Giant Trap Deployed To Catch Plastic Littering the Pacific Ocean Isn't Working (cbsnews.com) 199
In September, a nonprofit deployed a multimillion-dollar floating structure designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean. But, according to CBS News, the 2,000-foot-long structure hasn't picked up any plastic waste. Slashdot reader pgmrdlm shares the report: A floating device sent to corral a swirling island of trash in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has not swept up any plastic waste. But the young innovator behind the project said Monday that a fix was in the works. Boyan Slat, 24, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, said the speed of the solar-powered barrier isn't allowing it to hold on to the plastic it catches. The plastic barrier with a tapered 10-foot-deep screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch, while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it. The garbage patch isn't an island and it's even difficult to see with the naked eye, "60 Minutes" reported in September -- it's a vast soup of floating debris, much of it tiny and below the surface.
Little Lisa Recycling Plant is shutting down (Score:2, Funny)
Little Lisa Recycling Plant is shutting down
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This little more than a "smart" driftnet. It's not a surprise.
the problem with actual driftnets is that they have a lot of bycatch because they're designed to trap fish. Whales, Dolphins, Sea Lions, Sharks, etc are just victims. Now if you make a driftnet that is electrified, sharks will at least be repelled by it. Throw in some ultrasonic noises to make it sound like a giant predator, and it will scare the mammals away too. But as for catching plastic, I have a feeling that it will simply never be effectiv
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...and glass is much easier to recycle
And glass that is not recycled isn't a pollutant. It just looks ugly until erosion converts it into pretty stones.
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Says the guy who hasn't cut his foot on a shard of broken glass.
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I buy singles from costco, they have zero plastic between them. They're just sitting there.
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This isn't plutonium. Reducing plastic waste is a good idea, but striving to eliminate it entirely would be a huge and unjustifiable economic burden.
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As an alternative, let's try nutritionally enhanced growth of surface matting algae in the gyre. This will trap a lot of plastic, including the very small pieces, and at the same time sequester carbon. When it dies off as the nutrient is exhausted, the carbon and plastics sink to the seabed, ready to form more coal.
Yes, this would probably also kill a lot of fish. But fish that have ingested plastic are the ones we don't want in the food chain.
He needs to talk to Musk (Score:2)
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
Get some of his engineers on the project
They don't need engineers. They need accountants: Someone who can explain to them that every $1 they spend filtering microparticles out of the ocean would be a hundred times as effective if spent to prevent the trash reaching the ocean in the first place.
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some photos of "rivers of trash" [google.com] flowing into the ocean.
As long as this continues, it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean.
The place to stop pollution is at the source.
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
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The existing mess will clean up itself. Plastic gets constantly degraded to smaller pieces, ultimately down to molecular level. The key is to prevent new waste from entering the system, and the best place to start is with the biggest rivers of garbage.
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That will take hundreds of years. What about all the fish that are swallowing it right now?
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
We should ban the fucking production of plastic except for special circumstances, and also enforce stricter recycling rules, only 10% of plastic is recycled AT ALL, it should be 99% is recycled. Only after that is achieved will it be worthwhile trying to sift it out of the ocean. Fine people littering heavily and that money can be used to help clean up the ocean. Charge people more for every piece of plastic in their garbage (that they haven't even tried to recycle) and pay people who are recycling, when plastic stops entering our rivers and hence into the ocean we can look at cleaning up that mess. Trying to do it now is just a waste of money and resources.
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We should ban the fucking production of plastic except for special circumstances, and also enforce stricter recycling rules, only 10% of plastic is recycled AT ALL, it should be 99% is recycled.
You want to ban all plastic production, except for "special circumstances"? Good luck with that.
What would you replace plastic with?
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Plastic Bottles -> Aluminum Cans and Glass Bottles, paper cartons.
Plastic Bags -> Paper Bags, put them inside those reusable canvas bags.
That annoying packaging for electronics, etc -> box with cardboard inserts for padding.
Not everything but a lot of consumables can be switched over to non-plastic.
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I believe LordWabbit2 means production of *new* plastic. Recycled plastic would be fine.
