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Mar 15, 2022 11:45
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Another big misunderstanding about radiation is that if something is "highly radioactive" then it necessarily has a short half-life. But something being radioactive for "X million years" means that as far as radioactive contamination actually goes, it's not much of a hazard. So there is no need to bury nuclear waste for 10million years as most nuclear waste is basically inert after <100yrs. The goldilocks zone of -radioactive enough to be a problem but not so radioactive that it quickly decays away- is a bit wider than that, unfortunately. Even on the low end you still need a few thousand years. The main problem is that if someone ingests the material itself (via water contamination or something) you don't need a very high activity level to cause a problem.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:39
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Carthag Tuek posted:some 15 years i was at a halloween party at the university of copenhagen life sciences dept & a friend and i drunkenly decided to walk the building looking for unlocked doors that could have gone a lot worse for you, like it did for this kid. missing for 2 months before they found his body next to a transformer https://www.tribstar.com/news/local...38fbc087b9.html
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Mar 15, 2022 20:58
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yea thats not the dumbest poo poo we did, but we turned out fine so who's to say if it was really dangerous?
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Mar 15, 2022 21:19
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DuckConference posted:The goldilocks zone of -radioactive enough to be a problem but not so radioactive that it quickly decays away- is a bit wider than that, unfortunately. Even on the low end you still need a few thousand years. The main problem is that if someone ingests the material itself (via water contamination or something) you don't need a very high activity level to cause a problem. Oh agreed about contaminating drinking water/food/land for sure. But at that point how is it different then a Coal Ash pond, or mine trailings and there is no requirement to store that stuff safely for thousands of years. To be clear, I'm not saying radioactivity isn't dangerous, but the way the public looks at radioactive waste versus a coal fired power-plant spewing ash into the air and water tells me one is way more dangerous then we treat it, and the other isn't an dangerous as we assume.
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Mar 15, 2022 23:26
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My favourite nuclear thing - a cruise missile powered by a nuclear powered ramjet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html quote:Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Pluto's sponsors were having second thoughts about the project. Since the missile would be launched from U.S. territory and had to fly low over America's allies in order to avoid detection on its way to the Soviet Union, some military planners began to wonder if it might not be almost as much a threat to the allies. Even before it began dropping bombs on our enemies Pluto would have deafened, flattened, and irradiated our friends. (The noise level on the ground as Pluto went by overhead was expected to be about 150 decibels; by comparison, the Saturn V rocket, which sent astronauts to the moon, produced 200 decibels at full thrust.) Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard. Pluto had begun to look like something only Goofy could love.
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Mar 16, 2022 00:33
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slam and systema perimetr are the two cold war weapons that speak to me about how hosed up things were.
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Mar 16, 2022 02:21
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here is a neat little nuclear thing that i like: gamma gardens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening in the 50s and 60s, the мирный атом era, biologists started using nuclear isotopes to irradiate growing plants to try and create beneficial mutations. they would do this in a facility called a gamma garden (or similar). the gamma garden was a circular construction about 100 meters in radius, with various fields arrayed around the circle in pie-shaped sectors. in the center, buried underground in a concrete vault, was a few dozen terabecquerels of cobalt-60. the whole construction would be surrounded with a high earthen berm for radiation shielding.  various crops were planted in the fields, the area was locked out, and a robotic system would pull the radioisotope out of the ground, bathing the area in gamma radiation. the exposure protocol varied, but would usually be something like 8 hours on, 16 hours off, repeatedly for most of the growing season. 60Co gamma radiation doesn't induce radioactivity in other materials to any significant level, so when the source was shielded, people could go in and do the regular agricultural work.  the plants nearest the source would mostly just die. the ones far out at the perimeter might not be significantly affected. but somewhere in the middle, you'd hopefully strike a balance and get some weird mutant plants, and hopefully some of those would in turn be useful. it turned out to work quite well. the ruby red grapefruit, the most common in the world today, came from a gamma garden. most commercial peppermint comes from a gamma garden strain that was unusually resistant to disease. there are lots of gamma breeds of corn, beans, and rice with various advantages over their natural predecessors. and a ton of the bright and weirdly colored flower varieties you can get were originally gamma garden mutants. back in the day there were a bunch of these gardens around the world. the technique is less popular now, both because of general opposition to nuclear energy, and because we now have a better understanding of genetics and more precise tools than just blasting plants with radiation. but they do still exist! the first picture above is the gamma field at the institute of radiation breeding in japan, and it remains active today. https://www.google.com/maps/@36.5270798,140.393055,548m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://interestingengineering.com/atomic-gardens-how-plants-were-bred-with-gamma-radiation 
Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 16, 2022 |
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Mar 16, 2022 20:46
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Dad used to tell this story about a guy who was doing some machining op on a big hunk of plutonium and somehow managed to break the glass on the glovebox and inhaled a big lungful of plutonium dust. After a bunch of medical stuff including a lung levage he was let go and like obviously they dont let him work anywhere near radioactive stuff any more but he was this guy who'd gotten a large but nonlethal distributed dose of radiation roughly all over his body which made him fairly unique. Dad told me that the guy obviously died in his mid-60s of lung cancer but that notably for the 20 or 30 years leading up to that he was never sick. Never got a cold, never got the flu, nothin. Then dad was like "we radiate fruits & vegetables right? well,"
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Mar 16, 2022 21:02
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rotor posted:but dad was also known to tell a tall tale or two so it can be hard to separate fact from fiction
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Mar 16, 2022 21:02
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rotor posted:Dad used to tell this story about a guy who was doing some machining op on a big hunk of plutonium and somehow managed to break the glass on the glovebox and inhaled a big lungful of plutonium dust. After a bunch of medical stuff including a lung levage he was let go and like obviously they dont let him work anywhere near radioactive stuff any more but he was this guy who'd gotten a large but nonlethal distributed dose of radiation roughly all over his body which made him fairly unique. Dad told me that the guy obviously died in his mid-60s of lung cancer but that notably for the 20 or 30 years leading up to that he was never sick. Never got a cold, never got the flu, nothin. just make sure the cspam covid thread never reads this
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Mar 16, 2022 21:04
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:just make sure the cspam covid thread never reads this there are already radioactive mines people go to in the us to irradiate themselves in some misguided appeal to health speaking of atomic gardens iirc aren’t some of the supersweet corn varieties descended from the bikini atoll test
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Mar 17, 2022 00:02
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many of the sweet corn varieties we eat today came from gamma gardens. i hadn't heard that about the bikini tests specifically though. why would they even be growing corn there?
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Mar 17, 2022 00:20
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I believe they had to back breed these godforsaken toxic avenger plants with normie plants to get them to thrive or something
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Mar 17, 2022 00:26
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Sagebrush posted:many of the sweet corn varieties we eat today came from gamma gardens. i hadn't heard that about the bikini tests specifically though. why would they even be growing corn there? it's been some time since i read about this but i think they just had ships (or at least a ship) of random cargo to run tests on after being exposed
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Mar 17, 2022 00:40
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wasn’t borlaugs grain also from a gamma garden?
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Mar 19, 2022 09:34
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the trick is to plant the seeds fast enough, get relativistic (?)
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Mar 19, 2022 10:35
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Mr.Radar posted:i work for a company that makes SCADA software (thankfully not for nuclear reactors). we're currently in the process of rewriting our client software as a web app in javascript Cybernetic Vermin posted:it is not really about javascript anyway. the big deal is that web browsers are the best cross-platform set of standard apis, with huge amounts of effort and money spent on optimization and hardware acceleration, and on most platforms they are even at the outset a way more sophisticated package of layout and rendering technologies than the supposed native apis. if it's any consolation, i work for a company that mostly deals into backend code, and despite not having the same need to operate in the JS ecosystem mess, had to educate people on why they needed to treat proven arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities seriously, especially when said vulnerabilities were reported by loving Siemens. the JS ecosystem isn't helping things, but industry would likely be just as hosed without it
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Mar 20, 2022 10:50
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hey, Netflix has a new miniseries on Three Mile Island, and after two episodes, my official opinion is that it's loving trash. just constant sensationalist crap and melodrama to overshadow the facts, interviews with locals who say little other than "they showed us the science but I was scared because I knew the science was wrong," and Michio Kaku, perpetual dumbass, as their physicist. might effortpost about 3MI later, but I wanted to revive the thread to say that if you wanted to watch it, don't. I have a bunch of issues with HBO's Chernobyl but at least there was a point to most of the inaccuracies in that
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May 9, 2022 21:25
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my dad always said TMI qwas a testament to how safe nuclear reactors are. Basically everything went completely wrong and the net effect was an amount of radioactive steam large enough to give cancer to a small family of squirrels was released.
