Not at all! Great stuff.. anything I can use in the classroom to expand on radiation and how we can handle the problems in dealing with it is helpful.
Thanks for this.
Overmod The problem is with ingesting alpha EMITTERS -- in quantities that give reasonable flux at an energy that can release to a Bragg peak in biologically significant places. Think of them as essentially .500 Nitro Express hollow-points with merc cores. And you don't have to lick the rock to get into Dutch ... handling it without gloves and not washing your hands might get you there.
The problem is with ingesting alpha EMITTERS -- in quantities that give reasonable flux at an energy that can release to a Bragg peak in biologically significant places. Think of them as essentially .500 Nitro Express hollow-points with merc cores. And you don't have to lick the rock to get into Dutch ... handling it without gloves and not washing your hands might get you there.
A fairly apt analogy of the problem with alpha emitters. Alpha particles are heavy charged particles with stong interaction with the electron clouds of the material the particle is traversing through. I.E., the danger comes from the very short distance in which the energy of the particle is dissipated. In addition, the particles have enough momentum to knock atomic nuclei out of their position in a crystal lattice or molecule.
Radon daughters not good either. We should tell them why. "Radon" is a noble gas, and it can be breathed in just like any other gas. If it decays radiologically it turns back into a particle (which can stick to lung tissue like any other particle) and then proceeds to shower out energy down the decay chain. A Bragg radius away from parts of you.
Radon daughters not good either.
We should tell them why. "Radon" is a noble gas, and it can be breathed in just like any other gas. If it decays radiologically it turns back into a particle (which can stick to lung tissue like any other particle) and then proceeds to shower out energy down the decay chain. A Bragg radius away from parts of you.
The decay chain from Radon to lead involves another four alpha decays plus several beta decays, though few are as short half life as Radon.
Normal respiration takes care of almost all of the lazy half lifes but the fast high energy stuff will be deadly.. In my opinion most of the fun stuff is neutron flux or neutron activation. Not so much radiological poisoning as incident radiation. But there are other interesting things -- consider the number of curies of xenon released in the Three Mile Island incident; where did that all go?
Normal respiration takes care of almost all of the lazy half lifes but the fast high energy stuff will be deadly..
In my opinion most of the fun stuff is neutron flux or neutron activation. Not so much radiological poisoning as incident radiation. But there are other interesting things -- consider the number of curies of xenon released in the Three Mile Island incident; where did that all go?
Both Krypton and Xenon are present in fission products and have been used to gauge global plutonium production. Usual practice in the reprocessing plants was to vent the noblle gases realeased, with radialogical impact lessened by letting the spent fuel cool down for a bit to let the short half-life stuff decay away. Both decay via beta minus and the radiactive daughter products are also beta emitters.
I would suspect that the venting of the TMI containment was such to thoroughly mix the Krypton and Xenon with the surrounding air, worst case for local exposure would have been stagnant air conditions preventing mixing on a larger scale. My recollection was about 10 megacuries of both was released with only a few curies of radio-iodine released - the latter being insignificant compared to medical releases of radio-iodine.
With respect to "fun-stuff", high energy photons (>7MeV) can be involved with some interesting photonuclear reactions, with neutron emission being the most common.
(Talk about thread drift....)
3rd railNot sure how a thread about Hoover belongs here, but if you want a response, I'll say that the man was responsible for the 1929 crash, and the Great Depression that followed. Todd
Todd
Reminds me of a Blue Book Final in Econ 101 in college - Explain the causes of the Great Depression.
You now have 60 minutes!
Todd's answer would have gotten a F for a lack of specificity.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
While Hitler and Tojo started the war, American response to the war was what got us out of the depression. Deficit spending was thru the roof to pay for the war effort.
With all respect Todd, no he wasn't. What caused the Great Depression was a series of events that certainly with the benefit of hindsight could have been prevented but remember, hindsight is always "20-20."
Maybe Hoover's response could have been more energetic, but if he didn't know what to do he wasn't alone, no-one knew what to do.
As to President Roosevelt's response, the "New Deal," liberal and conservative historians have been arguing over that for decades as to how effective it was or wasn't, and it'll never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
Hey, I had a history teacher in high school who lived through the era and who told us that as far as he was concerned Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo did more to end the Great Depression here in the US than any American elected official did, NOT that he was a fan of either of those two monsters!
Just remember, just as American presidents can get the credit for good things they have nothing to do with, they can also get the blame for bad things they have nothing to do with.
And that's all I'm going to say about THAT particular can o' worms.
Not sure how a thread about Hoover belongs here, but if you want a response, I'll say that the man was responsible for the 1929 crash, and the Great Depression that followed.
Overmod Firelock76 And if your car glows in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime driving? And if YOU glowed in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime walking ... or an increased factor of safety recognition for crews if you are trespassing on the ROW wearing your headphones?
Firelock76 And if your car glows in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime driving?
And if YOU glowed in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime walking ... or an increased factor of safety recognition for crews if you are trespassing on the ROW wearing your headphones?
