I’d initially planned on writing about the tension between freedom of information versus security for this week’s posting, but this week’s weather has given rise to some musings that seem a bit more relevant and immediate. So – I hope you’ll indulge me in discussing what I’m sure hundreds (or thousands) of other bloggers (not [...]
I’m old enough to remember the duck-and-cover drills at school when I was a kid. Even in the first grade I can remember wondering how a desk would protect me against a nuclear explosion – at some point I just assumed that the adults must know more than I so I’d climb under my desk [...]
Radioactive waste disposal is not cheap. When I was a radiation safety officer we spent $10,000 each year to dispose of a fairly small amount of waste, and a few years our disposal bill was closer to $50,000. At another university I worked at we spent over a half million dollars to get rid of [...]
Consider the impact of a single nuclear explosion – temperatures higher than the surface of the Sun vaporize everything within tens to hundreds of meters; pressure and shock waves rippling outward at the speed of sound shred buildings; and fissioning uranium or plutonium atoms produce huge amounts of radioactivity. There have been over 2000 nuclear [...]
Humans are great at recognizing patterns and one of the patterns we do really well with is that of cause-and-effect. We like to know what causes what – and particularly what causes bad things to happen. So when something bad – like cancer – happens we want to find a cause; and we also want [...]
As I discussed in a past posting on uranium enrichment, the uranium we dig out of the ground is unable to sustain a nuclear chain reaction without a lot of coaxing – it has to be immersed in heavy water or surrounded by graphite as opposed to natural (light) water. This is why we enrich [...]
I was Radiation Safety Officer at a major university and hospital from the late 1990s through the first few years of the oughts and one of my responsibilities was to help assure the safety and security of our radioactive materials. When I took the job (pre-September 11) my major concern was that a disgruntled grad [...]
I had to work full-time through my undergraduate degree (through grad school too, but that’s not relevant here) and most of my electives were taken because a class fit my schedule rather than because I was interested in the class. So when I showed up for the first day of Philosophy 101 I have to [...]
As I mentioned in my first posting on thorium reactors, this is a huge topic that deserves a careful discussion – even four postings isn’t enough to do justice to the topic, but it’s a good start. So this will be my last posting on thorium reactors for now, but I might come back to [...]
At one point John Kennedy predicted there might be over 20 nuclear powers by the mid-1970s – one of the triumphs of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is the fact that, as of the year 2000, there were fewer than 10 and only North Korea was added to the total since then. But we know that the [...]