21–30 of 254 posts
Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
The idea that bringing a few bars of plutonium next to each other for a photo could result in a criticality event is completely bogus.
The real issue of course, is that you want people at a facility that handles plutonium to adhere very strictly to procedures. If you don't freak out when they take some selfies, next day they'll do something else. And one day, one of these things will be stupid and lots of people will get hurt.
Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
I would have though the decision tree for placement of concentrated plutonium was firmly established after the demon core incidents, set roughly in stone as the following: Should I bring high purity plutonium samples together? | V Do you want to die a horrible radiated death taught in textbooks for decades? | | V V No. Yes | | V V Then don’t you’re fired. It seems like Los Alamos may be in need of a fresh printout of…
Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
So I guess it turns out that Homer Simpson was more realistic than we thought... all the way through to only avoiding nuclear accidents through sheer luck.
So I guess it turns out that Homer Simpson was more realistic than we thought... all the way through to only avoiding nuclear accidents through sheer luck.
Putting a profit motive anywhere near anything that is safety critical is almost never a good idea. Naval Nuclear Power has it's issues, yet it is so safe that we have almost no incidents. That's because things like this don't happen there due to the culture of safety. That said, this is about production rather than operation, but the overall communities are relatively small and aligned.
Why? And exactly how do you mean that?
Is the safety track record of private industry worse than that of eg non-profit or state owned industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you continued to read the article, you'd see that there was a culture of throwing caution to the wind to increase productivity at not only that lab, but other nuclear facilities around the world. Hell, the article even went on to say that workers at the facility even came up with a euphemism for orders that ignored basic safety protocols, they called them "Bubba said" orders. And the article said that after those…
> And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating. And how exactly did they convince those employees to keep working? The employees are not making extra for not following rules, do people really just not care about their lives? (I don't for a second believe someone working in a nuclear lab would be una…
Nuclear labs kill the people inside them at worst. Bio labs ... Well there's a reason why I think covid was the worst lab accident in human history.
There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.
isn't that the film MI6 based their fake iraq WMDs dossier on