Thomas Kirby

You also can't get nearly so much of the stuff into your lungs from a coal-burning plant as you can when many rounds have filled the air with smoke, or when it's on dry sand that never gets washed down.

I think that a power vacuum developed and certain entrepreneurs came in to fill it. You always want to watch those areas that are being ignored. They attract rats and cockroaches. It's like something I watched on TV today about how Pat Robertson got to be such a powerful figure. He wasn't anybody. He just used the television to his advantage. I liked Gene Scott better. He simply asked for money to do the Lord's work, and he got money, and he was open about what he did with it. Other scams involve getting people panicked about other things and willing to do anything to get someone to "do something about it", including doing the thinking that they should be doing for themselves. Then again, I've seen how desparate some people get to get someone to do their math homework for them. Same difference. If I were to make such a choice, I'd rather be someone who was hired to put in a good word to the Lord for someone. It's easy enough, He listens to everyone, and it doesn't require being mean to someone if you are your own boss. Send me a few dollars, I'll do what I can to put your name in the book of Life, there's worse ways to try to make a buck.

In that link you just gave me, how do you read the charts and tell how many millisieverts of radiation a milligram of uranium gives off in a year? The mSv/mg terms are contracted so that it doesn't say if this is an mSv per second, per hour, per day, or what. It also doesn't explain the term "mSv/a". The term "millisievert", which I did look up, seems to be the average whole body dose for anyone who lives in the United States. If I go with the idea that when the charts say mSv/mg, they mean that one milligram gives off that fraction of a mSv per year, here's what I get. About 9 milligrams of DU is the equivalent of 1 mSv per year from the chart. This is interesting: Maybe this information sort of gets obscured as it is passed down, but one chance in 31 of getting cancer is a bit scary. I have to agree with people who think that a chance of one in a million is negligible. Breast cancer is a big issue when allegedly about 140 women in 100,000 population get it every year in the U.S. That's a chance in about 700. And we're talking about a whole body dose of 20 mSv/A, and if I am reading the figures right, that's the amount of radiation from about 180 mg of DU. 9 mgs is a flyspeck. 180 mgs is starting to get to be a good sized chunk of grit. The chart also rates the risks of exposures of so many micrograms per cubic meter of air. If you have a burning DU round, that smoke can be pretty dense with a lot of particulate matter that will end up in the lungs. There's a lot of flyspecks in that, and a lot of those flyspecks will weigh many micrograms. Their tolerable level is .07 micrograms per cubic meter. Smoke can exceed that level in a cubic centimeter or less. One thing that makes it hard to estimate the exposure in a hotspot is that we have to know what percentage of the energy of the ionizing radiation consists of alpha particles, gamma rays, and X-rays. Not that I'm happy about neutrons transmuting elements in my body right there next to my germ cells, a process which releases at least some heat and ionizing radiation also. Alpha is blocked by skin. That's what makes it a bit safer from the outside, but more dangerous from the inside. You've obviously seen cloud chamber photographs. Cloud chambers may be thought of as only teaching tools these days, but they give you a picture of hard reality. Observing them this way tells you, in 3D and living color, that even the least penetrating of ionizing radiation travels a certain distance through the air and interacts with it on the way through. It sheds enough energy to move molecules around and make them form clumps. Gamma rays do it too. Without colliding with anything or significantly altering their course, they shed energy into their surroundings. The ionization effects follow a more or less straight line all along their tracks, and gamma rays have a lot of energy to shed. I don't even have time tonight to begin to research how much energy they leave in a particular volume. And right now I don't have time to figure out the mass of U-238 that gives off a millisievert per year of alpha radiation. If I understood the charts right, that mass is going to be miniscule. The stopping power of human flesh is not a blessing in this case. It makes it more dangerous by confining the exposure to a very small mass of flesh. Offhand I'm guessing a millisievert per year to one one hundred thousandth of the body or less. If that were the case, that's the equivalent of a hundred full Sieverts, whole body, of radiation per year to the affected portion of flesh. If you're lucky, that's a cyst and not cancerous. If the cyst is in your lungs, you're going to have a bit of trouble actually feeling lucky. If you have a few thousand cysts, it's going to make you sick. Maybe the X-rays and gamma rays are killing off anything that turns cancerous, just like radiation therapy. I don't know. I must be getting something wrong because the charts seem to be saying that 180 milligrams of DU puts a person in the category of people who have a chance in 31 of getting cancer over 40 years, and the odds just keep climbing after that.

