Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Kyle Hill"
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@Tommy1marg that's the hardest lesson to learn or teach, to mentally take a step back and analyze what's going on and to then take the proper steps to get out of the problem one is unexpectedly confronted with.
I've been caught by rip currents, while merrily heading out to sea, evaluating what was happening and cut across the current to get out of it. I've also caught an offshore current, which was marked on nautical maps of the area that I just happened to blunder into (Coast Guard station was near the beach I was at), noticed I was quite distant from the shore and moving around 4 knots toward NYC from NJ. Seeing that and remembering the current marked on the map, I cut across the current and eventually waded back to the beach I was at.
Fighting the current is the recipe for disaster, as water's a hell of a lot stronger than we are!
Laughably, what brought my attention to the problem was, a shark swam between my legs, brushing against my inner thigh. As sand sharks tend to be in deeper water, when I turned toward shore, well, whoopsie that doesn't look good... The lifeguard looked quite alarmed, until he saw me cut the current and start wading back.
First failure, losing situational awareness. Lesson learned.
He who panics drowns.
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I dunno, we've not had any problems of note in the hands of the US Navy.
But, as a retiree from the Army, remembering our history with nuclear reactors, never*, ever, *ever give the US Army a nuclear reactor to run! We contaminated a chunk of Canada, we contaminated a chunk of Greenland, we blew up a reactor in Idaho.
But, we never misplaced a half dozen warheads, that took the US Air Force to do that in 2007... :/
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Yep and it was still quite new. Remember, one way of properly writing the chemical compound of water is HOH, hydrogen hydroxide, it's both a base and an acid, heating it only makes things uglier on metals. The main control rod was what was pulled to hook up to a pulley, it got pulled out over a foot too far and here's the fun part.
A mass of cold water inside of the reactor, around 3x10 feet, instantly vaporized from the insanely high amount of heat added faster than the eye can blink.
The reactor sharing a design flaw with Chernobyl, a positive void coefficient, which meant steam made the reaction even more intense. The root cause of each accident was the same, prompt criticality, the base reason being massively different, but both were shit designs that never should have even been prototyped as too unsafe.
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No, bonkers was, he retained his clearance to access any hazardous radiological devices.
I'm intimately familiar many instances of men and women of well documented off duty intemperate habits that worked with special radiological devices. Still, safe enough on duty, as not sober got ejected, reported and access curtailed.
Of course, the devices were innocuous enough, they were only boosted fission nuclear warheads. Trivial to arm without authorization - as trivial as performing a root canal on a patient safely and effectively via the rectum.
But, they did and still do contain some of our most powerful high explosives.
For the fission challenged, a boosted fission device is basically a baby version of a hydrogen bomb, too small to be called that, whose neutron radiation fissions the rest of the plutonium core and in some cases, the depleted uranium tamper that's frequently mislabeled a "jacket" (a tamper isn't a jacket, it has a purpose of confinement, ablation and focusing of energy).
Oh, iridium isn't anything special, it's the specific isotope with a 78 day half-life that's special. The shorter half-life, the nastier it is.
I intentionally exposed myself to a dose of a radioisotope that had only an 8 day half-life. It was one of two very similar ways to achieve a successful completion of a thyroid scan.
Turned out to be Grave's disease, one form of hyperthyroidism. My immune system attacked my thyroid, it retaliated and damned near killed me. That was a good thing, as it confirmed a diagnosis, a thyroid hormone formation medication blocked most of my thyroid output and I was able to be tapered back from a literal LD50 dosage of hypertension medication to something more age appropriate. LD50 being half taking that dosage does from toxicity of the drug.
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@IllustriousCrocoduck the laugh is, vacuum welding is a very real problem with metals in a vacuum. So, store those weapons in a vacuum, go to use them and find the metals welded together.
As for weapons modified to work on the moon, easy enough, just modify the sights to not account for earth gravity bullet drop or atmospheric density. Now, you poke tiny holes in space suits, blood then seals the holes and one has to hope that the still leaking cosmonaut runs out of red stuff before killing you.