Maybe but even there he's clueless. Certainly materials should be recycled where possible and better alternatives used where possible.
But plastics are incredibly versatile and have limits to their recycle-ability.
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I know that's true, but I've never been clear just how limited. What percent can be melted down and remade? What percent can be broken down into non-toxic component materials?
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> have limits to their recycle-ability.
I know that's true, but I've never been clear just how limited. What percent can be melted down and remade? What percent can be broken down into non-toxic component materials?
It's a complicated subject. Here's a simple article
https://blog.nationalgeographi... [nationalgeographic.org]
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Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers. Catch even half of the plastic from those rivers, and you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:4, Funny)
... you've reduced plastic in the world oceans by 45%.
You've reduced the plastic reaching the world's oceans by 45%.
FTFY.
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:5, Informative)
Especially since we know that 90% of the plastic in the ocean is deposited there from just 10 rivers.
Except it's not. 90% of the plastic that reaches the ocean FROM RIVERS comes from just 10 rivers. The actual number you're looking for is closer to 25%. We discussed this only yesterday: https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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I stand corrected. Interesting article.
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It was a nitpick. It doesn't make it any less of an incredibly HUGE problem.
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Yep because there's no point in taking things out of a closed system. The only affect you ever have is if you exlusively work on the single biggest input. /Sarcasm.
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Here are some photos of "rivers of trash" [google.com] flowing into the ocean.
As long as this continues, it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean.
The place to stop pollution is at the source.
The difference is that the "thousands of miles out to sea" spot isn't swarming with violent folks who don't want your help.
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>The place to stop pollution is at the source
They are not stopping pollution, they are cleaning already polluted environment.
Said that, this is of course true:
> it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean
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well if you're worrying where to get some pants and a few bucks for noodles for the week you kinda give up. HOWEVER a lot of it is just scale of things. se asia recycles a lot more than you would think, simply due to it being profitable enough for the really poor to sort out other peoples trash for different kinds of metal, plastics and glass.
and well. those rivers have been under large population centres for millenia. they've been full of feces for a long time anyways, people haven't regarded them as that
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b) Another large chunk is trash from first-world countries shipped to the third-world dumping grounds. The pile of waste in the photo at the top of this article [nytimes.com] is in China -- it's all dumped waste from the USA.
c) This sort of thing can happen to any city if its waste pipeline breaks down for some reason. NYC's garbage strike in 1968 [untappedcities.com], for example, created similar situations.
Re:He needs to talk to Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely this. So many scientist told this kid that trying to filter plastic from the ocean is literally the last item on the to-do list of actual useful things we could do to help this planet. Cutting off new plastics and trash from entering the ocean is as close to the top as you can get here. All that crowd funded money was a complete waste on tech that's not really been tested and could have been used on any one of the multiple ways we know to filter trash from streams. I give the kid credit that he wants to help out, but blessed if he went the completely opposite direction of anything that could be remotely considered within 500 light-years of the definition of useful.
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I think it comes down the the misunderstanding of the garbage patch in the Pacific. Many people seem to think it is like a solid island or otherwise tighly packed area of garbage, but while it is many time above the levels of populution it should be, it is not exactly dense (1-2 plastic objects per football field).
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It's something he can do as opposed to trying to make deals with every polluting country on the planet.
Why would he need to "make deals" to pull trash out of a river?
Even if there was somewhere in the world where that requires a permit (I doubt it), why would he need to make deals with "every" polluter?
Re:No just terraform an entirely new planet. (Score:2)
So now the floating trash catcher (Score:5, Funny)
Is floating trash
Re:U suck (Score:1)
Some Nonprofits are Scams (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK. Please point to an organization which has "a real track record" in removing mid-ocean plastic.
IMHO, they're honestly trying, but naive about the necessary technology.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm fine with going aluminum, though, I'm not sure what the energy trade-off is between aluminum vs plastic (i.e. we may be trading one environmental problem for another). But if we do go back to aluminum they must include bottle caps. I can't stand having bottled/canned liquid that I can't re-seal to carry.
As for glass, I believe that it was too heavy and also has the side-effect of starting forest fires.
