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Venusian Weasel posted:Yeah, not entirely sure that was a good idea going through there. Hydrogen sulfide seeps usually aren't dangerous, but when the topography keeps the wind from moving it along it can build up to toxic levels pretty quick. I've seen quite a few big yellow signs that basically say "H2S may be present, don't stop here" in the creek bottoms/low spots in the road around here in the heart of the East Texas oilfield, apparently it comes up out of the wells. It's a bit jarring when one is lost in the boonies on a still, moonless night, doing a three-point turn to go back toward civilization, and the headlights catch that sign on the side of the road.
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Jan 1, 2015 02:37
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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This was posted in the OSHA thread, but I think it belongs here too:Miss-Bomarc posted:http://allafrica.com/stories/201412290616.html
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Jan 4, 2015 04:39
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Mr.Radar posted:This was posted in the OSHA thread, but I think it belongs here too:  That's up there with nuclear material like old hospital machinery and Russian nuclear lighthouses being cut up for scrap.
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Jan 4, 2015 19:41
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GWBBQ posted:Russian nuclear lighthouses What. Explain further.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:02
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Rorac posted:What. Explain further. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
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Jan 4, 2015 20:19
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Here's an article with pictures http://englishrussia.com/2009/01/06/abandoned-russian-polar-nuclear-lighthouses/ They sometimes have problems since they're mostly abandoned http://barentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2013/08/two-nuclear-generators-missing-arctic-26-08
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Jan 4, 2015 20:32
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Huh. I knew those things existed but I thought they were only used for satellites or maybe in the arctic/antarctic, not lighthouses, even remote ones like those.
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Jan 5, 2015 07:06
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Rorac posted:Huh. I knew those things existed but I thought they were only used for satellites or maybe in the arctic/antarctic, not lighthouses, even remote ones like those. It's Russia. They do things differently there.
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Jan 5, 2015 07:11
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From the spaceflight thread: billowing clouds of dinitrogen tetroxide: article Or maybe it’s dust. One can hope. 
Platystemon has a new favorite as of 07:21 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 07:17
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 The visible clouds are obviously not dinitrogen tetroxide, as that is a colourless gas. It's likely to be nitrogen dioxide, though, a brownish gas which is easily formed from dinitrogen tetroxide (the two gases are always in equilibrium).
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Jan 5, 2015 10:49
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Carbon dioxide posted:
Those lying MSDS.  
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Jan 5, 2015 12:18
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Platystemon posted:From the spaceflight thread: billowing clouds of dinitrogen tetroxide: Commenter posted:If a rocket falls down in a forest, apparently everyone hears it fall
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Jan 6, 2015 18:42
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Over in the Comic Strip Megathread, this got posted, and the bit about radium spas made me think of this thread: Since often the proper answer to the title of this feature is "or not" (Ripley's tends to exaggerate, take stuff out of context, etc) I did a little research and found out, yup, those sure are a thing. I grew up in upstate NY and had no idea some Saratoga Springs water is radioactive.  My question for the more knowledgeable goons: how dangerous is bathing in or drinking from a radium spring? A NY Times article mentions that the Saratoga water fountains actually advise to "sip sparingly", and some of the springs exceed legal safety for bottling. Like, compared to an x-ray or an airplane flight, what sort of radiation are we talking, here? Also, I dug the info about the ghost nuclear lighthouses, thanks for that! Oh, Russia.
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Jan 6, 2015 21:34
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Weird, you'd think Japan knows better after Fukushima. Anyway, bathing in radioactive water is not that dangerous, especially if it's "just" radium. Most of the radiation will be stopped by the water or by the outer layers of your skin. I wouldn't recommend drinking it, though. Radioactive particles absorbed by the body wreck your body from the inside when they send out radiation.
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Jan 6, 2015 21:58
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Over in the Comic Strip Megathread, this got posted, and the bit about radium spas made me think of this thread: Radiation's tricky. The "standard" model is LNT, Linear No-Threshold, which says there's no safe level of radioactivity, and that risk is directly proportional to exposure. So if you expose 100,000 people to some dose of radiation, and get X cancers as a result, then if you expose 200,000 people to that same dose you can expect 2X cancers, and if you expose 100,000 people to half that dose you can expect .5X cancers, and so on. But there are areas in the world with higher-than-normal background radiation counts. People in Ramsar in Iran have exposures of up to 260 millisieverts per year because of, well, nearby hot springs that pass through radium-laden rock (which is also used as building material). That's a level of exposure more than 10 times that permitted to radiation workers. If LNT were correct, you'd expect to see an elevated incidence of cancer, chromosome aberrations, and other radiogenic conditions, but that haven't been observed. And there some studies have even found evidence of hormesis. So it's probable that LNT isn't the whole story. http://www.probeinternational.org/Ramsar.pdf So to answer your question we don't know.
