Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

osrp.lanl.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 277 posts

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#61

Post by corpMaverick »

xtracto wrote: post #39
Bakary wrote: post #17

Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c... There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.

My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#63

Post by orbital-decay »

xtracto wrote: post #39
Bakary wrote: post #17

Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c... There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.

There were several incidents like this, ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#64

Post by jackcarter »

OJFord wrote: post #32
Danieru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is established and commonly installed technology in Japan. It's called EneFarm. Lots of newish houses connected to natural gas have these largish boxes out front. The odd name leaves most people confused. The EneFarms used to be heavily subsidized by the japanese government in a long term program to encourage fuel cell development and manufacturing. Over time prices have decreased such that the subsidy is either…

Just because you pay a positive non-zero amount for less than a quarter of the energy in, it does not mean that a device has greater than 100% efficiency, which is not possible. If heat pumps are 400% efficient then log burners in cabins in the woods are even better.

A heat pump warms a home more efficiently than using the same amount of electricity for resistive heating. It can do this because it's not generating the heat from scratch; it's moving heat from outside to inside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#65

Post by saalweachter »

Bakary wrote: post #17

Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

It's the scary goldilocks of nuclear waste.

On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.

On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.

In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.

Scary!

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#66

Post by hkgjjgjfjfjfjf »

mysterydip wrote: post #13
bhaak wrote: post #3

Wonder how I slided into the world of Fallout? WTF!?! We have plutonium powered pacemakers? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/ Ah, okay we had . > Despite the often longer life-expectancies, nuclear pacemakers quickly became a part of the past when lithium batteries were developed. Not only did the technology improve, allowing for lighter, smaller, and programmable pacemakers, but doctors began to…

> allowing for doctors to check in on their patients and replace either the batteries or the pacemakers themselves I cynically read this as "we needed to get more money out of these patients"

No post body was provided.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#67

Post by ssizn »

kergonath wrote: post #37
ssizn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Yeah, tragic. They are no less human than you are. They had no clue what they were doing, like all of us in general. What fraction of the population is aware of the effect of radiation and the toxicity of medical sources? How would they go about assessing the risk in this situation? Uncontrolled contamination can also harm innocent bystanders, in this case children.

I know not to barge into buildings to steal stuff that doesn’t belong to me and that I know nothing about.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#68

Post by ssizn »

justusthane wrote: post #38
ssizn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

That is an extremely cavalier take, especially considering: > His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal do…

No post body was provided.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#69

Post by KerrAvon »

patrickserrano wrote: post #22
konschubert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this as: Most patients don’t survive those 10 years anyways.

Glad I'm not the only cynical one ;)

Seems like maybe don’t be cynical outside of your own specialty might be a lesson here.

Re: Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

#70

Post by zxexz »

dqpb wrote: post #40
Bakary wrote: post #17

Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

> stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city Is it “stealing” if it’s abandoned?

I would probably have used the word “scrapped”.

This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.

Post reply on HN