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Alumini?um isn't all joy. The cans are lined with plastic.
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Plastic solved many problems however it created new ones
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That was my experience in California... I asked several people where to return cans for the deposit. I was told to put them in a bag and leave them in parking lots for the homeless to collect and get the deposit back. That's right, that recycling incentive deposit? It's a stupid way to encourage littering while making litterers feel like champions for the poor.
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Ocean Cleanup appears to be HQ'ed in NYC
About 30 years ago the city of New York used to pile trash up on barges and dump them into the ocean. What better place to HQ?
This could be a scam (like those calls your grandma gets about the police ball) built on the plastic straw hype.
Could be... my money is still on Hanlon's razor.
Not so say there is not plenty of scam to go around. We have US recycling outfits shipping recyclables to poor countries who recycle the material into diamonds and gold which is generously donated to Arial, Flounder and Sebastian.
Re-engineering will consist (Score:2)
of an ocean going platform powered by burning plastic in a series of boilers powering turbines, instead of solar. /s
Circle Jerk (Score:2)
Both the plastic and system are being carried by the current. However, wind and waves propel only the system, as the floater sits just above the water surface, while the plastic is primarily just beneath it. The system thus moves faster than the plastic, allowing the plastic to be captured.
The system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water and a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below. The floater provides buoyancy to the system and prevents plastic from flowing over it, while the skirt stops debris from escaping underneath.
Everybody was so busy jerking each off that no one actually tried to see whether it would work.
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https://www.theoceancleanup.co... [theoceancleanup.com]
Both the plastic and system are being carried by the current. However, wind and waves propel only the system, as the floater sits just above the water surface, while the plastic is primarily just beneath it. The system thus moves faster than the plastic, allowing the plastic to be captured.
The system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water and a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below. The floater provides buoyancy to the system and prevents plastic from flowing over it, while the skirt stops debris from escaping underneath.
Everybody was so busy jerking each off that no one actually tried to see whether it would work.
That's the way it's supposed to work. The news reports have said that the system is moving slower than the debris. I believe that this is what they are trying to fix.
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I like the cut of your jib.
Whose plastic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Something useful to know when assholes want to ban things in the US and Europe: it's not your plastic. [scientificamerican.com]
Say no to zealots and totalitarians.
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We send most of our "recycling" to China, so it is (at least until recently, since they tightened the rules) our plastic there. We just sweep it off to a poorer country, so it's "not our problem".
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Everything is the USA's problem with enough mental gymnastics.
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Something useful to know when assholes want to ban things in the US and Europe: it's not your plastic. [scientificamerican.com]
Say no to zealots and totalitarians.
I don't really care whose plastic this is, it is affecting my life so I'm in favour of doing something about this problem. Nobody ever put out a forest fire threatening to burn down his house by sitting on his ass and thinking: "I don't care, I didn't light this fire".
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I don't really care whose plastic this is, it is affecting my life
No, it is not affecting your life. News about far away places is not about you. You aren't the center of the universe.
I'm in favour of doing something about this problem
Bullying people in the US and Europe doesn't affect "this problem" in any way.
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I don't really care whose plastic this is, it is affecting my life
No, it is not affecting your life. News about far away places is not about you. You aren't the center of the universe.
Oh all knowing one I must beg to differ. Numerous studies have shown that micro and nano plastics are present in every major food group consumed in my neck of the woods so, this really is a problem that affects me even if the vast majority of the plastic in my food comes from other countries.
I'm in favour of doing something about this problem
Bullying people in the US and Europe doesn't affect "this problem" in any way.
WTF are you talking about? Are you one of those whiny little Trumpist bitches that can't shut up about how 'unfairly' 'persecuted' they are by every body and every thing? Don't you people ever get tired of being a victi
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Oh all knowing one I must beg to differ. Numerous studies have shown that micro and nano plastics are present in every major food group consumed in my neck of the woods so, this really is a problem that affects me even if the vast majority of the plastic in my food comes from other countries.
How did plastic get from the Pacific Ocean into your peanut butter jar? Magic? And how did this micro and nano plastic "affect" you exactly?
