These numbers only apply to acute doses, i.e. getting it all within a few minutes. The threshold for chronic exposure limits is currently unknown so most regulators simply assume there is no benefit from the time a body has to repairs itself.
Think of a chemotherapy patient getting all the chemo they normally get in a month in one day. You'd have a corpse on hand after the first day. The same holds for radiation, its just that given the presumed effect of chronic radiaiton is cancer and 1/5 of everyone is expected to get it you'd need lots of people living in a place like Chornobyl to get any good numbers for real risk. Anyone care to volunteer, I hear its a quiet neighborhood?
RAD: absorbed dose of 0.01 J REM = RAD x QF Where QF is a number of much debate for neutrons, alphas, and betas. Its based on 1 for gammas, everything else depends on who you ask.
Its a common mistake to say 1 Roentgen is 1 Rad. First you only get Roentgen's in air and energies less than 3 million electron volts. Second if you're in a 1 Roentgen/hr field you're getting 0.7 Rad/hr. Nearly everyone rounds it up to 1 to 1 to save on the calculator which is going to cause a big problem one of these days.
Now what we really need are the pictures of the corium slag. Parts of the Uranium are oxidizing even further now into a less dense state similar to yellow cake. The lack of disturbance has allowed eloborate crystalline flowers to form, budding out of the corium.
Just an FYI part of the problem they had in the region around Chornobyl is the standard diet was notable deficient in Iodine. As a result everyone was Iodine starved and when the plant released it as a radioactive airborne gas the thyroids of the people in the plume just soaked it up like a sponge. Given that the western world adds iodine to its salt, and the amount of salt consumed, I would not be suprised if most westerner's thyroids are already saturated. Not counting those health nuts of course who would refuse to set foot in a McDonalds and use sea salt on their food.
For DU the greatest health risk by far is from kidney damage due to Uranium being a heavy metal, the radiological risk is negligable in comparison. Handling chunks of it is not a problem as long as you don't throw it across the ground to watch the sparks, UO2 fumes, it gives off when it skips.
A lot of history written about the allied motives and actions towards Japan are missing a dramatic fact. We had already compromised their communication encryptions at the highest level and were able to listen in on very high level internal policy throughout the war. Many of the official reasons given for US actions were mearly a cover for just recently declassified communications. Yes, the government does lie occasionally.
The leaders in Tokyo had no, I repeat no, intention of negotiating a surrender. It was pratically outside their cultural frame of mind. There were a few ambassadors that did seek such surrender negotiations mentioned above but it turned out they were acting beyond their authority and the foriegn minister was not happy when he learned of their actions. We have the decrypted cable transcripts between the embassies and Tokyo. Needless to say this did not inspire the Allies into putting much credence to surrender offers. Even with two atomic bombings, after being confirmed so they knew the extent of the damage dealt, the political and military leadership had no intention of surrender. It was only by direct action of the Emperor anything was done and there was a very nearly successful coup d'etat to overthrough the emperor for that very action. Although the Emperor's decision probably had more to do with the fact that the country's infrastructure had been destroyed and they were facing massive famine the next year even if they managed to hold everyone off. This is a country that had been enduring fire bombs that destroyed huge fractions of the cities targeted and they were already decentralizing as much as possible to make concentrated targets unavailable. When you look at the difference in destruction realized by the early nukes from the fire bombs there wasn't much from the ground's point of view. You're looking at destruction of the city and its people either way. The impressive part was instead of hundreds of planes dropping massive numbers of bomblets it took only one bomber and the implication we had the ordinance to continue bombing indefinitely.
If you look closley at the history including the declassifed communications and interviews with surviving officers on both sides the surrender didn't come about because of the a-bombs. Those were a minor consideration and primarily a way to save face by the Emperor for his country and himself by attributing the surrender to such a 'dramatic leap' in weaponry. The war was won the old-fashioned way but it wasn't good PR to advertise that when we had a world with new enemies that likely out-numbered us at that point.
As for Stalin I suggest you check at how throughly compromised the Manhatten Project was by the Russians. They had multiple independent sources in the program. The only question was if Stalin knew how limited our supplies of nuclear weapons were at the end of the war.
