Slashdot Mirror

They also closed the local post office. So there must have been evidence of something being shipped to the observatory.

It may have been physical evidence, or it may have been some kind of intelligence gathered.

I remember one incident when I-25 was shut down because of a shipment of radioactive rebar from Juarez.

A lot of the press coverage back then was focused on the environmental concerns. I was an undergrad at New Mexico Tech at the time. All of us science and engineering geeks immediately started thinking about the fact that the government must have had detectors for radiation installed at the borders, or along the path the truck traveled. I know that sound pretty standard to most people in the post 9/11 world, but back in the 1980's secret radiation detectors and surveillance were things that only 'evil empire' communist governments did. The good ole' US of A would never have secret detectors deployed in America! How naive we were.

Who knows what the evidence is in this case causing the shutdown, but the post office closing as well does point to something being shipped there.

BTW, many of you have probably heard of New Mexico Tech from either the VLA or, more likely, from watching Mythbusters. If you are a first responder who took a terrorist or bomb training course, it may have been at NMT. NMT was a great place to go to school. I could not imagine going to one of those universities most people go to where students are either partying or in class. We were either in class, building stuff, or blowing stuff up. Blowing it up in the name of research, of course!

There are plenty of videos on youtube about psychics, ghosts, and ufo's, making claims not backed up by ANY kind of science. Youtube didn't remove those.

Those kinds of claims do not have the record of death and destruction that making (absurd) medical claims has. There might be some deaths that can be attributable to psychics (not counting psychic medicine), but...lots and lots of people have died because of snake oil peddling and quackery, sometimes quite horribly. (Link deals with Radithor, which was a patent medicine that was literally and openly radium-laced water, and the fate of a sports celebrity spokesperson had a three-bottle-a-day habit...)

Pacemakers don't use RTGs, they use non-thermal radioisotope generators, like betavoltaics that harvest the current created by escaping beta particles.

That's only true for the Promethium-powered ones with a Betacel unit. I think the number of
actual thermoelectric ones still "in the wild" using Plutonium is about the same.

I see. It seems that this Wikipedia line had me confused:

According to Oak Ridge Associated Universities, this is not because of elevated levels of radium in the soil, but due to "the very extensive root system of the tree."[22]

The actual source indeed says:

The accumulation of the radium (and barium) is due to the very extensive root system of the tree.

So the root system is just effective in sucking in radioactive stuff.

Problem solved - just resume production of these:
Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/GilbertU238Lab.htm

What happens if a Pinto gets rear-ended by a Tesla?

Hang on, let me just check the slide rule...

(Actually I used have a Pinto -- well, it was my wife's -- and I'd buy a Tesla if it were in my budget.)

"I'd buy that for a doller!"

Step right up!. A time-tested restorer of vitality.

Since they also make pottery, I thought maybe they were bringing back old-school Fiesta Ware: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm

Including pacemakers makes that category sound less dangerous than it may actually be. These things contain plutonium....

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

"Pictures, or it didn't happen":

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/medalsmementoes/dimes.htm

Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.

It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days, the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.

Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.

The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.

Which groups of scientists and engineers do you mean? The ones similar to those that design weapons, or promote fluoridation of the water supply, created shoe fitting fluoroscope, or the ones that just outright peddle snake oil such as radium water jars?

If you've got a Geiger counter, orange Fiestaware is the cat's meow.

1.6 mSv is 0.00162 mrem.

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm Estimates for consumer exposure to the uranium in the glazing of orange Fiestaware show you could rack up to a mSv in just a few hours exposure.

Who wants to bet, that this batch of concrete had some orange Fiestaware mix into it, or perhaps just a natural concentration of pitchblende, and it has nothing to do with Fukushima?

Some people used to think so.

We used to just set off fission and fusion bombs in the air and on the ground, so I would kinda think the long term risk from a small amount of PU238 at the bottom of the ocean is not all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially since it may be completely contained.

Oh, and there may be a few people still walking around with similarly plutonium-powered pacemakers in their chests...

http://www.theodoregray.com/periodictable/Samples/094.3/index.s12.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

G.

Well, maybe you can't make an nuclear reaction just by hitting it with a laser. (I'd try a beryllium hammer, first, personally.) But with a sufficient supply of weapons-grade stupidity, plus some nuclear materials, one can certainly make lots of neutrons really, really fast. Adding some lasers could only make the conversion of stupidity into neutrons more efficient..