And why do you want to pretend that Pacific Ocean plastic affects you? Because you want to control others' lives and this is today's excuse? Are you borderline obsessive/neurotic about maintaining purity in your bodily fluids?
Don't you people ever get tired of being a victim?
Don't you get tired of victimizing people to satisfy your emotional needs? Why not just stop making everyone's life worse?
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But that I doubt everyone could afford the current alternatives.
Environmental religious zealots don't care about how their demands hurt poor people.
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Agreed. Middle ground doesn't involve using the government to bully people whose lives, while not perfectly pure, are not causing a big problem.
Let's have conservation and practical measures not driven by zeal or emotion.
People who aren't desperate tend to choose clean over polluted. So making poor people poorer is counterproductive to a clean environment. And people who feel like they have control over their lives might think twice about throwing trash in a river, but when your life is someone else's to
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it's not your plastic.
Actually it is our plastic. Just not all our plastic. But hey just because someone else is dirty we should just fuck the world right?
When did the developed world stop being a leader and example and start being such a worthless fingerpointer?
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It depends on the cost. And what we view as thrash and how we measure it.
One example is the banning of plastic bags in Europe. Now, paper bags are routinely handed out by more luxury shops. It costs a zillion times more energy and water to produce a paper bag than a plastic one.
Food packaged in plastic is another example. "But this cucumber comes with its own packaging!". Yeah, well, the plastic one is much better and makes us throw away significantly less food.
Less thrash should not be a goal in itself. We
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When is "less trash" ever a bad thing? This attitude of "the people over there are 100 times worse so I shouldn't be the one doing something" is complete bullshit and needs to change.
When you're bullying people to create "less trash" and the people you're bulling are just regular people trying to live their lives, people who aren't dumping their trash in the rivers or oceans.
"I shouldn't be the one doing something" to commit fewer murders, because I didn't murder anyone.
"I shouldn't be the one doing something" to dump less plastic in the rivers and oceans because I don't dump plastic in the rivers and oceans.
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Jesus, you must be a joy to be around at parties.
So people are assholes because they want companies do such things as provide wooden coffee stirs in place of ones made of plastic?! Got it.
If you ask, then no, you're not an asshole.
If you demand and bully and send the coffee stirrer police to threaten people, then you're an asshole. And probably worse than merely an asshole.
Using a wooden coffee stirrer versus a plastic one in the US and Europe accomplishes nothing. What do you call someone who bullies others for no benefit to anyone?
Even if it worked... (Score:3, Informative)
So... (Score:2)
Surprise! (Score:2)
You ever try to pick up a piece of plastic in the bathtub? It's hard!
Re: Surprise! (Score:2)
Gah, did it really have to be solar? (Score:2)
I get it that solar is a good idea to be considered for each project. On the other hand, diesel also need to be considered as an option. In this case, it seems like reliable high power-to-weight engines would be the better fit.
And given that, if it worked, this thing would have a massive positive environmental impact, I can't see why the insistence on not using the right tool.
at the same rate (Score:2)
of course it isn't
it's drifting at the same rate as the plastic bits propelled by the same forces
you fecking ijots
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If they had some more engineers, and fewer multimedia people, they would have tested a prototype version by pulling it behind a boat at various speeds and see what the actual requirements are.
only way to beat plastics (Score:2)
the only way to beat plastics is the smart people who invented the chemistry have to invent a way to undo the molecular chains to safe components.
not true (Score:2)
Boyan Slat has already explained that this news is incorrect. It's not functioning 100% but still working as intended, some refinements are still needed, nothing that cannot be solved.
How about we first ... (Score:2)
... stop dumping plastic into the ocean in the first place and then worry about getting the plastic that's already there out?
If we all decide we want to do this than we can move beyond bullshit feel-good projects and throw another few billion at plastic vacuums or something to fix things.
That sounds more like a plan, doesn't it?
Just saying ...
The problem... (Score:2)
is that the recycling places sell the plastic to companies in China and other places but they have no idea what actually happens to the plastic once they sell it. The * HOPE * is that it is dispose of it properly but the reality is that in many (most?) cases the plastic is simply dumped in the ocean.