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Jan 6, 2015 22:08
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Depends on the type of radiation, too. Skin can block alpha particles (an He nucleus) along with some beta particles (essentially electrons; the betas might cause a sunburn or be a long-term cancer risk), and gamma radiation is the cosmic-ray level of fun where you need lead shielding to block it. http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/alpha.html#affecthealth http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/beta.html#affecthealth http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/gamma.html#affecthealth Within the Chernobyl reactor (yes, that Chernobyl reactor) there's a fungus that's evolved to use gamma rays for photosynthesis http://awesci.com/radiotrophic-fungi-feeds-gamma-radiation/
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Jan 6, 2015 22:21
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From the EPA's page on Radium:quote:What does radium do once it gets into the body?
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Jan 6, 2015 22:28
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Icon Of Sin posted:Depends on the type of radiation, too. Skin can block alpha particles (an He nucleus) along with some beta particles (essentially electrons; the betas might cause a sunburn or be a long-term cancer risk), and gamma radiation is the cosmic-ray level of fun where you need lead shielding to block it. That's factored into dose, though. That's what the Sievert unit is: equivalent dose, a measure of health effect. Big slow radiation like alpha particles can't go through dead skin but if you get them inside of you they'll ionize the heck out of atoms in your cells and generate a lot of free radicals. Gammas, on the other hand, are more penetrating but since they're not charged the odds of a given gamma actually hitting something directly and doing something is low. So to get the equivalent dose, you take the absorbed dose and multiply it by a factor based on what sort of radiation it is, another factor based on the type of exposure (whole-body, to an extremity, to which particular extremity, etc). So absorbed dose is measured in Grays, 1 Gy = 1 joule deposited in one kilogram of you. If you take a whole body dose of 1 Gy, if that's gamma radiation we multiply it by a factor of 1 and you wind up with a dose of 1 Sv. If it's alpha particles, we multiple that by 20 and you wind up with a dose of 20 Sv and now you're dead.
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Jan 6, 2015 22:50
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Thanks for all the replies! Radiation is just one of those things I can't wrap my head around. One on hand, it's an invisible scary thing that goes right through your body; but then I remember watching Silkwood when it came out and seeing the plant workers take showers to decontaminate. Like, what good is a shower against radiation? To get the alpha & beta particles off (but the gamma will still gently caress you up)? Back to chemistry chat: that article about the Kenyans frying chips in transformer oil is pretty horrifying. Most of my knowledge about how terrible PCBs are admittedly comes from recently reading Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. That said: 1. If you've read that book, is his science sound? 2. If so, how are all those Kenyan people not covered in chloracne? (It's a fun & quick read, recommended if you like this thread!) (Also, every time you post, Phanatic, I get the worst urge to watch Repo Man again.  )
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Jan 6, 2015 23:24
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Thanks for all the replies! Radiation is just one of those things I can't wrap my head around. One on hand, it's an invisible scary thing that goes right through your body; but then I remember watching Silkwood when it came out and seeing the plant workers take showers to decontaminate. Like, what good is a shower against radiation? To get the alpha & beta particles off (but the gamma will still gently caress you up)? Ah! A question about radiation that's simple to answer. Alpha and beta particles are only dangerous because of their high energy (that is, high speed). As soon as they've collided with anything, they are harmless. You just don't want them to collide with DNA, because that can damage the DNA. Gamma is similar, except it's electromagnetic radiation which means it always has the same speed (speed of light), but not necessary the same energy. But after it's hit anything and released its energy, it's gone. The reason they take showers is to get rid of any radioactive materials that might've gotten on their skin, such as radium dust. That stuff keeps radiating for a long while, and if you don't get it off you, you'll receive a much higher dose from the dust than you got from just being in the plant. It's important to realize the difference between the radiation (dangerous if it hits you but it doesn't stick around) and radioactive elements (possibly dangerous because they keep emitting radiation, but some have such a low radioactivity that they are practically harmless). Carbon dioxide has a new favorite as of 23:35 on Jan 6, 2015 |
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Jan 6, 2015 23:32
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Phanatic posted:That's factored into dose, though. That's what the Sievert unit is: equivalent dose, a measure of health effect. Big slow radiation like alpha particles can't go through dead skin but if you get them inside of you they'll ionize the heck out of atoms in your cells and generate a lot of free radicals. Gammas, on the other hand, are more penetrating but since they're not charged the odds of a given gamma actually hitting something directly and doing something is low. So to get the equivalent dose, you take the absorbed dose and multiply it by a factor based on what sort of radiation it is, another factor based on the type of exposure (whole-body, to an extremity, to which particular extremity, etc). So absorbed dose is measured in Grays, 1 Gy = 1 joule deposited in one kilogram of you. If you take a whole body dose of 1 Gy, if that's gamma radiation we multiply it by a factor of 1 and you wind up with a dose of 1 Sv. If it's alpha particles, we multiple that by 20 and you wind up with a dose of 20 Sv and now you're dead. That's...far more than I had even began to wonder regarding radiation, and extremely interesting/cool. Thanks!