As a hint, on one shuttle mission, an astronaut tore a hole in his space suit glove. The hole was sealed by the blood from the small cut that the tension bar gave him on his hand and went entirely unnoticed until he got back inside the shuttle after the EVA work was done.
So, to disable someone, one's going to have to poke a hell of a lot of holes or really large holes through the micrometeor barrier overgarment and through the suit proper. That overgarment being what you see when you see someone wearing a space suit and it's designed to stop small objects from piercing suit and astronaut that are moving a hell of a lot faster than a bullet.
Better to use a laser or maser to try to soften plastics, causing seals to breach and the faceplate to soften and fail.
Or have a few cases of vodka handy...
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No self-hatred needed. Major depressive disorder or severe bipolar disorder can and has lead to some pretty horrendous deaths by suicide.
I worked military EMS. The very first lesson in dealing with suicidal patients is, don't let anything whatsoever ever, ever get between you and the door. If they've decided, have the means and perceive you an obstacle to their goal, they very well and in the past, have taken EMS personnel and police with them. A great rule to abide by, given some of us are trained to be able to end someone's existence before that person even realizes they're in danger.
A corollary is, if the dog is out upon arrival at a scene, close the fucking door unless you really enjoy getting bitten by Cujo.
Not a lick of self-hatred, only assured death of a suicidal person, who seems to have taken great care not to involve others in their path to self-destruction. Self-hatred, in my experience, was the realm of terrorists, who enjoy taking others down with themselves. Common themes being "I'm a sinner and can do no better or worse" and similar nonsense. Yeah, I dealt with terrorists and conversed with them. A fine experience only rivaled by the joys of masturbating with a cheese grater.
Note for full disclosure, I have no idea, nor inclination of finding just where I put my cheese grater, nor since retiring, dealing with terrorists. But, I've come to understand all too well depression since my wife of 40+ years died in March. It's a pernicious thing I'm working on shaking and have no intention of self-harm beyond enjoying that can of chili I bought today.
That last requiring my sending an NBC-1 report first, so that a NUKEWARN flash can be sent. ;)
Even more seriously, that notion of self-loathing is a condition of its very own that does require a mental health professional intervening, but attributing that to a suicide or suicide attempt is harmful to those in desperate need of protection. Kindly stop it and learn about such conditions before harming others with such bullshit.
I never, ever claimed to be a diplomat, but I'm infamous for my candor.
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@sean..L blackout drunk and bipolar or some depressive disorders can trivially account for that.
But, we could get a six sigma certainty, 99.99966% certainty, all we need to do is learn how to read the blankness of the human mind. ;)
More seriously, their nuclear security office should've alarmed on him, his behavior and likely predictable action upon deleterious personnel action.
It'd the only reason I refuse to support actions against Manning's intentional spill of classified data, for the same reason. Deleterious personnel action is, per federal regulation on nuclear material or classified information is an automatic revocation of access.
I'd only support Manning's punishment if Manning's entire senior chain of command suffered a similar fate. In this case, the signs were present and repeated, but access was continued to make a buck.
That isn't damning, it's displaying a prejudice that could harm security overall and in his case, essentially proved. At the time of exposure, memory or not irrelevant, he ensured a fatal exposure, a successful suicide. One upside is, he didn't allow others even the slightest chance of exposure.
And Kyle pulled a lot of punches, death by that level of exposure is far uglier, nightmare fodder kind of ugly.
As in, given a choice of that way or beating off using a cheese grater, then ride a 10 foot razor blade to then drown in a pool of iodine sounds far more pleasant.
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I've got something that just outright kills people. It's called space and I don't even need to make it, it already is and isn't there. ;)
Second place in killing astronauts goes to their own space suits. One astronaut nearly drowned, courtesy of his own space suit during an EVA. The source of the leak never identified and likely, given the stony silence on the matter, likely operator error.
Once, I donned an M17 series protective mask for a military training exercise. Operator PM for that, upon receipt and regularly after being a series of checks, such as running a finger along the outlet valve and inlet valves.
I skipped the outlet valve, due to intracranial flatulence. That valve got stuck closed.
So, in the dark middle of the night during a training exercise, I get called for an emergency. I came running, fogged over lenses obscuring vision (a big hint of air flow obstruction) and I started to gray out, tunnel vision began and I realized I was being asphyxiated.
