Nearly two decades ago I took a short class on nuclear criticality safety – basically a class on how to work safely with things like enriched uranium. When we were reviewing the nuclear properties of U-235 (the isotope of uranium that fissions) I happened to notice that U-233 seemed to have a lot of advantages [...]
I used to fly quite a bit – for a decade I flew at least 50,000 miles a year, and was at more than 75,000 for nearly half that time. Every time I fly this means that cosmic rays are falling on me like rain, and continue to do so until we land. In fact, [...]
Although this may sound odd coming from a writer and blogger, words are cheap. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing if we consider all the times we’ve heard people vent about what they’d like to do – or what they plan to do – to someone who’s just upset them. Think about what our [...]
A kiloton is an abstract concept. Let’s face it – most of us have no direct understanding of what a kilogram of TNT can accomplish, let alone a million times that amount. A kiloton is just a number – like the national debt – that we know intellectually to be huge, but without a [...]
I was stationed on an old submarine – at the time we took it into the shipyard for decommissioning it was one of the half-dozen oldest nuclear submarines in the world. It was creaky, things stuck or broke, it was sometimes temperamental – come to think of it, pretty much the way my body is [...]
With the week interrupted by both the Fourth of July and a heat wave it seems a good time to serve up a few light snacks rather than a full-blown posting. So here are a few stories in the news recently – none have received a lot of attention yet; we’ll have to see what [...]
I was at an international conference in Madrid, Spain in the summer of 2004 when I was accosted by a member of the delegation from the Philippines. She told me of a Filipino physician who had set up a cancer therapy clinic and who obtained a used radiation therapy source from a hospital in the [...]
I’ve never had the experience of having a gun pointed at me but I’m guessing that it would make me wish mightily for a gun of my own to help even the odds. I do know that whenever my submarine ventured near the Soviet Union we knew that their ships were armed and we took [...]
So what would you think about using nuclear weapons to blast a new canal across Central America? Or to dredge a new harbor? How about lighting off a nuke deep underground to fracture rock and increase natural gas production – and we thought that fracking was controversial! Nutty? Well…today they sure seem that way, but [...]
Let’s use this week’s post to speculate a little bit. Let’s think about a world in which cancer is no longer feared. This is not necessarily a world without cancer – but at least one in which cancer is routinely prevented or treated, so that it is more like pneumonia or (at worst) diabetes. This [...]