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Jan 7, 2015 00:06
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Alpha particles are basically just helium drunk driving. Once it crashes and sobers up with a couple electrons, it's no longer a threat.
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Jan 7, 2015 00:11
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Icon Of Sin posted:Within the Chernobyl reactor (yes, that Chernobyl reactor) there's a fungus that's evolved to use gamma rays for photosynthesis Dude that's awesome; sounds like it could be a real life analogue of "the Japanese Miracle" from Ghost in the Shell.
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Jan 7, 2015 00:35
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Thanks for all the replies! Radiation is just one of those things I can't wrap my head around. One on hand, it's an invisible scary thing that goes right through your body; but then I remember watching Silkwood when it came out and seeing the plant workers take showers to decontaminate. Like, what good is a shower against radiation? To get the alpha & beta particles off (but the gamma will still gently caress you up)? To get the emitters off you. You get some radioactive dust or whatever on you, it's going to keep emitting until you get rid of it. So scrub it off, throw your clothing away, etc. quote:Back to chemistry chat: that article about the Kenyans frying chips in transformer oil is pretty horrifying. Most of my knowledge about how terrible PCBs are admittedly comes from recently reading Neal Stephenson's Zodiac. That said: No. If I recall correctly, there's a major goof. So they engineer this bacteria that can eat PCBs and release it into the wild, and it (according to the book) eats the PCBs by changing the covalent chlorine in the PCBs into chloride ions. But in seawater, with its abundance of chloride ions, the equilibrium shifts, and the bug starts manufacturing PCBs instead of dismantling them: Zodiac posted:Now, somewhere along the line, when these guys were trying to design a plasmid to change covalent chlorine to Even putting aside that this is mostly word salad, okay, you turn chloride ions in seawater into chlorine atoms. So what? That's not going to magically produce PCBs, it's going to produce chlorine atoms floating around in seawater. quote:2. If so, how are all those Kenyan people not covered in chloracne? The transformer oil hopefully doesn't use PCBs. There are other ways to cool transformers, like plain old mineral oil. quote:(Also, every time you post, Phanatic, I get the worst urge to watch Repo Man again. That's because you're a white suburban punk just like me.
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Jan 7, 2015 00:49
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Phanatic posted:
Hey, I just need to get my car out of this bad area. Google tells me mineral oil is a-okay for food grade stuff like re-oiling cutting boards, is there any real hazard to cooking with it?
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Jan 8, 2015 06:16
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Hey, I just need to get my car out of this bad area. It'll make you poo poo real good.
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Jan 8, 2015 06:27
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Phanatic posted:No. If I recall correctly, there's a major goof. So they engineer this bacteria that can eat PCBs and release it into the wild, and it (according to the book) eats the PCBs by changing the covalent chlorine in the PCBs into chloride ions. But in seawater, with its abundance of chloride ions, the equilibrium shifts, and the bug starts manufacturing PCBs instead of dismantling them: Yeah, it would require biphenyl to attach the chlorine to, and since that's nonpolar, it's not going to be found in seawater.