(Link is to 158 page pdf "Review of Criticality Accidents" Los Alamos, 2000 / a.k.a "Stupid Reactor Tricks", but also processing plant disasters, experiments gone horribly wrong, etc.)

If the food you're testing is more radioactive than a pile of brazil nuts then you probably don't want to eat it, especially if it's normally not supposed to be as radioactive as a brazil nut :).

http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/brazilnuts.htm

What the sibling said. I combined the "few syllables means safe" joke with the 1930s-era belief that radioactivity is perfectly safe and wholesome under all circumstances. They pretty much put the stuff in everything from the Revigators the sibling mentioned to ready-made radium-enriched water sold as a health tonic (and discontinued after someone got radiation sickness form it). Toothpaste, suppositories... there was a whole bunch of products made so you could contaminate yourself in the comfort of your own home.

Don't forget this lovely product for the do-it-at-home crowd: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/revigat.htm

Have they considered putting it in cans and selling it at gas stations with a big glowing F on it?

Fukushima - For Radiant Health! It'll make a Monster out of you!

marketing has an answer for everything!

This has been tried before...

Also reminds me of irradiated dimes just sink a bunch of those nearly worthless aluminium Yen coins in the water and fund the clean-up by selling them on eBay.

Have they considered putting it in cans and selling it at gas stations with a big glowing F on it?

Fukushima - For Radiant Health! It'll make a Monster out of you!

marketing has an answer for everything!

This has been tried before...

Also reminds me of irradiated dimes just sink a bunch of those nearly worthless aluminium Yen coins in the water and fund the clean-up by selling them on eBay.

Have they considered putting it in cans and selling it at gas stations with a big glowing F on it?

Fukushima - For Radiant Health! It'll make a Monster out of you!

marketing has an answer for everything!

This has been tried before...

The shoe-fitting fluoroscope.

Basically a box that you put your feet into where x-rays are fired upon your feet and you can look into the viewing ports on the top and see the bones in your feet for the purpose of getting correctly sized shoes.

It was used during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and was subsequently discontinued after employees experienced radiation burns from the constant exposure.

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm

...get over the stigma against nuclear tech and utilize small personal reactors for energy...

Eh, It's been done already

Don't forget that even nuclear power do produce a large amount of emissions and waste. If you include the whole process from mining, transport, enrichment and then the waste produced by the process you will end up in a situation where you find that you have a relatively dirty process.

And building a reactor takes a huge amount of material, advanced alloys and extra thick concrete to keep radiation on the inside. The control equipment is also very expensive due to all failsafes. The designs also have to be enhanced in a newly built reactor compared to what was in previous generations of reactors in order to contain any spills if they do occur. This will both affect the construction cost - making the construction more expensive, but also the operational cost making it more expensive to run the reactor.

Some of us actually remembers Harrisburg and Chernobyl, both are indications of things that can go wrong. There are other examples too that can be found in A Review of
Criticality Accidents.

Most of the accidents are caused by neglect and ignorance but a nuclear failure is causing trouble for a long time since it contaminates the area affected for so long. It's a question of decades and the contaminants are often invisible. Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.

...books [seriously?], trains, cars, radio television [sic], internet, cell phones...

And the shoe-fitting fluoroscope, lead paint, Thalidomide, and this darling little number. Good thing none of those things were really dangerous after all.

Maybe I'm missing your point.. I can only speak for the few plants I was working on. The source range detectors are very sensitive. In theory, a single thermal neutron saturates the detector and delivers a HV pulse (The operation is here http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/proportional%20counters/bf3info.htm). The power level is measure of the pulses over time. The source range detectors anodes were manually powered off at a level of about 10^-5 reactor power level or they would burn up. When moving that source around, you could move it an INCH and pick up very large changes. The purpose for the Navy's operational checks with this source were not really calibration, they were to ensure that the detectors and associated instrumentation are actually working and responding to changes in neutron count before starting up the reactor and for material history purposes to track the detectors sensitivity over time, the source was pulled slowly and held at each source range detector and the max counts recorded and compared to previous time it was done. They don't run for 12 to 13 decades either because I don't think they were around 120 years ago.

This proves that cellphone radiation actually interacts with matter in the brain... which is something to be afraid of, in my opinion.

Nono, this is GOOD effects, not bad ones. Cellphone radiation has no bad effects, none whatsoever, but it has lots of beneficial effects. While we're on the subject, I highly recommend the Revigator for greater health.