You betcha! And man, could I have a lot of fun in old cemeterys, abandoned houses, Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, old covered bridges...
This list could be endless...
Flux Capacitors!
We teach here at the school, and again taught and enforced at the Mine sites all about personal hygiene in Uranium Mining. Of course gloves and washing hands, along with many other things,,,,no jewelry, clean fingernails, no beards, lunch is brought down to them, drink only provided water and so on.
The don't lick the rocks sign is just for effect and comedy of a sort but it is a good metaphor for all the care that must be taken. Thats in my classroom not at a minesite.
Of course they wear on their belts a personal alpha dosimeter (PAD) and a necklace with the dosimeter under the clothing ...and there are Prisim stations in many locations. Ventilation costs are many many times higher in Uranium Mines as the air cannot be passed on down as in flow through, but one and out.
Now about that sample in our PreCam Lab...the less said the better.
We call it Thors Hammer.
Waiting for the day a bunch of black Chevy Suburbans pull up with Federal License Plates, badges are flashed, we are pushed aside and it's gone.
MiningmanJust don't lick the rocks ...I have a sign in my classroom that states that. Alpha can be ingested, then you might be in trouble.
There's no particular issue with ingesting alphas -- they're just helium nuclei and rather promptly regain electrons to become inert noble gas.
Of course Russian spies like the highly unstable super short half lifes of microseconds embedded on umbrella tips.
That stuff doesn't have supershort half-life: it isn't even a timed decay chain producing high-energy daughters at 'just the wrong moment'. It's stuff like polonium-210 that selectively has a LONG enough half-life that it goes to the bones and then does the irradiation thing in suitable volume.
Unless one lives in a thick concrete bunker you are not going to stop Gamma. Alpha and Beta are easy peasy to block and our own bodies, and all living things, have well adapted to handling all 3 as it naturally occurs in background or else we would not be here.
Just don't lick the rocks ...I have a sign in my classroom that states that. Alpha can be ingested, then you might be in trouble.
You obviously survived your dinner encounter with the yellow glass but I have to ask if you developed a third eye in the back of your head or something else a-la X-Men superhero mutation?
Firelock76And if your car glows in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nighttime driving?
MiningmanNow a wee wee bit of radiation is actually ok for you, but has to be natural occurring, as in very slightly above background.
Actually no. The wee bit has to be in the right bands of wavelength, as well as reasonable intensities. The analogue y'all will recognize is the difference between the traditional UV 'tanning wavelengths' vs. those that are specific for DNA cleavage (UV-A vs. UV-B and C in simplistic form)
The amount of tonic 'sunshine units' in the various bands also differs with individual genetics and phenotype -- I suspect we still don't know some of the pathways that are regulated, modulated, etc. by the EM involved. There is certainly an amount of DNA "damage" that is beneficial for cells to remediate, up to the Hayflick limit at least, but it is hard to find academic papers on the subject that do not suffer from political spin of some kind or other.
A colleague of my father's invited us up for a dinner party one evening, and it would have been amusing to have watched my facial expression change as I looked around. They were collectors of beautiful glass, a beautiful ethereal-yellow glass, thousands of pieces (some quite large) of beautiful yellow glass. Not colored lead glass. Much of the apartment in fact was dedicated to glass shelving and cases which were full of this beautiful yellow glass. I was NOT a happy guest.
And if your car glows in the dark wouldn't that be an outstanding safety enhancement for nightime driving?
Now a wee wee bit of radiation is actually ok for you, but has to be natural occurring, as in very slightly above background.
Curite of course is highly radioactive but the mineral has a stunning colour and in various hues that blend would be outstanding, just the colour, not the radioactivity.
MiningmanYes but not in 'Curite hues"
Well, the whole 'radium' magic whipped up by Union Miniere and the rest of the rapacious Belgian setup didn't last that long past the introduction of Art and Color and those magical 'season' cars of 1928. In fact I would suspect that in between the Radithor scandal and the introduction of the Delaney Amendment the whole idea of cheerful radiation -- the sort of thing that would later be measured in 'sunshine units' with little particular public take rate -- was over and done, and of course events overcame the racket of "medicinal" radium paid for by publicized schoolchildren's pennies at, what was it, $23,000 a gram FOB Olen (and wouldn't you love to learn about the Love Canal-like radiological hazards lurking in THAT area now???)
I wouldn't go back to that era, no matter how I feel about the ghastly proliferation of high-level radioactive elements since then.
Yes but not in 'Curite hues"
Firelock76So if you wanted a "top-of-the-line" GM car, it was Cadillac, or nothing.
I always had the impression LaSalle was competing with those Packard 120s. Successfully... as far as providing a less expensive alternative to one of your own can be.
