101–110 of 254 posts
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Fired or fried?
That would depend on whether they read the flow chart before or after coming to a decision. But I think it would almost always be an either/or, not both: It would seem a little unethical to fire someone after they fried themselves & thereby performed a great service, making the next generation of techs much more likely to keep themselves both in the gene pool & lifelong contributors to scientific knowledge through th…
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I mean no, it's completely correct. Criticality happens when there's enough plutonium in a small enough space (or not enough plutonium, but in a space with a high density of neutron reflectors). The demon core incident(s), the Cecil Kelley criticality incident, and others don't involve explosives. Just read through the wikipedia list[0], and you'll see that causes included dropping a tungsten brick, an unexpected poo…
Those examples, especially the Demon Core, had much higher quantities of plutonium. The Demon Core [1] was a sphere of 6.2 kg of plutonium surrounded by neutron reflecting tungsten carbide. The photo in this article shows a few small sticks of plutonium. They are not in contact with each other. They are not surrounded by neutron reflecting materials. The chance of criticality in that configuration was insignificant.…
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If true, that sounds like a serious indictment of manufacturing power sources with the ability to destroy a good portion of the Earth. That does remind me of the incident where a technician dropped a socket off a wrench and quite nearly detonated a 9 megaton bomb in Arkansas.
This type of thing is common in all industries - so much so that one way that railroad workers would strike is to “work to rule” - follow every single safety regulation to a T causing productivity to plummet. Many safety rules can be summed up as “don’t be a dumbass” but trying to proceduralize that can be difficult. It’s part of the reason nuclear stuff is so expensive - you have to work to rule every single time.
My favorite nuclear disaster! Criticality events. I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure ten…
Reading what happened to Ouchi makes me think two things: 1. Anyone who has not gotten that far, skip the "Ghastly deaths after the blue glow" part. 2. Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. Give the patient a choice, but also the option.
> Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. That was my thinking too. The poster child for humane avoidance of suffering.
Maybe just stop building nuclear weapons!? The last thing the world needs is more of this shit.
And as more countries get it, 10 and counting, we're guaranteed to have an exchange at some point. The exchange will at best break the taboo on using nuclear weapons. Or it could lead to a global exchange.
And it only makes sense to get acquire them. Not getting them, or giving up a nuclear project, is dumb geopolitics.
But we dont have a magic wand. So should the US (or any large power) unilaterally give them up?
Of course not! Thats incredibly stupid because the other super power would trample on you.
Should the super powers agree to give them up? It was tried, it failed miserably. Besides, you cant get the top N nuclear powers to give them up because then the N+1 power now is the world's eminent super power.
Even if you got all ten to agree to give them up, nukes aren't that hard for a semi modern state to acquire. Pakistan and N. Korea have them! 1970s India acquired them. That an eleventh country (out of the 50-60 or so that could build one) will acquire them is basically guaranteed.
The list of countries that are turn key capable or renounced a probably successful program is very long.
So no. We're stuck with them. And we'll probably end the world because of them. On the bright side, global warming is a much smaller concern once you accept this.
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…
If a scientist wanted to commit suicide, couldn’t he trigger the criticality event just to see what it’s like and then promptly kill himself off afterward before radiation effects set in? Or is the agony instant?
But you might raise some red flags if your workplace notices you doing calculations to calculate criticality experiments next to calculations of human radiation dose levels and lethality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those examples, especially the Demon Core, had much higher quantities of plutonium. The Demon Core [1] was a sphere of 6.2 kg of plutonium surrounded by neutron reflecting tungsten carbide. The photo in this article shows a few small sticks of plutonium. They are not in contact with each other. They are not surrounded by neutron reflecting materials. The chance of criticality in that configuration was insignificant.…
Somewhere between known incidents with 6.2 kg of plutonium and nothing happened incidents with some sticks there’s a point at which something could happen. And modeling exactly where that point is is difficult, hence the rules and restrictions. The reaction of those involved lends much more credence to the “stop being idiots and clean this up Homer” reading.
Yes, but that somewhere is an epsilon below the demon core. How do I know? All nuclear bombs have a core, that's more or less the size of the Demon Core. They don't go critical until they need to.
Here [1] is a photo of scientist holding a plutonium pit with nothing but gloved hands. He is smiling. He does not look like someone thinking that the likelihood of a criticality event is all that high.
Now take another look at the few sticks of plutonium in the photo. Draw your own conclusions.
[1] https://lajicarita.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/cmrr-is-no-more-...