As far as there not being a manned invasion of Japan, I'm sure any vet who was there would be suprised to hear that. The military was gearing up for an invasion and a fresh new president would've been hard pressed to halt the inertia. Remember, it was because of Japan that we actually entered the war.
I think you're thinking of alpha energies. Gammas pretty much max out around 3 MeV for radioactive decay and energy lines above 1.5 MeV are not very common. One way to look at it is the higher the energy the more unstable the radioactive atom is giving it a shorter half-life. Short half-life atoms don't stay around long so all you get are a few rare isotopes emitting energies above 1.5 MeV seen outside reactors and accelerators.
For gamma-rays carbon based life is pretty transparent. The gamma ray will rarely deposit all its energy in one spot instead it knocks an electron off an atom and gives it a few 100 kev to work with and then proceeds on its merry way. Anything in the path of that electron is hammered but for the most part that's just inter/intra-cellular fluid which produces some free radicals that are quickly scavanged. Its only a problem when the DNA helix is hit or possibly the cell membrane, both fairly low in volume compared to the whole cell. Internal alpha particles are another matter entirely. They have energies around the 5 MeV range and an alpha is like a cannon ball shot in a fab shop. Anything it hits is a goner since all that energy is deposited in a very small volume.
As for microbes surviving high radiation levels you should look at some articles concerning high microbe levels in reactor core coolant streams. They appear to have highly redundant DNA with very good repair mechanisms. Unfortunately the processes they use seem to only work for for ring DNA strands found in bacterias. So don't look for a human drug soon to make you rad proof. D. radiodurans is one species that was found in the shielding water of high activity sources.
Think about a photographer for a press conference, sporting event, or anything preplanned. That way they can plop a wireless basestation down next to a phone link or sat-dish and click away.
FedEx is the best at handling rad shipments. UPS isn't very comfortable with it if they still do Yellow I packages and I don't think the post office will ship any at all. Just hang out at a hospital's loading dock for awhile and you'll probably see a fedex truck with a DOT rad symbol on it pull up sometime.
Uranium is much more toxic to the kidney based on its heavy metal aspect than its ionizing radiation. Long before you'll get any significant radiation damage you'll be going into renal failure.
You'll want to be careful with the code the intel compiler spits out. It may be fast but some scientific codes compiled with it give incorrect answers. Compile the same code on any other f90 compiler and it gives the correct answer. Not something to inspire confience in your answers.
The big deal here is that there are three criteria for calling yourself an engineer:
1) Capable of the job. This includes having the necessary training and capable of passing tests on the subject.
2) Following a standard code of ethics.
and the biggest sticking point
3) Accepting liability for your work. If you write a program that crashes a pacemaker you can be sued in civil court and depending on the extent of your knowledge of the degree of hazard perhaps prosecuted in criminal court.
Given that all the other professional engineering fields must follow these standards its damaging to their reputation and confusing to the public that someone claiming the same title can deliver unreliable goods with no consequence.
I think you have radiation level's and radiation dose's confused. Very different things. That said the peak dose at 4k years makes LOTS of assumptions that taken in total are extremely unrealistic. Notice that none of the numbers presented had error bars. Perhaps the uncertainty was so high it would have made the plots meaningless.
So if we are below a normal Uranium deposit's activity levels within a thousand years and you're worried about 40k years out maybe we should have you looking at containing all the loose radioactive uranium sitting around in the ground in the Rocky Mountains. I mean its just sitting there, ground water percolating through it and some people have been drinking that water for years.
So what result would you expect from a 9.5 earthquake? Maybe the waste would be buried from a tunnel collapse? It'll make retrieval harder but I forgot its WASTE and we can't retrieve it because it might be a valuable material when looked at from a different perspective.
As far as Pu being one of the most toxic substances around thats a myth or urban legend. I'll gladly eat a teaspoon of Pu dust if you do the same with a teaspoon of liquified sarin gas, as long as we do it in separate rooms. There is an extremely long list of things more toxic than Pu. I'd be more worried about Be. A completely stable element that has an illness all to itself.