Just shy of blackout, I realized in a flash what was going on and literally tore that buytl rubber mask in half - literally. The NBC NCO never saw one torn in half before, adrenaline is a strange thing. He kept apologizing for not checking the mask first, I wave him off, as it's an operator duty that I missed. I paid closer attention to operator checks after that debacle, as I damned near killed my dumb ass.
Likely, a mis-seated connector caused the same for that astronaut. And he didn't have an option to tear off that helmet that was drowning him. Remove the helmet, get about 10 seconds of useful consciousness and a total of about 90 seconds before fatal v-fib that can't be resuscitated from. No experimental animal survived beyond 90 seconds of hard vacuum exposure. The few decompression events experienced by humans revealed only 10 seconds of consciousness.
And in one case, cost a pressure chamber its window, as the supervisor broke out the window to rescue a technician whose faceplate failed under hard vacuum.
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@Bob5mith if it's a self-inflating raft, the charges could be useful - not on the moon, but in spaaaaaaace.
You know, a real life iron man and far less well guided. Brief bursts could work - maybe. Sustained, x=rnd movement.
For that example though, that's a lot dicey. When giving a class, I try to smooth such wide variables out to prove a point, then employ socratic methods to discuss why it was smoothed. One SME or even experienced STEM person now is the SME and the rest, bozos. Bozos win clown games, not real life situations.
But, can have bursts of brilliant insight, which is the value of a group that otherwise is going to spout useless nonsense.
Leading to the adage, committees - no one is as dumb as all of us combined.
A not so gentle reminder that while we might blunder as a group to a solution, it's just as likely we'll come up with the bonehead award for the decade, proceed accordingly, leader. Included in my class, "admit when you fucked up, everyone does and accepts that, they mistrust the 'perfect, dear leader' accordingly, whereas they forgive a fuck up".
And listen to, "This is going to sound dumb", that might just lead to an idea that'll get you out of the shit. It has for me. And I've been in far too many "in the shit" situations over the decades than I care to count. Boy, am I glad to be retired from the military!
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@kinderdm not really. If you saw the part where he kept shifting and halving dirt piles around and taking readings, can you picture doing that with lungs? You'd be cutting out lobes, halving them, halving them again, things don't go back together very well that way.
And precision detectors rely upon time exposures of a non-moving sample and lungs, well, if they stop moving, the heart does too and that dead thing ensues, rather ruining one's weekend plans.
Meanwhile, microsample exposures occurred during the Manhattan Project, where workers were exposed and for the remainder of their lives, their urine contained plutonium. Their lives notably not involving cancer or radiation poisoning. Do a search on "plutonium pissers", their unofficial title.
People survive amazing things, a radiation example being an Iranian city notable for its naturally high radiation levels, Ramsar. All, courtesy of thorium deposits in the ground elevating the background to what everywhere else would be thought harmful, potentially fatal. 20 mSv/year is the maximum for radiation workers, Ramsar residents receive 260 mSv/year and that's been for hundreds of years.*
*Finding the history of Ramsar's been problematic, all of the search engines default strictly to the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, regardless of how you phrase the search, due to their Artificial Idiocy implementation.
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Actually, some telephoto lenses were and remain classified. I am not joking, they're used in crap like satellites and U-2 spy planes.
Had one idiot try that question with me, I introduced them to a brand new substance called reinforced concrete and offered them the opportunity for an extremely close and intensive examination of the substance.
Interesting bit of history, Akiko Takakura was 300 meters from the hypocenter of the Hiroshima blast, inside of the bank vault of the bank she worked at. Survived unscathed - well, physically. Mentally, not so much. Went into the vault at work as a ho-hum business as usual day, bright flash, rude noise and shaking building, come out to find insta-cooked people, yeah, that'd mess anyone up.
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@neuralmute OK, we'll dig him up and charge him with suicide.
Laws against suicide need to be properly targeted. Now, given what was presented here, beyond ethanol intoxication into duty hours, just which suicide attempt was one to curtail his access?
I do have an answer - his first exposure.