Typical normal CT scan dose: 1-2 rem
Faulty CT scan overdose: 8-16 rem
1950s shoe-salesman's fluoroscope: 10 rem
Typical normal Therac-25 dose: 200 rem
Malfunctioning Therac-25 dose: 15-20,000 rem

Come on, seriously people. Yes, this is a mistake that needs to be fixed, but millions of kids in the '50s got their feet nuked with this much radiation and lived to become healthy normal adults with normal feet.

The Therac-25 cooked straight through people, leaving a hole of rotting meat behind. This is not even remotely in the same league.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/R/Radiation.html
http://chestjournal.chestpubs.org/content/107/1/113.full.pdf
http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluor/shoe.htm

http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

If you eat Potassium Chloride, you get nutrition. If you inject it, you die.

Either way, you get radioactive.

People are always looking for The Explanation to various problems, troubles and ailments. So it is easy to blame vaccines for causing Autism; instead of accepting that it could perhaps be a multitude causes behind it.

For instance, as an example, no one fully understand the accumulated effects of all the pollution we pump into the air, the toxins we dump into the ocean, and rivers, and the additives and preservatives added to food and drinks. Various chemicals could by themselves be harmless, or even of benefit to society, but combine variations together in a person at random (especially children) and the effects are unknown. Perhaps it's not the cause of anything, perhaps it is; all I know is that very little substantial research is being done. And the sentiment presented by manufacturers and retailers seem to be; "If you don't die at once; it's not a poison. Besides you're all just a bunch of doom saying crybabies."

Personally I try never to form a convolution based upon a lack of evidence, however in these cases there seem to be almost fundamentalist zeal in ignoring or suppressing any research and trials to document fully the effects of Everything for an extensive amount of time (enough time to make a rational conclusion one way or the other).

Basic point is, question everything. As a specie we have a tendency to use, abuse, package and sell all kinds of stuff that we don't fully comprehend yet. Like radioactive toothpaste being marketed as extra healthy.

Not sure about nanoscale, but smaller nuclear power sources than this 20x6ft surely do exist. Take a look at this:
http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

We can't actually build a small implantable GPS yet. Passive RFID tags, yes; GPS receiver with uplink, no.

Well, in theory you could build a pacemaker-sized device powered by a nuclear battery, but that would take major surgery to install, and approval from the FDA and DOE.

There were dangers back then and now. Sunlight has been proved to be damaging to your body; sunburn - the amount of UV radiation from the sunlight has caused damage to your cells equivalent to being burnt by hot water (which in turn is emitting infra-red radiation a.k.a. as heat). Stand too close to a hot object and you will also damage your body.

Not forgetting the hazards of the early X-ray equipment (many shoe stores used to have novelty X-ray machines that allowed children to view X-rays of their feet).

Out of curiousity, does anyone have a comparison of the electromagnetic spectrum in somewhere extremely remote (eg. desert in Nevada) against the "electro-smog polluted" urban areas? The optical frequencies will probably be lower (less glare due to the shadows caused by buildings).

There are places in cities which are free from "electro-smog". Most basements won't allow cellphone operation. One of our technicians set up his office in the most remote corner of our building - it didn't even have a telephone - so he could get on with his work uninterrupted.

Good thing they don't make plutonium-powered pacemakers anymore.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm

Another similarly odd X-ray machine was used for fitting shoes [www.orau.org]. Indeed it showed precisely how well a new shoe would fit.

This "patented" nuclear slide rule seems to be pre-empted by just a little prior art.

And unless I'm missing something, I can think of no obvious scientific reason to attribute Gulf War Syndrome with U-238. It smells very much like public paranoia and mis-information: Uranium 238 is depleted Uranium: it is not fissile, and it's half-life is near 5 billion years. It is rather abundant in bricks---which is why most building have a higher ambient radiation than the outdoors (even though the buildings shield some cosmic rays, they usually have enough Uranium in the bricks to compensate).

That the level of radiation is of absolutely no concern whatsoever, and calling it one of the 'most dangerous toys of all time' is spreading public mis-information.

Yep, Low-sodium salts. Salts are just ion-paired complexes, and table-salt can be converted to low-sodium by replacing the sodium chloride with potassium chloride. Theoretically, better for your heart, and you won't worry about the banana jokes at lunch. (I seem to remember somewhere during my schooling a lot of kidding of people at lunch, concerning whether they peeled their bananas in three or four strips. Allegedly Chimps consistently peel theirs in three sections.

From Oak-Ridge National Labs, (http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20pro ducts/lowsodiumsalt.htm/ a suitable discussion of low-sodium salt.