Of course, there was a while where 'top-of-the-line' was a bit relative. Hard to believe GM could market a Caddy Nova as the most expensive thing in the line, or that Catera as "the Caddy that zigs" (a problem being it had trouble zagging back), or the ridiculous I-left-my-DeVille-in-the-wash cars from 1988 that Roger Smith stuck the world with. (I must say that we had one of the last '76 convertible Eldorados, and when they re-introduced the convertible in '85 the showroom example was the same color combination ... but I actually looked under the dashboard to see if there was a crank and pedal arrangement; it was that shriveled. Then they got smaller! This summed it up pretty well.)
However, they got the picture with Art and Science replacing Art and Color as the source of design drama, and have done some interesting things since, including a better Vette than the Vette.
Firelock76The poor old La Salle, a casualty of World War Two. The war ended, but the La Salle "didn't come home." The "powers-that-be" at Cadillac decided it didn't make much sense to compete with themselves (a certain logic to that, when you think about it) so the La Salle line was dropped when post-war consumer production began again. So if you wanted a "top-of-the-line" GM car, it was Cadillac, or nothing. Oh, well.
And in subsequent decades Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Saturn have all been done away with.
The poor old La Salle, a casualty of World War Two. The war ended, but the La Salle "didn't come home." The "powers-that-be" at Cadillac decided it didn't make much sense to compete with themselves (a certain logic to that, when you think about it) so the La Salle line was dropped when post-war consumer production began again. So if you wanted a "top-of-the-line" GM car, it was Cadillac, or nothing. Oh, well.
Miningman Cadillac, get with the program.
Cadillac, get with the program.
Gee our old Cadillac ran great
From the LaSalle ad..."curite hues"...a Uranium mineral, named after Madame Curie. Highly radioactive, so I hope they left that part out.
You got to luv that 2 tone purple ...Come on Lincoln and Cadillac, get with the program.
Maybe Bentley?..naw, too stuffy....a Mercedes? ...nope, strang verbotten
Two things about the above from Wanswheel.
Automoblie manufactures such as LaSalle were in many ways more sophisticated than today, perhaps not on a technical/performance scale but when it came to the comfort, desires and needs and also marketing they were top notch. Of course this was for a slightly different class of people and perhaps, outside of the Roadster, they likely had a 'driver' to get them around.
So much magnificence, lost to mass production. Reproductions and preservationists fortunately keep the lamp lit somewhat.
The Mining book DE RE METALLICA as translated by Herbert Hoover from Latin is my Mining book #1, always has been, and I'm grateful that Wanswheel put it up here. Great great inspiration can be had from these pages and I am using a few quotes from it for my presentation at our Core Days event.
Terrific stuff all around.
https://archive.org/stream/georgiusagricola00agriuoft#page/n3/mode/2up
https://hoover.blogs.archives.gov/2016/04/13/de-re-metallica-translated/
....and you knew what you wanted
Goils were goils and men were men
Mr. we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Didn't need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee our old La Salle ran great
Those were the days
....or something like that.
I like to think that 'gee our old Lasalle ran great' refers to the Lasalle St. Station and not the car.
Hoover saw the New York Central Building from his window at the Waldorf.
Nine Car Special Train Speeds President-Elect On Way To Southern City – Hoover Special, Enroute to Miami, Jan. 21 – President-elect Hoover traveled southward Monday through Virginia and North Carolinia, bound for a month's rest in Miami, his last chance for a vacation before he enters the White House on March 4. He intends to make the most of it, too. After his close confinement in Washington during the last two weeks and the conferences with hundreds of office seekers and advisers, the prospect of quiet, lonely days in the Florida keys, fishing for barracuda, sailfish, and other aristocrats or more humble inhabitants of the gulf stream hold the strongest appeal for Mr. Hoover. His most precious baggage is the deep sea tackle which he bought in California before embarking on his South American trip, and a new rod which has been presented recently to him. The President-elect is expected to disappear on a fishing trip of several days' duration as soon as he gets through with the first round of visitors in his new home. He may return to Washington about February 25 and he may not appear there until the day before his inauguration. This is a question which Mr. Hoover has not yet definitely decided. The special train of nine cars made fast time over the Atlantic Coast Line. No special stops were on the schedule outside those necessary for operating, but all along the way people were watching for his train and hoping for a chance to greet him. Two hundred or more persons were gathered at the station at Richmond, Va., and Mr. Hoover came on the platform of his private coach to greet them. The President-elect looked tired after his strenuous weeks in Washington. The lines of fatigue which had been erased from his face by long weeks at sea on his South American trip had returned. But Mr. Hoover is one who recovers quickly and finds rest in action and travel. His southern trip will give the President-elect just the kind of relaxation he needs… The Hoover train will reach Miami at 2 o'clock Tuesday afternoon. A state-wide celebration has been planned and Mr. Hoover timed his arrival in deference to his Florida friends. He captured the state by 42,000 votes over Governor Smith. Mr. Hoover has definite ideas about the reorganization of the southern branch of his party. His mind may swing to this job after he has decided on his cabinet and the preparation of the inaugural speech is out of the way. In the meantime he would just like to go fishing for a few days.
https://mirc.sc.edu/islandora/object/usc%3A51492
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