I also noted, he was a loner, which is a potential exposure to risk source. Nowhere a clincher, but one needing to be examined and alas, was ignored instead.
That's a major oversight failure, the company wants to keep a worker on duty to make money, which is the company's purpose and its officers duty. Oversight ensures that insulation gets removed and action taken. Missed, after deleterious personnel actions began, access remained and worse, if access got denied, he'd be abandoned while in need.
Some years ago, we were assigned a medic that had discharged after a tour in South Korea.
SSDD, we were assigned a hell of a lot of reassuring numbers of personnel, diluting some deleterious personnel issues that plagued our organization since the inception of this nation.
Long story abridged, the man exhibited outward charm, interacted well with the team. But, when alone, he would argue with someone not present and even strike his own face during a violent altercation. He also made gestures, during a motor movement that I replaced one of my privates in as driver (not suspicion at all, the private was ill and lacking other licensed drivers beyond one new driver, I've never asked that which I wouldn't do, so I drove. Passing a well placarded elementary school, he made gestures, after calling my attention to him, of shooting at the school.
He passed one psych eval, he failed a second one after other, thankfully innocuous incidents.
After he was discharged under compassionate grounds, he was found sleeping in our armory. The XO of the battalion wanted him arrested for trespass. I managed to divert that and personally drove him to a VA hospital and stayed there, he was refused treatment due to budget, now he's got God and an NCO behind him.
NCO prevailed, News at Six or take care of someone we owe, decide now, well and properly.
A few months later, I ran into him in town. Working, for a change, sane enough to survive in the presence of insanity of the populace, eating well.
He did better than I've done after losing my wife of over 40 years. Took me a week just to be able to eat once a day. Nearly a month before I could tolerate two meals a day.
I've only recently been tempted for three meals a day, the "requirement" also being nonsense.
Last I heard before moving halfway across the country, he's finally fully functional. Given our knowledge and ability, that's the best outcome.
Me vs the loss of my wife, the jury's still deliberating. :/
Add in BS wage lowering, not suicidal, I'd call it homicidal, save for the cidal bit, destroying a dishonorable business that bitches over turnover that's their fault, yeah.
It'll even out, learned that from hard won experience.
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It'd essentially start at peak heating, since it's originating at the densest part of the atmosphere. I'll assume tumbling adding inefficiencies to movement, sideface being unlikely due to the fluid dynamic, which I agree, are far from static. There'd also be ionized components to further confound trying to calculate matters and he also treated it as a uniform object that would fully melt, then boil as a unit, rather than melt from outside inward as has been observed for other hypersonic objects passing through the atmosphere. The core of a meteor doesn't instantly boil while the surface is being superheated and bolides tend to fail structurally due to the aerodynamic deceleration forces overcoming their binding energy more than anything purely heating related.
More probably, the cap would be partially melting, losing strength as it's heated and aerodynamic forces driving pieces off as it traveled until sufficient mass was lost that only fragments were traveling and decelerating much as bolides would be traveling in pieces after a fireball explodes.
I suspect a lot of the modeling has already been done that would help in calculating this, but much would be related to railgun work that remains classified. As it was a decidedly non-aerodynamic body to begin with, the stresses would be beyond immense, that the object is a disc and not a blunt body, conic, biconic, etc body just increases compressive strength failure as a mode of fragmentation of the body's chances tremendously.
Then, to further muddy the waters, there's a major assumption that the initial estimation of velocity could be wildly off, as even the shape of the cover once it departed from where it was welded is unknown. Did the weld fail and it's just largely cover? Did it bring any parts of whatever structure it was welded to with it? The heating isn't immersive either, it's heated by the inferno just in front of the shockwave and modeling that is devilishly complex with known shaped objects, such as blunt body, aerodynamic body, cone body, etc.
Most likely, it'd have come apart fairly early on, much as Columbia came apart, for much the same reasons.
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@mitchellspanheimer1803 metal shielding is even worse, especially with beta. Remember, Cs-137 is a 0.5 Mev beta source and a 0.6 Mev gamma source. Bremsstrahlung radiation will be emitted by metal when a particle impacts the metal atoms, which can then ionize a path through the chip itself. Some plastics would be far more effective in protecting the circuitry than metal.