Unlike metal and paper, there is no economical way to recycle plastic. About all you can really do with it is burn it. And we have rules against that. So the recycling companies, out to make a profit just like e
Or they'll fix it, without a new $100 billion tax (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe they'll fix it. A skimmer isn't exactly rocket science, much less science fiction. Dude tried something to solve a problem, rather than just demanding a new $10 billion from taxpayers to fly around in his private jet lecturing us. I give him credit for trying, and if it's needs some tweaks, that's to be expected.
Re:Or they'll fix it, without a new $100 billion t (Score:4, Informative)
If you research it further you will learn its a family run enterprise build to scam environment grants.
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Perseverance, especially when things fail, is really the key to innovation.
As Edison said:
"I have not failed 10 000 times, I have successfully found 10 000 ways it will not work."
Next time you turn on the lights, perhaps consider the number of iterations it took to make it work, and then ask the question, can we not give this guy two tries at least before we start complaining?
Dyson made $5 billion, after 5,127 prototypes (Score:3)
James Dyson has pretty pretty successful with his cyclonic vacuum. He says he made 5,127 different prototypes before getting it right.
I suspect he's being liberal in his counting for hype purposes, but it's also clear that he didn't nail it on the first try.
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What he got right is, "Look! A little tornado! Watch it go 'round!" And idiots bought it so much all other retail makers copied it.
Don't see that idiotic, inferior stuff in hotels where they use real vacuums.
The company admits they suck (Score:2)
The Dyson company agrees. They say their vacuums suck.
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Hopefully this does eventually work out, because the rest of the world seems to be doing fuck all about the problem.
Re:It's almost as if simple answers (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't think of anything, even the trivial things that are easy to take for granted, that humans ever got right on the first go.
The atomic bomb worked on the first try.
We had enough metal for 3 bombs: Trinity at Alamogordo, Little Boy at Hiroshima, and Fat Man at Nagasaki.
All three worked perfectly.
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But the Manhattan Project had the most intelligent and capable men of that generation working on it. This is the exact opposite situation.
Re: It's almost as if simple answers (Score:2)
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And she would have been the best man in the project, too, if she hadn't died before the start of WWII from radiation poisoning. (I presume she would have emigrated to U.S. to flee Nazi persecution, as many good men in physics and chemistry did.)
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Well, Pierre might have, if he hadn't gotten himself run over.
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I can't think of anything, even the trivial things that are easy to take for granted, that humans ever got right on the first go.
The atomic bomb worked on the first try.
Only because they'd already tested the hell out of the subassemblies.
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Are you saying that if Japan hadn't surrendered right away, we wouldn't have been able to nuke them any more times?
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Are you saying that if Japan hadn't surrendered right away, we wouldn't have been able to nuke them any more times?
It would have taken a few months to generate enough fissile material for another bomb. Maybe late October.
Kokura [wikipedia.org] was the next city scheduled to be nuked. It was the original target for Fat Man, but it was clouded over on the morning of August 9th, so the B-29 was diverted to the alternate target of Nagasaki.
Re:It's almost as if simple answers (Score:4, Insightful)
They should employ their skimmer in the mouth of the most polluting river, rather than in the ocean. They would catch 10 truckloads on the first day.
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It would be nice if this worked. There is a wave powered capture system that I believe worked but it probably doesn't scale nicely...
The next thing to try will likely be engineering microbes to eat our waste which they are working toward...
https://www.sciencealert.com/n... [sciencealert.com]
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The "island" part of it is big media hype. It's not an island, there are no huge patches of plastic floating in the middle of the ocean that you could land a plane on. No boats are crashing into the plastic.
There are basically microplastics everywhere in the water, but especially close to the surface and they are supposedly going to collect where the currents bring them. Those are, as the name implies, mostly microscopic in nature and the effect on health really hasn't been studied well, the only studies so
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And that would be perfectly fine if real-world objects were as iterable as the deliverables of software projects are. The maxim "measure twice, cut once" exists for a reason—it's easy to do things multiple times in software; it's costly and environmentally unsound to do them more than once with real materials.