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May 9, 2022 21:42
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it's history's only major disaster with zero dead, zero wounded, and zero dollars property damage outside of the plant.
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May 10, 2022 00:08
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Whenever you are talking to someone who is anti-nuclear (for this scenario, I'll assume there exists a reason to be anti-nuclear), if they bring up Three Mile Island as an example then they don't' actually have a reason to be anti-nuclear.
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May 10, 2022 02:29
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disaster pastor posted:hey, Netflix has a new miniseries on Three Mile Island, and after two episodes, my official opinion is that it's loving trash. just constant sensationalist crap and melodrama to overshadow the facts, interviews with locals who say little other than "they showed us the science but I was scared because I knew the science was wrong," and Michio Kaku, perpetual dumbass, as their physicist. netflix docs: regularly outdone by your local nerd youtuber doing a talking head over some slides i think i may have posted this before, but i briefly worked with the B&W department that designed employee training, including a general audience "history of the US nuclear industry" session. i got a chuckle out of the department head recollecting that the person they contracted to do it was like "ooh! neat, i can do a whole segment about TMI, it'll be particularly relevant!" and the B&W leadership responding "oh hell no, do not cover that at all"
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May 10, 2022 02:46
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after watching The Lighthouse the other day i wiki'd lighthouses and of course was reminded of the soviet rtg-powered ones in the middle of nowhere hell yeah lol lmao
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May 10, 2022 02:49
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i still don't know if the post-soviet collapse stories of people stripping everything bare and stumbling on rtgs and cracking them open only to find magical warm rocks that you could camp next to and not be cold are real or not my gut feeling is it's one of those "hahaha wow look at how stupid people were because of communism" story that are so popular in the west, but i never really looked into it
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May 10, 2022 03:33
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there was definitely one incident where some woodcutters found the core of a lighthouse or nav beacon RTG sitting in the woods, and they slept beside it for warmth and all got radiation poisoning and a couple of them died. the IAEA has a paper about it. in that incident i don't think they ever figured out which lighthouse/beacon it came from, or who opened it up in the first place, or what happened to that person.
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May 10, 2022 03:37
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you'd think a glowing corpse would be easy to spot even in dense woodland
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May 10, 2022 04:34
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:you'd think a glowing corpse would be easy to spot even in dense woodland Yet another harmful stereotype perpetuated by The Simpsons that has no connection to reality. There was also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Which is darkly humorous. quote:On September 13, 1987, the guard who was tasked with protecting the site did not show up for work. He took his family to a screening of the movie Herbie Goes Bananas.[9] Taking advantage of the absence of the guard,[8] Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira illegally entered the partially demolished IGR site. They partially disassembled the teletherapy unit and placed the source assembly – which they thought might have some scrap value – in a wheelbarrow, taking it to Alves's home. It get's much worse from there.
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May 10, 2022 05:02
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the loving herbie movie gets mentioned by name every time that story gets told.
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May 10, 2022 05:03
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i honestly believe that the simpsons bears much of the blame for the current american anti-nuclear attitude. yes there were environmentalists protesting nuclear sites well before the simpsons. but i'm sure it didn't help that a tv show that has been on the air for thirty-five years, the most popular tv show in the entire country for about a third of that time, has as its main character a stupid dolt who regularly causes meltdowns at his job as the safety inspector at a nuclear power plant. when i was a kid i remember going to one hippie art fair or another with my parents and there was a guy selling anti-nuclear t-shirts with a drawing of homer simpson saying "d'eh" (yeah) and pushing random buttons on his console.