In space, one faces mostly protons and beta, along with x-ray and a touch of gamma, all save the EM generating bremsstrahlung radiation from the spacecraft hull. Thankfully, one doesn't have neutrons or protons to really foul the camera in the case of Cs-137, but damage from gamma should be minimal to absent at that energy level. As a hint, thunderstorms can generate gamma in the 100 Mev range, we don't see cameras failing from that. Pair production is quite unlikely at that flux and energy level.
Oh, another tidbit, I-131 is used in nuclear imaging, had such testing done for my thyroid. It puts out around 0.364 Mev, which goes clean through the body to be easily detected. The Cs-137 is harder by a little, but magically was blocked by a hand that should've only barely attenuated some of the beta and not a lick of the gamma.
Were such an offer real and I ran into it and could verify it as a source of some type, I'd buy it and call a friend who's a nuclear health physicist to verify by a proper survey. Then, if it was something like Cs-137, call the NRC and the military installation he works at to see who wanted to take custody of the damned thing. Better to get it off the street and market and into proper custody than pray it doesn't turn up used in some terrorist attack or irradiating a neighborhood.
I'd also get the tag number of the seller and if possible, the VIN from the dashboard. The NRC would certainly want to have a conversation as to where such a hazardous source originated.
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Well, we've actually had cold fusion for ages. Not gainful, hell, it's a hell of an energy sink, but then neutron generators aren't energy sources, they're neutron sources.
I remember one model at a national lab that is literally smaller than the end of one's thumb, generates quite a lot of neutrons for a bit, draws tons of power, produces really nasty electric bills. ;)
Farnsworth fusors are excellent cool fusion devices, only raises one's electric bill moderately to massively.
Hollywood, well, they've forgotten the first law of thermodynamics, TANSTAAFL. They're also clueless about neutron embrittlement, but then they also still rely upon high explosive automobiles (all cars explode in Hollywood, at the convenience of the script) and electricity is magic.
Weird Google experiment though, if I'm checking for fusion reactions, I only really need to look for two outputs, thermal and neutrons.
Want cheaper cold fusion? Go lithium. Won't generate gainful power, but lithium is weird, will fuse or fission fairly easily. Fission it, get tritium, fuse it, get a really big electric bill - oh wait, you'll get that either way.
Don't get me started on their infinite supply of ammunition and most of that genre's infinite supply of smokeless powder (if it was actual gunpowder, well, it'd be patently obvious given gunpowder's notoriety for its complimentary smokescreen on firing even a single round)...
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...before he was tortured to death by radiation.
One can't be more spot on, every fatal case of radiation exposure was a fugly death, redefining agony in many cases. Bad enough that the DNA was badly damaged in the exposed cells, even the cellular machinery was badly damaged or destroyed.
Sounds like major depressive disorder or severe bipolar, coupled with easy access to a cat 1 source. That's already a potential disaster, add in ethanol, it's fortunate that he at least had a conscience.
Ir-192 is plain out evil, due to its short 78 day half-life. Just maintaining the things had to be challenging, due to the brevity of the source's utility!
But, why those sources went home on company vehicles is beyond me and now, the fodder of my nightmares. Way too easily stolen that way!
"So, what do you have for show-and-tell, Johnny?"
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It was an unmitigated disaster!
To the reputation of an absurd number of people, agencies and companies. It wasn't so good for the reactor either. I reviewed imagery of the core after the accident, that wonder of modern engineering wasn't that any longer, it was a Greek tragedy. The only thing uglier was Fukushima's cores.
Couldn't find any imagery of what's left of Chernobyl's core, which is just as well, I'd probably become ill seeing what happened to that engineering.
Beyond those disasters, well, I live 3 miles from the island, everyone's still here and annoyingly, we still need street lights at night - nobody and nothing is glowing.
TMI, a lesson on precisely how not to keep the public and press informed during a mishap or major accident. The truth shall set you free, even if you're stuck admitting that you're in the middle of recovering from a major goat screw event.
Oh, from the report, the flashing indicator was on the obverse side of the main console and was noticed by the shift relief operator as he arrived.