I actually bought one of these kits at a CD auction years ago for $15.00 bux US. I have them on a shelf and can see them right now.

qz

See http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluo r/shoe.htm

"According to Williams (1949), the machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube."

Yes, a product that sold by the hundreds of thousands. Probably the most popular device to add radon to drinking water: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/revi gat.htm

Good times.

Poor Madam Curie and many others did non-scientific, informal, non-rigorous testing. That is, they died at early ages from a host of maladies that typically were not seen before, or were not seen in people so young.

Don't think that you must test something to know if it will kill you. There is no formal testing program with human participants to see if freeway crashes are really as fatal or "enjoyable" as they appear.

There was a facinating period of time in human history where the new power of atomic radiation was believed to be the ultimate energy drink. Radithor and others http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/quackcures/quac kcures.htm eventually led to the death of many people, sometimes by tumors, sometimes by weird means such as the bones becoming brittle and collapsing like dust.

In addition, it's not fully un=tested. In 1949 Quaker Oats fed mentally retarted school children (in America, no less) radioactive isotopes to study their effects on the human body. A few cases have been leaked indicating that the Department of Enery in coordination with physicians in America injected poor Black men with Plutonium isotopes, another leaked study shows people being purposefully exposed to radiation ten time higher than normal. I imagine that the leaked studies are few in comparison to the non-leaked studies.

And don't think that such things don't happen in the United States. Look at the Tuskagee Syphillis experiment, where they literally infected people with Syphillis and then refused medical treatment, lying to them about the disease to see how impactful the entire course of the infection would take. To keep people on the program, they warned them that their "free medial treamements" would be discontinued if they sought advice from other physicians, and they selected poor under-educated test subjects which would basically require free "treatment" as opposed to real, paid medical advice.

I agree.

It's amusing to observe what was considered healthy throughout history. "Drinking donkey urine/bathing in virgin blood will grant you eternal youth!", "High-fiber diet reduces colon cancer risk!"

One of the recent ones was sent to me by a dentist friend - a radioactive toothpaste (1940ies):
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/toot hpaste.htm

From the advertisment sample that I have:
"RADIOACTIVE TOOTHPASTE - CREATES NATURAL FRESHNESS"

"Gentle rays of Radium are active for 4 hours after application. It will remove plaque and oral inflammations, strengthen blood flow, keep your gums pink and strong, and your teeth as white as snow!"

But NASA keeps insisting on plutonium power for space probes--even as the Rosetta space probe, launched this year by NASA's counterpart, the European Space Agency, with solar power providing all on-board electricity, now heads for a rendezvous with a comet near Jupiter.

The Pentagon has long stated that they will require nuclear reactors to provide power for space-based weapons. NASA says that each of its space missions will now be dual use, meaning military and civilian at the same time. The obvious next question is what is the military application for nuclear power in space?

On January 11, the window opens for a launch from Cape Canaveral of a rocket lofting a space probe with 24 pounds of plutonium fuel on board. Plutonium is considered the most deadly radioactive substance.

The user interface should pop up a window with a big orange standard Radiation Hazard Warning and ask for confirmation that is what the user wanted to do.

Of course, this kind of interface may come with risks. In my last job the project was called 'RAD' for 'Risk Assessment Database' and we wanted our logo to be a big yellow and black radiation sign. this was at a big bank in downtown Chicago. Unfortunately, it turned out one of the neighboring departments had an employee who either had cancer or whose wife had cancer, and the radiation signs kind of freaked him a bit, so we changed our logo. Alas. It would have been cool but for the whole oops-we're-insensitive-doofuses aspect.

ROFL, from that link, "Vita Radium Suppositories"

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quac kcures.htm

And the (tiny) problem of smashing the battery open by mistake and releasing enough radio-elements in the environment to poison your entire neighborhood for decades doesn't bother you?

Depends on the design. A thero-electric battery (e.g. Pielter or micro-Sterling) could easily be encased in a steel cladding that would prevent the materials from ever being released short of being heated to a molten state. This probably wouldn't work for beta-voltaics, but a strongly sealed battery would achieve the same effect.

Did you know people with pacemakers who die are cut open to recover the darn thing before they're buried, to avoid exactly what I just described, on a much smaller scale?

Did you know you have this wrong? The pacemakers are recovered to be refurbished and reused. Plutonium is very expensive, so Pace Maker receipients were required to sign a contract that allowed the device to be retrieved after death. AFAIK, there are no concerns about contamination due to the fact that the pacemaker casing would easily outlast the life of the plutonium power source. Linky