of tourists that it deserves. So they are always looking for things that make them stick out from AZ, CA, UT, etc., like gambling, prostitution, marriage laws, etc. (Utah might have funny marriage laws as well but if it does, they're of a different sort because I never heard of anyone going to Utah just to get married.)

The Manhattan Project sites are great things to have in your state. The bomb test areas themselves might still be radioactive and nasty places, but they have the status of historical sites, which is great for attracting tourists and so you can build tourist traps around them at a safe distance.

Yucca Mountain, on the other hand, is nothing but bad news because it cannot be leveraged to generate tourism at all- it's for waste, which repels tourists. As far as Nevada is concerned, the federal government might as well be dropping a smelly hog farm in the middle of Vegas. So you won't see Yucca Mountain plates anytime soon unless it's part of a political ploy during the next election, when Nevada's 4 electoral votes are up for grabs.

Re:nother plate proposition--funny :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Alamo has become a fantastic tourist trap in spite of being a horrific military failure"

Err, no. The stand at the Alamo delayed the Mexian troops while the Texas army finally got it's act together. Not to mention galvanizing them as well. Also, lets not forget that the number of casualites inflited by the Alamo defenders against the vasty larger Mexican army were nothing less than amazing.

So, we lost the battle but won the war.

Re:Die Bambi!

[joib]

Uh, it's quite logical when you think about it. Military gunnery ranges are usually off limits for civilians => less human activity there (they don't shoot _that_ much there...) => animals like it. Why not call it a wildlife range at the same time and make some tree-huggers happy.

Off course there will be incidents when animals are killed by shells, but I think they are quite rare after all. There are exceptions though. Reindeers during winter being a famous one. Now, contrary to what you might have understood from watching xmas movies, reindeers are not very smart animals. In fact, they are fucking stupid. No survival instinct whatsoever.

Now for a short introduction to artillery. Usually you fire calibration rounds to calibrate the tubes. Only when you know the rounds hit the target you shoot with all you got.

So, during winter artillery firing exercises, the calibration shells blow away the snow cover. This often leads to reindeers arriving at the scene to eat the newly exposed undervegatation. Usually just in time for the "big arty barrage" to hit them...;) IIRC, there was a case in Finland a few years back when an entire herd of like 50 reindeers were blasted in one go.

Re:A shame for Einstein...

[Anonymous Coward]

This equation is almost always misquoted. E=mc^2 is the non-relativistic form, the actual equation is: E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 (afair).

[p is the momentum of the object in question]