Always remember the Shepard's Prayer, Alan Shepard praying when he entered the space capsule prayed, "Oh Lord, please don't let me fuck up!".
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@tom.m you neither zero or adjust fixed iron sights, which by definition are... Fixed.
And those rounds arc at one rate on earth and a substantially different rate on the moon.
Again, sights are designed to account for a fair bit of parabolic trajectory "out of the box", for adjustable sights, simply by virtue of being designed to be used on earth. A GI model M1911A1 has fixed sights. It's designed to fire a bullet mass of 230 grains and the sights are fixed at 25 meters/yards. If fired at 25 meters on the moon, the round will always impact high by around an inch (drop of 2.6" at 25 meters for 230 grain in air, more likely 1 1/4" high, accounting for drag vs vacuum). And 45 ACP out of an M1911 series is ideal for such calculations, given its range, extremely prolific documentation, known drag and mass for a NATO round, etc.
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@tom.m boy, you love to display your ignorance for all to wonder at!
First, I mentioned fixed sights for a reason. You never could zero fixed sights, you never will be able to zero fixed sights, you never will in the future be able to zero fixed sights - they're fixed. That's to provide a simple example to a simple mind.
Now, your magical reticle sights, great job, the marks are for earth, so let's say for easy of math, the bullet drops six inches per tick at 100 meters. On the moon, it'd drop less than one inch, now you're way off, as earth gravity is six times higher and then there's drag on the bullet, as expressed in the math via the ballistic coefficient.
A tall mount further introduces parallax errors, dropping accuracy.
But, what would I know? I'm only a competition shooter and experienced in rocketry.
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@TallinuTV well, space suits do have a type of armor, it's the micrometeor protective layer. Consider that micrometeors are cooking along around Mach 12 - 15 or so, that's a wee bit faster and more energetic than a mere bullet. So, goosing that up a bit shouldn't be a big deal, as one then accounts for a much slower, but heavier projectile. Basically, the overgarment is a cloth version of the Whipple Shield, which is used in all spacecraft, including the ISS.
Without that protection, a mere grain of sand sized meteor, which are common, would drill through a bare space suit and vaporize inside of an astronaut.
There was one spacesuit breach during the shuttle program. A tension bar inside of an astronaut's glove broke loose, cutting the astronaut's hand and through his glove, exposing his hand to space. His blood sealed the hole and the hole went unnoticed, that whole adrenaline thing and EVA thing going on. It was noticed when he removed his gloves inside of the shuttle.
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@Vaprous sights are rather useless for lunar distances anyway. On earth, someone standing just showing over the horizon would be around 5 miles away. On the moon, less than 2 miles. Given sights and stability of a firing platform, such as a sniper rifle system, suffice it to say that shots at a mile and over are beyond difficult.
Add in the terrain, well, it's hedgerow country done with rocks and small craters and large.
Now, line of sight weapons that could cause seals to fail would be far more effective at ranges great and small, despite the inverse square law. But, I'll stick with my standby, a few cases of vodka.
Because, fighting on the moon is about the stupidest idea ever considered since the military asked Carl Sagan to figure out how to make a nuke blast on the moon look impressive. Short answer, it's impossible and would likely go unnoticed, as there's no air to hold a fireball.
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YuoTvbe not quite true. it's a tenuous atmosphere, but a hard vacuum level one nonetheless.
As in, there is an atmosphere, that is barely detectable., but is present.
And for, well, bullets, not worthy of mention.
But, it is something that exists. Barely. Right up there with farting n a space elevator at a few miles up.
Seriously, there is a lunar atmosphere, it's pretty much a hard vacuum, but tenuously present. Google it, you'll be shocked and amazed.
If there's gravity, there's an atmosphere (ish), just don't try to breathe it, it's still a hard vacuum by our standards. But, even Pluto has an atmosphere.
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Given that the capsule of the cobalt-60 source is intact, Homer would never be radioactive, as cobalt-60 isn't a neutron emitter.
