maaan startin' to feel like 1986 'round here
The tricky thing is if we're talking about a radioisotope source used to power an aircraft, and if that radioisotope source experienced, erm, violent dispersion due to any number of factors involved in propulsion and energy generation, then your radioisotope source is likely to be distributed over a formidable area. Columbia was 39 miles up and traveling at about 12,000 mph when it ceased to be an aircraft so we're not talking about that level of dispersion, but we're also not talking about a gopher hole full of strontium 90. Goiania was 93 grams of medical isotopes and involved health checks for a quarter million people. It was also distributed by thieves, not physics.
Ah, I was making a reference to HBO's Chernobyl. I don't want to defend the accident that's resulted in five people's death, I'm just making a reference to the last Russian nuclear accident I know about. Sorry! Christ, I've never heard of Goiania before. That's heartbreaking. They were thieves, sure, but the little girl who died because nobody knew what the glowing blue powder was...Damn. Yeah. You make a compelling case for "Let's not send nuclear isotopes into our atmosphere!"
A ha. I watched it a couple months ago so the reference wasn't fresh. I grew up around radiation. My father was a member of NEST. A whole bunch of the impact of radiation is the general fear and misunderstanding of radiation... but yeah once you cross a line it ain't no joke.
No worries, I'm well behind the curve on watching that one. I wonder how people with "The cake is a lie" tattoos are doing right now? I'm gonna guess that the line for what's dangerous and what's safe is extremely well-defined for experts, but that laymen get it wrong like 90% of the time? Dealing with a software version of that at work today, so maybe I'm just trying to find reflections of my pain in your comment lmao
The n of any nuclear exposure research is much smaller than we can really use. Yeah, we nuked the shit out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but (A) those were acute exposure events (B) a whole lot more people are alive than we figured would be. Chernobyl turned out to have much lighter long-term effects than we anticipated, too. Which doesn't mean things are great and that caution should be thrown to the wind, but it does mean that all the harum scarum boogeyman-shaking that tends to be practiced by anyone talking about nuclear stuff will always have a small asterisk at the end of it. Know what a downwinder is? My dad. Not according to the DOE, of course. He didn't even know it until I pointed it out to him. Dude used to keep plutonium above the fridge (I didn't even know it until I got into an argument about DU rounds in Iraq). His dad, who was in the 1-5 Roentgen contour with him, lived to 96. Lemme know if you wanna hear a "funny" story about a truck driver and a rad detector.
So okay. My dad got an engineering degree. That ended up with him doing some... stuff for the nuclear medicine program at Lovelace Medical Center (pronounced "loveless") in Albuquerque. Lovelace is mostly famous for being the place the Mercury 7 were run through a bunch of bullshit tests; it features prominently in The Right Stuff. They also had a vivarium with a bunch of chimps ("throwing shit ain't nuthin', we had one there who knew that if he really wanted to get a reaction outta you all he had to do was pop a turd in his mouth and squeeze it out through his teeth like toothpaste") and they also had a bunch of isotopes. Anyway. "fun with isotopes" kinda became my dad's bag. And he was fond of explaining how shitty radiation monitoring equipment in general tends to be because, well, radiation monitoring equipment was pretty much his job. I know he spent six months in Thule. I don't quite know why. Silkwood was on TV once and he started talking about how shitty the rad counters were because he'd worked with them. Apparently at some point early on his job was to check trucking for exposure as it came into and out of Lovelace. And he was screening a truck driver and the counter in his hand went WHEEEEEEP! The driver, of course, panicked. Truck was fine, it was the driver. Dude was immediately hustled into a shower, stripped down. Wasn't his clothes. Showered like crazy. Came back out, my dad waved the wand, WHEEEEEEP! Shit ain't funny now. Driver is scrubbing like he hates his skin. Turning pink. Gotta get whatever it is off of him before it goes internal and gets really sketchy. Comes back out, haunted eyes, WHEEEEEEEP! About this time everyone's freaking out. Except my dad. My dad is messing around with the rad counter. He holds up the handpiece. realizes that while the position the rad counter is in has been changing every time it alarms, the angle he's been holding it at has not. So he holds it at that angle and moves it around the tarmac. Sure enough, right about when a shaft of sunlight hits the split between the cover and the handpiece, WHEEEEEEP! My dad starts laughing. I'm six. "Did the truck driver want to kill you?" "He was too busy being glad he was alive," my dad said, chuckled heartily, and cracked another beer.
Cool! Disgusting! Wow! Project Iceworm seems like the exact type of irresponsible shit I've come to expect from the USA in the 60's. I particularly like the part about ecological impact: Holy fuck, that trucker story. Your dad sounds like a real character. I almost love your description of how he told the story more than the story itself! I can't imagine how shook that trucker felt driving away from him. As far as "False-Alarm Nuclear Accidents" go, this is a pretty funny one :) Fuck am I glad that my lifestyle never puts me in contact with highly radioactive material. Everything you've shared in this thread could come straight from a horror film."...all he had to do was pop a turd in his mouth and squeeze it out through his teeth like toothpaste."
When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall. A 2016 study found that the portion of the ice sheet covering Camp Century will start to melt by the year 2100, if current trends continue. When the ice melts, the camp’s infrastructure, as well as any remaining biological, chemical and radioactive waste, will re-enter the environment and potentially disrupt nearby ecosystems.