And you can believe me about the resistor. One experiment I did in class was to swing a magnet past a coil. This was just a horseshoe magnet swinging past a coil. It put out enough current to make a flashlight bulb flash brightly. That's over 200 milliamps, maybe more than half an amp.

Phi's answer from a while back takes a lot of explaining. The fact that a neutron has no net electrical charge means what? The proton and the electron have equal and opposite electrical charges. The picture of a neutron as being a proton and electron fused together is accurate to a certain degree. A proton and an electron go in. A proton and an electron come out. The anti-neutrino is small change. The fact that according to current science the neutron consists of three quarks bound together is a bit much to just throw right in there when someone asks if a neutron is an electron and a proton fused together. It's confusing enough to need an explanation. Somehow we do get a neutron when a proton and an electron are squeezed together. In a neutron star the electrons are moving at pretty high relativistic speeds by the time they are crushed into the neutrons and have a lot of energy to give up to the cause and to the surrounding space, so there's where you can get your weak interactions or your anti-neutrinos. We also know that neutrons spontaneously emit electrons during beta decay and become protons. The anti-neutrino was a pretty abstract notion for quite a while, a bit of missing mass that couldn't be located as energy or as a particle. It's still pretty edge of perception. We can't observe them nearly as directly as we can observe gamma rays, electrons, protons, or helium nuclei. It takes a lot of doing to observe quarks. Can't just haul out a handy cloud chamber or fluorescent screen.

Pangloss, that is an unfair accusation and you should take it back. It is not my fault that the Bush administration is incapable of doing anything important and doing it in any manner that can conceivably be right. In this case, totally and thoroughly blowing it is letting the Shiites have power in a country where they had little or none before. If you read the article, you would notice that it is Shiites who are torturing Sunnis. These Shiites are US trained "police." At least some of the insurgency has to be because of this, in spite of the fact that the author of the article accuses the Sunnis of being the ones who are being violent and causing divisiveness or whatever. If the Shiites are running around in gangs using US supplied money, training, uniforms, and weapons to do this, we are responsible for this situation that would not have developed if the U.S. had not intervened.

You may notice that the Sunnis are now a persecuted minority, persecuted by U.S. paid and trained Shiites. Just because they are called "police" does not make this murderous band good people. We never had to have this war, and that's the first thing I would have done differently. I don't even know why you keep wanting me to say what I would have done after the hottest part of the war and place that in a superior position in this discussion. That part is also in the past so it's just as moot as whether we should have gone to war or not. This discussion may well help illustrate my point that we never seem to learn anything, and we will fight to keep ourselves from learning anything. The lesson of the wars on Iraq is to not start wars against Iraq. Second best is to never let a Shiite near any kind of weapon or any control of any government. We already know what they do with it. They will murder people.

Just departing from the radiological hazards for a moment, but isn't uranium a hazard at least as bad as lead biologically? It was badly needed to get lead out of paint and gasoline, the old inhalation hazard, and we aren't going to be making water pipes out of it. Still, why take lead out of circuit boards and then work uranium back into them? If I had my druthers, I would leave the lead in solder until a superior lead-free solder was developed that was also less toxic than the original lead.

From what I've seen, gay-bashing is an obsession that small and large groups of men can have, and I think that this obsession easily exceeds the bounds within which it can be described as other than mentally ill. The way some of them go on and on about it, it is actually a viable strategy to sit with a group of gay men so that you can talk about sports and the weather like normal people.

I made that statement presuming that the fusor was in operating condition and properly fueled. Would I forget to put gas in my car before a long road trip? You don't have to answer that one Also, it would probably make a lot more sense to impact an aluminum target with helium that you can buy at a welding shop. If you can build a fusor, you can build a linear accelerator. Aluminum works to increase the neutron yield and it's a lot easier to buy. We're not breeding U-235, we're breeding Pu-239.