Plus what's the big thing to worry about Pu? It may cause cancer over a long latency period if not treated and removed. Think we might have a cancer cure or even a vaccine in 4k years? I'm expecting one in my lifetime.
Anyone care to take bets on what the anti-nukes will focus on if there is a cure/vaccine for cancer? Or will they even realize their cause is moot?
The real solution is to recycle the so called waste. Separate the high activity waste, primarily 50 y half life material, from the significant amounts of Pu, U and other fissionable elements. Stick it back in the reactor and start over. Better yet use breeder reactors that are designed for this. Even some of the high activity waste can be used as power sources in RTGs - hey ma, no moving parts.
Also this 10,000 y number is pretty much a joke. After 500 to 1000 years the annoying fission products will have decayed away leaving a slightly impure material more valuable than gold. And this is probably before the primary containment barriers have been breached! So in a sense it's just long term recycling. The fiasco with Yucca mountain will stand in the annals of history as monument to the manipulation of a willingly ignorant public. If Nevada politics had any sense, and as a local I find that highly improbable, they would demand deed to the 'waste'. Five hundred to a thousand years is beyond consideration for the individual but for a state thats a valuable investment, something that increases in value as the laws of physics clean it. Of course you need someone in position to think beyond the here and now.
As far as H fuel cells, sure H is abundant out in space but so is solar energy. Where do you propose to find large quantities of free Hydrogen on an Oxygen rich planet? It takes just as much energy to free H from water as you get back plus you pay on the entropy. Natural gas, even in fuel cells, still doesn't solve the CO2 problem. Not to mention obtaining and transporting the gas. How many people have died in the last 5 years to gas explosions? Compare that to how many have died in NPP mishaps.
Given that nuclear power is the cheapest power out there even with a significant portion of its costs going to fees for the repository, insurance, overregulation, etc. I don't see nuclear power going away for a long time. Management has finally realized that a safe power plant is a profitable one. Plus the design process has continued. The pebble bed design claims to be melt down proof, have online refueling and non-proliferation friendly. Even when the current reactors reach their end-points expect to see a new reactor built on site, if not sooner.
Actually its much more difficult to write buffer overflows for PowerPC's. Too many instructions have null bytes in them terminating the buffer. That's not saying its impossible but its much easier to write overflows with intel's instruction set.
I've actually done this for a few university lists. Every once in awhile some jerk would mail every list at the university something that would generate lots of responses by people who would cc everyone.
The system was fairly simple. Any mail to a list had to have a prefix in the subject, say SGA: for the Student Goverenment Association. The filter would then strip the prefix and send the message out to the list. Messages that didn't have the prefix were bounced back with instructions to add the prefix and a list of topics those subscribing to the list were interested. It's still working to this day.
Fortunately I've been lucky in that all the addresses I've used only one became a spam collector and that was after I no longer had a use for it. Otherwise I would seriously consider installing the perl scripts on my own account.
Fusion is great for low thrust high burn times and there are several projects in the works for interplanetary drives. The problem is that the fusion reactor needed for high thrust is currently too large and massive to reach escape velocity on its own.
It would take much more than a big rocket explosion to vaporize one of NASA's RTGs. They've survived reentry multiple times, one even being retrieved from the ocean floor and reused. We're talking a high temperature ceramic with a very low heat transfer coefficient. A rocket explosion is not going to do it unless you have an anitmatter rocket sitting around somewhere.
As far as Pu being one of the most toxic substances known to man I'll eat a gram of it if you eat a gram of Sarin and then we'll talk. Pu is far from being top on the toxic list except in public perception.
But due to politcal and religous reasons it wasn't an option unless Iraq had initiated chemical warfare against Israel, US, French or British forces.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The option was seriously presented to President Bush. So it was on the table at the highest level.
Slashdot Mirror
These numbers only apply to acute doses, i.e. getting it all within a few minutes. The threshold for chronic exposure limits is currently unknown so most regulators simply assume there is no benefit from the time a body has to repairs itself.