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May 10, 2022 05:55
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Sagebrush posted:i honestly believe that the simpsons bears much of the blame for the current american anti-nuclear attitude. it didnt help but as someone who was alive in the pre-simpsons world I can assure you it was still bad. Imo the root cause was the demonization of all nuclear technologies by a large swathe of activists, scholars and politicians because the idea was that if we took a rational look at the risks posed by radiation exposure that maybe nuclear war wouldn't look so bad, and people might start thinking it was survivable (it would be) and that if people thought a nuclear war was survivable then maybe we'd be more inclined to indulge in one (we absolutely would have been)
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May 10, 2022 06:01
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Sagebrush posted:i honestly believe that the simpsons bears much of the blame for the current american anti-nuclear attitude. hippies didnt screw up the construction of summer 2&3 that was so mishandled that westinghouse went out of business, other executives went to prison, and ratepayers were stuck with a pair of very precisely dug holes in exchange for their $9.8bn hippies didnt screw up the project to replace the generators at san onofre, a life-extension project that managed to cost more than $2bn and led to the plant being shut down in less than a year when thousands of tubes showed premature wear in tens of thousands of places same story for vogtle 3&4, hinkley c, flamanville 3, olkiluoto 3...just an endless stream of incredibly expensive engineering and construction fuckups
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May 10, 2022 06:11
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Yet another harmful stereotype perpetuated by The Simpsons that has no connection to reality. it was a joke; i'm well aware of that. getting exposed to radiation doesn't mean you'll emit radiation. i mean i suppose neutron activation does make things radioactive, but if you manage to get enough of that that your corpse becomes a problem for whoever finds you, then they probably have bigger problems than the radiation coming from your corpse, like "why am i currently inside the core of a nuclear reactor"? and either way it's unlikely you'll be emitting anything in the visible range honestly if whoever decided to make radiation green on the simpsons had at least looked at the cherenkov effect and decided to make it a nice shade of blue instead, nuclear power would probably be in a significantly better position in the west today. it's kind of depressing to think about
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May 10, 2022 06:14
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FMguru posted:hippies didnt screw up the project to replace the generators at san onofre, a life-extension project that managed to cost more than $2bn and led to the plant being shut down in less than a year when thousands of tubes showed premature wear in tens of thousands of places in fact i am increasingly one of those people persuaded that nuclear is simply horridly expensive
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May 10, 2022 07:46
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:in fact i am increasingly one of those people persuaded that nuclear is simply horridly expensive asia (china, south korea, taiwan) was able to build modern nuclear plants (in good time and within budgets) in recent years, which means either 1) they are just better at building things than the west is, or 2) there were a lot of corners cut (either in terms of financing or in construction/materials) whatever the reason, its pretty clear that in the west new nuclear power is a nonstarter
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May 10, 2022 08:32
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FMguru posted:hilariously, those plants were mostly new-model designs (like the ap-1000) which had been specifically engineered to be easier and cheaper to build and with more modular components many (English speaking) countries are currently also incapable of building other sorts of infrastructure without incredibly high costs which makes me suspect it might be 1)
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May 10, 2022 11:25
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distortion park posted:many (English speaking) countries are currently also incapable of building other sorts of infrastructure without incredibly high costs which makes me suspect it might be 1) The western world can't even build a loving pedestrian bridge without loving it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_University_pedestrian_bridge_collapse The solution to things like this, and large construction projects in general, Nucler reactors etc, is to build more of them, faster, with a dedicated federal group of project managers and general contractor's to get experience and collect the "tribal knowledge" that is acquired as you work on large projects like that and ensure it doesn't get lost when whatever sub-contractor fires everyone after every project right before they pocket their grift. Basically a federal works department that employees PE's/PgMs/PMs/etc instead of just leaving everything to whatever well-connected failson owned company that captures the bidding process so that their company is the only one that is qualified to bid on every project.
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May 10, 2022 17:07
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why do you hate the free market, which is always more efficient than governments?
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May 10, 2022 19:21
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i mean normally i'd agree with you and i'm pro-nuclear personally but i'm not sure that "gently caress up over and over until you have sufficient experience to do it right" is advisable re: nuclear reactors
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May 11, 2022 03:58
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the solution is to standardize and always build the exact same reactors as France did back then the Flamanville EPR is a new design so they had to relearn everything but if they have managed to iron the kinks in the construction process the next ones they build should hopefully go a lot better
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May 11, 2022 10:31
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