DV8 2XL, you make it look like you have some gaps in your knowledge too. I know that you know that only those nuclei with odd numbers of neutrons can be fissioned by thermal neutrons, but even or odd, fast neutrons can split a uranium nucleus. For those who don't know, thermal neutrons are those whose energies are low enough to be comparable with the temperature of their surroundings. Fast neutrons simply have higher energies, or can be considered to be hotter. For nuclei containing an even number of neutrons, fission can only occur if the incident neutrons have energy above about one million electron volts (MeV). I think that you and Jdurg have been trying to tell me that U-238 cannot be fissioned by fast neutrons. Doing some research, I find that the term "fissile" in this usage means that the given nucleus can be fissioned by thermal neutrons. Either isotope fissions when struck by fast neutrons. The classic picture of uranium fission is of a fast neutron splitting a uranium nucleus and producing excess neutrons, which split more uranium nuclei. A nucleus that absorbs a neutron and doesn't fission interrupts the chain reaction. U-238 absorbs thermal neutrons but is split by fast neutrons. As I have finally found out, U-238 only produces one neutron for one neutron, and I would have a lot more confidence if someone had produced that fact in evidence. It's one of those basic facts that you would expect an expert to bring up in a discussion such as this. One of you should have caught me on that earlier. You still get a tendency for some neutrons to split nuclei and produce neutrons which split more nuclei. I still can't see them getting away if the piece of uranium in question is more than an inch or two thick. They don't get away so well from a chunk of U-235 about four inches in diameter, you betcha. One of this thing that makes this ironic is that the newly formed nucleides would be hard to detect because the U-238 does actually act as a radiation shield. Shoot a hole in it and see what comes out. Maybe it will be what some of the "nutcases" on the net have referred to as high levels of radiation coming from American tanks that are encased in U-238. And yes, you get smaller probabilities of fission as the energies increase and all that. Where did I say that the chain reactions were going to be as long, as efficient, produce as much power per pound, and so on? If you have a nice thick chunk of DU, you are going to have a region inside it where the natural emissions of the U-238 are only going to be able to travel so far without finally splitting a nucleus or being absorbed. We can pretty much discount the nuisance value of the U-235, about one in five hundred nuclei capable of producing a gain in neutrons, but chains of single neutrons might be able to last pretty well deep inside. You have to figure that if a four inch sphere of the right stuff can be exploded by chain reaction, a neutron doesn't have to travel very far to find a nucleus that it can split. For each neutron that you can see that comes out of our heavy duty shielding material, how many have been produced inside one by one? I see three things that it can do: Split a nucleus and have one child neutron. Be absorbed and produce a fissile nucleus that can produce excess neutrons. Escape. When escape is not possible, the first two will occur according to their probabilities. This mess is going to cook itself the hardest in the most shielded areas. You want to take a valid sample, it's going to have to be a core sample. You can't pay me enough to take that sample without wearing a heavy duty radiation suit. A scary thing to realize is that no matter how many U-238 nuclei are split one a one by one basis, you're not going to detect any more neutrons than were emitted by natural decay. Think about it. A bucket brigade does not throw any more buckets of water from the far end of the line than are fed to it from the water source. It actually ends up with less because of spillage. That's a pretty good analogy for a chain of splitting U-238 nuclei. More is actually less. And yes, I think that the behavior of U-238 in a bomb can be used to some extent to predict the behavior of DU. It is just an example of the well known fact that fast neutrons can split U-238. If they couldn't, the U.S. government couldn't detonate it using any sort of nuclear device. If it didn't produce a lot of excess energy, the U.S. government wouldn't want to try to detonate it.

Well, this is the first time I've seen something that looked like a symptom of political correctness and it looked like I could actually get behind it.

The US didn't know enough not to invade a pretty much impotent Iraq and install a government that included Shiites where before the Shiites didn't have any power. The right course of action to take would have been to believe the U.N. inspector who said they had no weapons of mass destruction, which is something that the U.S. government admits to now. There are risks that we can take to keep a problem from becoming worse. One of those risks is the risk of not sending a bunch of our young adults into a desert to fight a nasty war against a fairly harmless country, not wasting a lot of our money and military resources, and wait and see if the Husseins did anything to us at all. This may well be a tired subject for some people, but there seems to be no way to get the most powerful country in the world to think before it acts. Maybe all that intelligent people have left is the same dull persistence that the dullards use. If it is possible, I would also like to see some jail time for the people who started this illegal war.

I would leave the resistor in because once you get this project going well, the transient currents can go well above the 25 or so milliamps that the LED uses, and even above the 100 milliamps or so of surge current.

The article that you linked to says that the coal-fired plants are radiation hazards because of the small amounts of natural uranium and thorium in coal. So you are telling me that these small amounts in coal are more hazardous than ton quantities of uranium that are scattered about the sands of Iraq, or pounds and tons of it at a time used in several places in industry. U-238 most certainly can support fission. It is used to increase the explosive power of hydrogen bombs. It is used successfully in Candu and pebble-bed reactor designs. Some of it fissions the more or less normal way. Some of it absorbs a neutron and becomes Pu-239, which is more fissionable. Looking around, it seems to me that we are in more danger from transmutation by fast neutrons than by slow neutrons because even splitting U-238 releases an average of more than 2 neutrons per fission. All of this by the way has been public knowledge for more than thirty years. It has never been the case that U-238 is not fissionable. It just takes too much unenriched U-238 to make power reactors of convenient size using sustained chain reactions. It doesn't take fine-tunable chain reactions for U-238 to acquire a lot of nasties.