Think of a chemotherapy patient getting all the chemo they normally get in a month in one day. You'd have a corpse on hand after the first day. The same holds for radiation, its just that given the presumed effect of chronic radiaiton is cancer and 1/5 of everyone is expected to get it you'd need lots of people living in a place like Chornobyl to get any good numbers for real risk. Anyone care to volunteer, I hear its a quiet neighborhood?
RAD: absorbed dose of 0.01 J
REM = RAD x QF
Where QF is a number of much debate for neutrons, alphas, and betas. Its based on 1 for gammas, everything else depends on who you ask.
Its a common mistake to say 1 Roentgen is 1 Rad. First you only get Roentgen's in air and energies less than 3 million electron volts. Second if you're in a 1 Roentgen/hr field you're getting 0.7 Rad/hr. Nearly everyone rounds it up to 1 to 1 to save on the calculator which is going to cause a big problem one of these days.
Now what we really need are the pictures of the corium slag. Parts of the Uranium are oxidizing even further now into a less dense state similar to yellow cake. The lack of disturbance has allowed eloborate crystalline flowers to form, budding out of the corium.
Just an FYI part of the problem they had in the region around Chornobyl is the standard diet was notable deficient in Iodine. As a result everyone was Iodine starved and when the plant released it as a radioactive airborne gas the thyroids of the people in the plume just soaked it up like a sponge. Given that the western world adds iodine to its salt, and the amount of salt consumed, I would not be suprised if most westerner's thyroids are already saturated. Not counting those health nuts of course who would refuse to set foot in a McDonalds and use sea salt on their food.
For DU the greatest health risk by far is from kidney damage due to Uranium being a heavy metal, the radiological risk is negligable in comparison. Handling chunks of it is not a problem as long as you don't throw it across the ground to watch the sparks, UO2 fumes, it gives off when it skips.
Some key facts missed:
A lot of history written about the allied motives and actions towards Japan are missing a dramatic fact. We had already compromised their communication encryptions at the highest level and were able to listen in on very high level internal policy throughout the war. Many of the official reasons given for US actions were mearly a cover for just recently declassified communications. Yes, the government does lie occasionally.
The leaders in Tokyo had no, I repeat no, intention of negotiating a surrender. It was pratically outside their cultural frame of mind. There were a few ambassadors that did seek such surrender negotiations mentioned above but it turned out they were acting beyond their authority and the foriegn minister was not happy when he learned of their actions. We have the decrypted cable transcripts between the embassies and Tokyo. Needless to say this did not inspire the Allies into putting much credence to surrender offers. Even with two atomic bombings, after being confirmed so they knew the extent of the damage dealt, the political and military leadership had no intention of surrender. It was only by direct action of the Emperor anything was done and there was a very nearly successful coup d'etat to overthrough the emperor for that very action. Although the Emperor's decision probably had more to do with the fact that the country's infrastructure had been destroyed and they were facing massive famine the next year even if they managed to hold everyone off. This is a country that had been enduring fire bombs that destroyed huge fractions of the cities targeted and they were already decentralizing as much as possible to make concentrated targets unavailable. When you look at the difference in destruction realized by the early nukes from the fire bombs there wasn't much from the ground's point of view. You're looking at destruction of the city and its people either way. The impressive part was instead of hundreds of planes dropping massive numbers of bomblets it took only one bomber and the implication we had the ordinance to continue bombing indefinitely.
If you look closley at the history including the declassifed communications and interviews with surviving officers on both sides the surrender didn't come about because of the a-bombs. Those were a minor consideration and primarily a way to save face by the Emperor for his country and himself by attributing the surrender to such a 'dramatic leap' in weaponry. The war was won the old-fashioned way but it wasn't good PR to advertise that when we had a world with new enemies that likely out-numbered us at that point.
As for Stalin I suggest you check at how throughly compromised the Manhatten Project was by the Russians. They had multiple independent sources in the program. The only question was if Stalin knew how limited our supplies of nuclear weapons were at the end of the war.
As far as there not being a manned invasion of Japan, I'm sure any vet who was there would be suprised to hear that. The military was gearing up for an invasion and a fresh new president would've been hard pressed to halt the inertia. Remember, it was because of Japan that we actually entered the war.