But, there's another extremely common source that resembles that capsule, a phosphor coated tritium vial, the tritium also coming from nuclear power plants. Again, he'd not be radioactive, as it's intact. Although, the amount of tritium, were the source compromised would be decidedly unhealthy, it's unlikely to reach LD50 for tritium on a chemical basis. Biochemically speaking, tritium sucks in organic reactions...
As for Cerenkov radiation, it's not only present in water, it can and has occurred in air, the eyes (OK, yeah, that's mostly water) and I've personally observed, much to my horror, its presence in glass.
Really long story there.
Oddly, there have been survivors of prompt criticality accident who observed the glow in the room air. Got sicker than all hell, but they survived. Suffice it to say, any children resulting from them are not on my family's intimate relationship list, as some of their DNA "eggs" got scrambled for certain.
I've been, off and on, reading an interesting IAEA report on criticality accidents. My thought, the entire time reading it and after, "A bunch of 5 year old kids with daddy's loaded gun in their hands". I'm firmly convinced that Homer Simpson is a real person and he bounces back and forth mostly between the US and Russia. ;)
Still, I'm in the market for a cobalt-60 source, so I'll soon be calling around South America to evaluate a few potential sources... :/
No, I'm sure Kyle recalls the orphaned sources at the heart of a couple of accidents and one in Mexico, which contaminated a hell of a lot of US steel that's still in use, you can't wink and smile about those deaths.
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nunyabaznus7851 so, lung cancer from asbestos and the other nasty chemicals burned in the tower fires and collapses is precisely the same as lymphatic cancer? That's like saying my testicles and toes are identical structures and trust me, maybe yours are, but in humans that's entirely untrue. Lymphatic cancer is well established in fallout exposure cases as a primary cause. True, not the only cause, but genetic testing can help rule in radiation exposure, as can that whole radioactive lymph nodes thing. And frankly, I'll say something I've rarely ever said, in this, I'll trust the VA.
But still, IRL, feel free to hand me my trusty rusty and tell me more about conspiracy theories and how we're all liars. The hogs are hungry.
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@bschleevs2723 meh, I could trivially build a nuclear warhead right inside of my apartment. If it doesn't contain explosives or fissile elements, nobody will care. Literally.
That'll not happen though, as for one, it'd still be quite massive and I'd not want to have to shift the damned thing around when cleaning my apartment and well, I have a small apartment and only keep useful things around.
Like that Americium-241 source sitting over here, just harvested from a recently defunct smoke detector. I'll be throwing together a cloud chamber in the coming weeks, just to have something to do.
A little for the cloud chamber, a little for me... ;)
Yeah, I actually took the source from a dead smoke detector for that purpose. Boy, have they shrunk the source by a lot over the last 20 years! The source on this one is a quarter the size of an old model, pretty much the rest of the circuitry was literally the same, down to the chip driving the unit.
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No, there is no criticality possible, as there are two critical factors in achieving a critical mass, a moderator and the proper geometry of fissile fuel. The corium is diluted fuel, cladding, structural components and concrete. The only way it's reactive is chemically, due to the alkalinity of the fluid around it.
Spikes do get recorded, it's called radioactive decay of daughter elements.
The "elephants foot" has decayed sufficiently as to literally be safe enough to sit on and have lunch, although eating in that environment would have occupational safety personnel raising merry hell and rightfully so. Safe to sit on isn't safe to risk exposure to.
As for the original accident, well, that was The Three Stooges meet Home Simpson on the stupidity scale.
Written from visual range of 2 1/4 mile island, it used to be 3 mile, but part melted when I was a senior in high school. ;)
It's shut down, as fossil fuels are cheaper to produce electricity than running a nuclear plant is to run. And well, CO2 will bring the wonders of Venus to earth, making earth the garden spot that Venus is today - to use your level of hyperbole...
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SL-1 and Chernobyl shared one common flaw in their control rods, graphite tips on the control rods. Graphite is a moderator, so the end of the control rod, the rod being the slow down control, sped up reactions as it traveled through the core.