Oh yes, the illegal invasion of Iraq is a little over two years old, so it's "water under the bridge." The death of a few people in Mississippi in the 1960s was still an open case when the U.S. government prosecuted some of the perpetrators this year. Ideological pre-judgement? Of the Sunnis and the Shiites, which one routinely practices more violence and torture?

Either that, or some of the obvious gaps in the protestor's information makes it difficult to state their case. Just how many millirems per hour of gamma radiation does get from several tons of uranium sheathing through the steel cladding and zing through the bodies of the people who are inside? Just how many of the neutrons naturally generated inside of these tons of uranium actually crack atoms and cause short chain reactions? How is it that if fast neutrons won't react so well, the fission-fusion-fission bomb even works? Has anyone, just for the sheer fun of it, analyzed large pieces of DU that have been stockpiled among other large pieces of DU? Another thing that I personally have trouble is, how can anyone trust anything nuclear that is not thoroughly weighed, measured, analyzed, and otherwise tested? How does anyone even get that idea? Am I to be unconcerned when I am told first that U-238 produces no neutrons, then the same person tells me that it does but the so many thousands per second aren't a problem? When someone says that the fast neutrons naturally emitted that way do not cause further fission very well, then a Google search shows me that there are numerous chain reactions involving U-238 and other isotopes that actually favor the use of fast neutrons? Especially when it is painfully obvious that for an atom bomb to work at all, fast neutrons must work pretty well as the mechanism of fission. There is no way to moderate those neutrons to make them absorbable instead of being atom splitters, doing that typical breaking of U-235 in uneven halves, producing about 2.5 neutrons per fission. This is, just incidentally, information that has been public for more than forty years. The fact that an atom bomb works at all also tells you that fast neutrons can do their work within just a few inches of U-235. The critical mass of U-235 is 33 pounds give or take. The fact that U-238 does not perform well by itself in a fission reactor does not mean that it does not perform at all, nor that it is impossible to use it that way. Certainly there can be no harm in actually running the tests.

Talking down to me isn't going to impress me. It also isn't going to reassure me that the hazards of U-238 metal in large quantities have been thoroughly checked out.

Weren't you saying that DU didn't emit neutrons at all?

Can you show me plans or a working model?

Nice one. Looking forward to a career in diplomacy?

Leaving Iraq alone would have been better. We have to know when to do nothing. How could we have known we would make it worse? I'm not sure what all made it predictable, but it's happening. I think they're proving that letting them have power in another country that pretty much succeeded in locking them out is not a good idea.

Oddly enough, this is the first time I've run across something like this and what they were doing seemed to make real sense. I'm presuming, YT2095, that you object to the term "deferred success." It is a concept that I can get behind, actually, even if there might be a better way to say it. It sounds too stuffy. A child should not have to see tests and grades the way I saw them, a way contrived to hurt and harass people. There are better ways to get better results. "Happy slapping" is a euphemism that definitely had to go. I was pleased to see in that article that they rejected one example of political correctness which was too obviously stupid. Bullying is bullying.

BBC News Article Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. The Sunni Moslems have usually been the good guys, but they seem to be behind the insurgency in Iraq. Who can blame them? The Shiites are using their police powers to commit further tortures and murders of Sunnis. This is when the ink is barely dry on any agreements signed by the alleged coalition government. It's a joke. What do you get when you set up a joint Shiite/Sunni government? You get a Shiite government. As far as I know, historically Sunnis have been much easier to get along with, by anybody, than the Shiites. Saddam may or may not have played head games with us, which I don't think justifies a war, but George Bush definitely played head games with the American public, and Saddam was firmly on the side of the Sunnis. And now the Gulf Wars have managed one significant change. They have created another Shiite dominated country, where the Shiites do to people exactly what they do in Syria. They torture and murder them. In the same article the reporter says this: That's a strange little piece of rhetoric. It had looked to me like this reporter was saying that the Shiites were doing the provoking, then he switches around like that. Whatever. George II must be a total genius. He has figured out how to completely screw up what his father only partly screwed up.