211–220 of 254 posts
Why is the only lab that can make new cores for America's nukes privately owned? Honestly this is utter madness. Surely one of the most critical core components of America's entire nuclear deterrent should be government owned and run? What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En...
I used to work at NREL.
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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.…
I think you're at least somewhat underestimating the quantity of plutonium in those pictures, plutonium is dense enough that there's likely more Pu in that photo than in a modern nuclear warhead. For context, modern warheads use 3kg, much less than the demon core, and the pit that you link to the guy holding is likely a hollow shell of plutonium that is then covered in steel or beryllium. The pit itself is usually ~5…
The BLS says: > There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a 10.7-percent decrease from 5,333 in 2019. We should diligently work to reduce work injuries, especially fatal ones. It appears that LANL is a safer workplace than average and its three criticality-accident fatalities in 80 years are not a significant contributor to its overall workplace accident risk. However, it sounds like…
We used to make fun of some of the videos giving them titles like "rattlesnakes are not your friend" or "you and your fire extinguisher" and the most entertaining "do not look into laser with remaining eye". People in Colorado are very outdoorsy, and unfortunately, rattlesnake bites were not that uncommon as there were lots of rattlesnake dens on the campus.
TL;DR - the workforce at the national labs tends to be highly educated and trained.
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?
No one gets to play with that much radioactive stuff without all sorts of safety briefings. If you were that depressed then your co-workers would notice and would turn you in.
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> 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.
It's darkly ironic that we'll "humanely" euthanize animals in pain without question, but the "humane" option is often unavailable to actual humans .
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A chest X ray is about 0.1 mSv.
A chest X ray doesn't get inhaled, to provide a constant 0.1 mSv internally for the next 15 years or up to 24,000 years.
On the one hand, it's a lot of radiation, but on the other hand, that's a very long time to live. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
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Fun fact, if you ever want to locate sketchy sites, the keyword is "Wildlife Management Area". Odds are pretty good it's going to be some former superfund, government, chemical, or industrial cleanup site. They do their best to clean up what they can and then declare it a nature preserve. E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quehanna_Wild_Area
Don’t forget the largest stretch of undeveloped prairie in Colorado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_Arsenal_Nationa...
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It's true, but the risk of that is fairly small. There were 60 publicly disclosed criticality accidents from 01945 to 01999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc... causing a total of 21 deaths, though for some reason that list doesn't include Chernobyl, which killed 31 people directly and about 6000 people over the years. But you aren't going to get a Chernobyl-style disaster from a criticalit…
> about 6000 people over the years. Note that this is heavy disputed, with estimates going from under 100 to the hundreds of thousands.
> There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer.[2][3][4] However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to have occurred due to the disaster's long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe. Such numbers are based on the heavily contested Linear no-threshold model.
I think the under-100 numbers are just from the direct effects, disregarding the excess deaths among the "liquidators" and other people exposed to radioactivity after the accident.
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LANL has had three criticality accidents in 80 years, which have killed three people, two of them during WWII (after which things presumably improved) and the third in 01958. That's out of what is now 12000 people, which would lead you to expect about 40 deaths over that period of time, though presumably the workforce size has fluctuated over the years (but it was about 10000 by the end of 01946). I think that by any…
I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. Forgive me, but the tone of this comes across like talking to someone from the sovereign citizen movement. Maybe you don't think workers have the right to a safe workplace, but the majority of US society does and has passed laws to ensure it. People don't believe in workers rights because there are laws; there are laws because people believe in workers rights.…
You say, "Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that [led] to the risk." To the extent that that's true, that's not okay under any circumstances, even if OSHA approves it, and even if they're working in a country with no equivalent of OSHA. But it's important that the risk in question is really a risk that is either important to them or would be important to them if they knew what someone else knows.
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I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. Forgive me, but the tone of this comes across like talking to someone from the sovereign citizen movement. Maybe you don't think workers have the right to a safe workplace, but the majority of US society does and has passed laws to ensure it. People don't believe in workers rights because there are laws; there are laws because people believe in workers rights.…
I do think workers have the right to a safe workplace, or more precisely they have the right to not be coerced into taking risks, but that that right exists inherently; it does not come from laws or what the majority of US society thinks. So those things are irrelevant to determining whether a given workplace is too dangerous or too paranoid. You say, " Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that [l…
I don't think most people assume laws create rights (at least, those of the inalienable variety) but they create a framework to protect those rights. That framework is what allows people to objectively determine the safety of workplace and are relevant. In the case of something like OSHA, that framework gives the employee grounds to rebalance the power dynamic with management in terms of understanding and mitigating that risk. Sometimes I think HN is so skewed towards tech that many are unable to understand that people in other jobs don't necessarily have the same leverage with their employers. Laws help ensure they are still protected.