I think you're thinking of alpha energies. Gammas pretty much max out around 3 MeV for radioactive decay and energy lines above 1.5 MeV are not very common. One way to look at it is the higher the energy the more unstable the radioactive atom is giving it a shorter half-life. Short half-life atoms don't stay around long so all you get are a few rare isotopes emitting energies above 1.5 MeV seen outside reactors and accelerators.
For gamma-rays carbon based life is pretty transparent. The gamma ray will rarely deposit all its energy in one spot instead it knocks an electron off an atom and gives it a few 100 kev to work with and then proceeds on its merry way. Anything in the path of that electron is hammered but for the most part that's just inter/intra-cellular fluid which produces some free radicals that are quickly scavanged. Its only a problem when the DNA helix is hit or possibly the cell membrane, both fairly low in volume compared to the whole cell. Internal alpha particles are another matter entirely. They have energies around the 5 MeV range and an alpha is like a cannon ball shot in a fab shop. Anything it hits is a goner since all that energy is deposited in a very small volume.
As for microbes surviving high radiation levels you should look at some articles concerning high microbe levels in reactor core coolant streams. They appear to have highly redundant DNA with very good repair mechanisms. Unfortunately the processes they use seem to only work for for ring DNA strands found in bacterias. So don't look for a human drug soon to make you rad proof. D. radiodurans is one species that was found in the shielding water of high activity sources.
Think about a photographer for a press conference, sporting event, or anything preplanned. That way they can plop a wireless basestation down next to a phone link or sat-dish and click away.
FedEx is the best at handling rad shipments. UPS isn't very comfortable with it if they still do Yellow I packages and I don't think the post office will ship any at all. Just hang out at a hospital's loading dock for awhile and you'll probably see a fedex truck with a DOT rad symbol on it pull up sometime.
Uranium is much more toxic to the kidney based on its heavy metal aspect than its ionizing radiation. Long before you'll get any significant radiation damage you'll be going into renal failure.
You'll want to be careful with the code the intel compiler spits out. It may be fast but some scientific codes compiled with it give incorrect answers. Compile the same code on any other f90 compiler and it gives the correct answer. Not something to inspire confience in your answers.
The heat sink is about one universe in size and has a temperature of around 4K. I think that'll suffice quite nicely as a heat sink.
The big deal here is that there are three criteria for calling yourself an engineer:
1) Capable of the job. This includes having the necessary training and capable of passing tests on the subject.
2) Following a standard code of ethics.
and the biggest sticking point
3) Accepting liability for your work. If you write a program that crashes a pacemaker you can be sued in civil court and depending on the extent of your knowledge of the degree of hazard perhaps prosecuted in criminal court.
Given that all the other professional engineering fields must follow these standards its damaging to their reputation and confusing to the public that someone claiming the same title can deliver unreliable goods with no consequence.
The mac version is being released at the same time. The news story just forgot to mention it. See here.
I think you have radiation level's and radiation dose's confused. Very different things. That said the peak dose at 4k years makes LOTS of assumptions that taken in total are extremely unrealistic. Notice that none of the numbers presented had error bars. Perhaps the uncertainty was so high it would have made the plots meaningless.
So if we are below a normal Uranium deposit's activity levels within a thousand years and you're worried about 40k years out maybe we should have you looking at containing all the loose radioactive uranium sitting around in the ground in the Rocky Mountains. I mean its just sitting there, ground water percolating through it and some people have been drinking that water for years.
So what result would you expect from a 9.5 earthquake? Maybe the waste would be buried from a tunnel collapse? It'll make retrieval harder but I forgot its WASTE and we can't retrieve it because it might be a valuable material when looked at from a different perspective.
As far as Pu being one of the most toxic substances around thats a myth or urban legend. I'll gladly eat a teaspoon of Pu dust if you do the same with a teaspoon of liquified sarin gas, as long as we do it in separate rooms. There is an extremely long list of things more toxic than Pu. I'd be more worried about Be. A completely stable element that has an illness all to itself.