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Jan 8, 2015 08:26
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A few months ago, our chemistry friends at Periodic Videos did a nice experiment with hydrofluoric acid *shivers hearing the name* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZBwluyR2Tc
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Jan 8, 2015 18:07
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Picnic Princess posted:Some beavers had dammed the creek, flooding the area, and all the water turned into a big sulfur spring, but I don't think they live here anymore. I wonder why?  Phanatic posted:The transformer oil hopefully doesn't use PCBs. There are other ways to cool transformers, like plain old mineral oil. quote:Kenya Power, the firm that distributes power in Kenya, is now thinking about building transformers that don't use oil. Such transformers are not widely used and cost about half again as much as ones that do use oil. atomicthumbs has a new favorite as of 21:31 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 21:25
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Wasabi the J posted:Dude that's awesome; sounds like it could be a real life analogue of "the Japanese Miracle" from Ghost in the Shell. Not really, it eats radiation like plants eat sunlight. The sun isn't getting any dimmer just because those plants are using the light to make sugars. Bip Roberts posted:It'll make you poo poo real good. It's basically indigestible and passes right though you. So it's a problem if you eat too much of it. Incidental contact, like a cutting board is harmless. Olestra has the same problem, for the same reason. They wanted to make an oil that tasted and felt like a proper food oil, while still being indigestible. And then it passes right though you, so if you load up on potato chips... Phanatic posted:
It's actually 2 strains of bacteria, a organochloride eater and a organochloride producer. The eater was developed to clean up a dump site, and the producer was developed to replace the expensive Chloralkali process. The plot happens because when the eater was released it was contaminated with a the producer. The contamination was masked because in the lab what ever the producer made was immediately eaten. In the wild the eater starves after it finishes eating the spill, and all that is left is the producer, which goes nuts. The book also notes that was was being produced wasn't just biphenyls, but a large assortment of organics, manufactured by the bacteria as well. So really, other than treating genetic engineering to produce a chemical as an expensive but solved problem, I'd say the science is pretty good. JacquelineDempsey posted:
Dose of a poison can determine the symptoms. Low does could just make you sick. But really PCBs are almost inert on short timescales. It's why they were used. They don't burn like mineral oil. They're stable so they take heat exceptionally well, and they're inert enough that for a long time they were actually considered non-toxic. Or at least safe. The problem is that they are non-polar so they dissolve in your fat, and that your body can't break it down. When that happens that big unhappy highly electronegative chlorine atom just sits there in your cells mangling all kinds of things being a cancer risk, and it never leaves. Because it never leaves, it's accumulative, so every dose makes it worse. Additional fun. If a bunch of it is in your fat, and you lose a bunch of weight, it'll all come out of solution from the fat you no longer have and flood your system again. Giving you an acute dose again, before it finds different fat to redissolve in (because you still don't really excrete it). Hope you enjoy sudden chloracne after weight loss. But compared to many organochorides (like some dioxins) PCBs are down right pleasant. (The guy who got chloracne in the book had the producer living in his gut, and had his system flooded with all kinds of random stuff)
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Jan 9, 2015 04:27
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I understand that it's not analogous, I was just mentioning that it was neat and I wonder if we could eventually use it for things like managing fallout. Radiation cleanup is a nightmare, and there is a market for understanding the kinds of life that can subsist off of dangerous types of radiation.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:24
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Wasabi the J posted:I understand that it's not analogous, I was just mentioning that it was neat and I wonder if we could eventually use it for things like managing fallout. Managing fallout is more related to getting rid of the radioactive elements before they decay, so the area becomes useable. Something like plants (or animals, I guess) that would bioaccumulate radioactive nuclides so they could be gotten into one place. Like a grass that accumulates cesium isotopes, so you can plant it in a field then mow it and bale up the cesium-containing grass, for further processing elsewhere. Fallout tends to contain dozens of radioactive elements, though, so getting rid of all of them is pretty tough. Meanwhile, it's nice to know nature can adapt, and disasters like Chernobyl don't produce a sterile moonscape.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:43
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Wasabi the J posted:I understand that it's not analogous, I was just mentioning that it was neat and I wonder if we could eventually use it for things like managing fallout. The issue here is that it feeds on the radiation, not the radioactive materials. And the latter are what you need to clean up.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:55
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ToxicFrog posted:The issue here is that it feeds on the radiation, not the radioactive materials. And the latter are what you need to clean up. Maybe I'm not getting it but doesn't that help ABSORB the radiation, keeping it in the mold vs in everything else.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:58
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Wasabi the J posted:Maybe I'm not getting it but doesn't that help ABSORB the radiation, keeping it in the mold vs in everything else. It's like trying to clean up sunlight with solar panels. Even if you cover the entire world in them - there's still lots of light because the sun is pumping it out and you're not doing anything to stop it.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:02
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Shanakin posted:It's like trying to clean up light with solar panels. Even if you cover the entire world in them - there's still lots of light because the sun is pumping it out and you're not doing anything to stop it. oh duh. gently caress.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:03
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Wasabi the J posted:Maybe I'm not getting it but doesn't that help ABSORB the radiation, keeping it in the mold vs in everything else. The radiation itself isn't the problem in most cases. It's the stuff that's emitting the radiation that you need to get rid of. Once an atom decays and it emits radiation, the radiation itself is gone. It doesn't stick around. So plants making use of it is interesting, but doesn't really fix anything. Radioactive materials that stay outside your body do little harm, as nothing but gamma rays are going to have much effect externally. The problem comes when you ingest it, and the radioactive material then emits numerous particles that can do serious damage to your DNA. So you need to get rid of the radioactive materials first and foremost.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:05
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Deteriorata posted:stuff You forgot beta radiation, chum. That's another form of ionizing radiation you don't want near you. 
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Jan 9, 2015 22:23
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Radium hot springs? Oh yeah, just like Radium Hot Springs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Hot_Springs I like going there in winter.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:28
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Radium also really fucks up your forums.
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