The base event that disassembled both reactors explosively via steam hammer explosions was the same - prompt criticality. But, SL-1 was excessive removal of the primary control rod (don't get me into having a single pull to start control rod, let alone having to pull it up a bit to hook to a pully...), Chernobyl was a reactor that just came down in power from producing peak prime power for a large region to super low power, causing iodine/xenon levels in the fuel to be excessive, poisoning the reaction when they tried to ramp power up for the unauthorized test. Not recognizing the iodine pit problem, the poorly trained oopserators then pulled most of the rods from the reactor and when the iodine and xenon finally burned off, it went prompt critical.
Two reactors that never should have been prototyped, let alone constructed as a production or test reactor, due to insufficient safety and training, which points directly to a cavalier management mindset.
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@kylehill had an iodinated contrast agent the other day for a CT scan, one of the potential side effects is a worsening of Grave's disease, which I have. Didn't have to worry, as I'm taking a medication that blocks an enzyme in the thyroid hormone iodination chain, preventing iodine from being linked to form the hormones in excess. It'd essentially behave the same way as potassium iodide and similar iodine drugs to shut down the thyroid gland.
Because, a high dose of iodine does precisely that, it shuts down the thyroid gland as it takes up the administered iodine via the Wolf-Chaikoff effect. It's also an emergency treatment for a thyroid storm.
The day after the radiologist's report was posted, my doctor called and tried to convince me to go to the hospital because my AAA had a thrombus in it. She missed the CT from two years prior that listed the same thing, "Yeah, but now you've got a second one". No, actually, it's two additional at the nephratic artery branches, they come with aneurysms. It's kept this long, no clots wandering about, it'll keep until the vascular surgeon's appointment in two months.
She's consulting with the vascular surgeon, ain't heard back, so I suspect the surgeon agrees with me and not the resident. They're residents so that they can learn and I've always been a good instructor.
And an incidental finding of a mass on an adrenal gland, which hasn't changed in size or shape in a decade. And that my lumbar and thoracic spine is a train wreck, which is also readily apparent from symptoms and that I need a cane to walk.
Yep, I'm a walking pathology exhibit. With rather significant knowledge and experience in pharmacology and A&P.
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I'm using tons of radiation right now. Otherwise, I'd be frozen and stubbing the shit out of my toes.
Oh, ionizing radiation, my bad! Used that two days ago, got a CT scan to figure out how much of a train wreck that I am, the railroad's still sending full trainloads of heavy wreck equipment... The CT beams, guided and shielded largely with the magical metal of incandescent lamp filaments, cutter of metals in industrial applications, reflector of x-rays and gamma radiation in radiology equipment and x-ray and gamma telescopes, tungsten, the pain in the ass to work with metal.
And oh, I do glow a fair bit in gamma. Had a thyroid scan using I-131, before dosing, they perform a background check, got my potassium-40 onboard as we all do, some strontium-90, cesium-137 and a few other isotopes your generation wouldn't have. Was born a week after Tsar Bomba detonated, when the nuclear armed nations had the dubious wisdom of detonating their products from the insanity factory in the atmosphere. Not that any cancers came of that, at least that's what our government told the downwinders repeatedly. I'm also known for anger management issues, unusual strength, but only turn green if I've eaten some food that's a bit off. ;)
Actually, that's all measured in trace radiation levels, using a gamma camera, which also uses tungsten tubing to focus the energy for imaging. Which makes me wonder if this filament might be a good basis for those tubes, adding tungsten plating within for increased reflection efficiency and the tungsten impregnated plastic adding efficiency lost via the thinner reflection coating at a modest resolution cost. Gain being decreased cost and more importantly, less heavy support for a much lighter reflector. Because, tungsten is heavy and dense, as in "Oh my God, I need a new foot now that I've dropped this tungsten brick on it!" kind of heavy. And yeah, you'd be in the market for a new foot. It's damned heavy.
It'd be also useful for a quick, fugly casing for homebuilt instrumentation, like my radiation spectrometer I built from plans on CERN's educational outreach site.
Which reminds me, gotta scavenge a mylar cap for a radiation window, a cheap headset for the jack and a 10k resistor and 0.05 uF cap for coupling to the computer. The processing software is javascript and python, both already happily installed on my computers.
Not too bad a price for the filament, considering. Guess I'll be ordering a printer soon after all. My americium source will be an excellent test sample for the filament.
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