Plus what's the big thing to worry about Pu? It may cause cancer over a long latency period if not treated and removed. Think we might have a cancer cure or even a vaccine in 4k years? I'm expecting one in my lifetime.
Anyone care to take bets on what the anti-nukes will focus on if there is a cure/vaccine for cancer? Or will they even realize their cause is moot?
The real solution is to recycle the so called waste. Separate the high activity waste, primarily 50 y half life material, from the significant amounts of Pu, U and other fissionable elements. Stick it back in the reactor and start over. Better yet use breeder reactors that are designed for this. Even some of the high activity waste can be used as power sources in RTGs - hey ma, no moving parts.
Also this 10,000 y number is pretty much a joke. After 500 to 1000 years the annoying fission products will have decayed away leaving a slightly impure material more valuable than gold. And this is probably before the primary containment barriers have been breached! So in a sense it's just long term recycling. The fiasco with Yucca mountain will stand in the annals of history as monument to the manipulation of a willingly ignorant public. If Nevada politics had any sense, and as a local I find that highly improbable, they would demand deed to the 'waste'. Five hundred to a thousand years is beyond consideration for the individual but for a state thats a valuable investment, something that increases in value as the laws of physics clean it. Of course you need someone in position to think beyond the here and now.
As far as H fuel cells, sure H is abundant out in space but so is solar energy. Where do you propose to find large quantities of free Hydrogen on an Oxygen rich planet? It takes just as much energy to free H from water as you get back plus you pay on the entropy. Natural gas, even in fuel cells, still doesn't solve the CO2 problem. Not to mention obtaining and transporting the gas. How many people have died in the last 5 years to gas explosions? Compare that to how many have died in NPP mishaps.
Given that nuclear power is the cheapest power out there even with a significant portion of its costs going to fees for the repository, insurance, overregulation, etc. I don't see nuclear power going away for a long time. Management has finally realized that a safe power plant is a profitable one. Plus the design process has continued. The pebble bed design claims to be melt down proof, have online refueling and non-proliferation friendly. Even when the current reactors reach their end-points expect to see a new reactor built on site, if not sooner.
Actually its much more difficult to write buffer overflows for PowerPC's. Too many instructions have null bytes in them terminating the buffer. That's not saying its impossible but its much easier to write overflows with intel's instruction set.
25% is nothing. Educational institutions run about 50% overhead and government doesn't do percent but multipliers.
Pauli exclusion principle.
I've actually done this for a few university lists. Every once in awhile some jerk would mail every list at the university something that would generate lots of responses by people who would cc everyone.
The system was fairly simple. Any mail to a list had to have a prefix in the subject, say SGA: for the Student Goverenment Association. The filter would then strip the prefix and send the message out to the list. Messages that didn't have the prefix were bounced back with instructions to add the prefix and a list of topics those subscribing to the list were interested. It's still working to this day.
Fortunately I've been lucky in that all the addresses I've used only one became a spam collector and that was after I no longer had a use for it. Otherwise I would seriously consider installing the perl scripts on my own account.
Shh, that a secret. The ignorant masses need to be blissfully unaware of that fact or the entire Foundation could collapse.
Doesn't the worm disable file privilges after the restart?
Fusion is great for low thrust high burn times and there are several projects in the works for interplanetary drives. The problem is that the fusion reactor needed for high thrust is currently too large and massive to reach escape velocity on its own.
It would take much more than a big rocket explosion to vaporize one of NASA's RTGs. They've survived reentry multiple times, one even being retrieved from the ocean floor and reused. We're talking a high temperature ceramic with a very low heat transfer coefficient. A rocket explosion is not going to do it unless you have an anitmatter rocket sitting around somewhere.
As far as Pu being one of the most toxic substances known to man I'll eat a gram of it if you eat a gram of Sarin and then we'll talk. Pu is far from being top on the toxic list except in public perception.
But due to politcal and religous reasons it wasn't an option unless Iraq had initiated chemical warfare against Israel, US, French or British forces.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The option was seriously presented to President Bush. So it was on the table at the highest level.