Although I know that leading off with an apology is not recommended, in this case it seems appropriate to do so in this case – for having been somewhat erratic in the last few postings, and for having missed last week. The emergency response to Hurricane Sandy (now apparently renamed “Superstorm Sandy”) is winding down [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
As an undergraduate student at Ohio State (I studied Geology) I was intrigued to find that hydrogeologists were indirect fans of the era of nuclear weapons testing. By “indirect” I mean that they didn’t really approve of the testing itself, but they loved the fact that the radioactivity put into the environment could be quite [...]
Say a dirty bomb goes off in your city – say contamination is spread over a few billion dollars’ worth of property. Government buildings are contaminated. Parks are contaminated. So are trendy restaurants and gentrifying apartment buildings, subway tracks and cars and busses. Tens of thousands of people are contaminated as well as are many [...]
A dirty bomb is not a good way to kill lots of people, but it is a great way to scare the hell out of a population. There are reports that Saddam Hussein investigated the possibility of making an RDD in the 1980s and gave up on the idea because it simply wasn’t deadly enough. [...]
As the grandson and nephew of dentists I was probably the only kid at school who actually enjoyed going to the dentist. In fact, it wasn’t until I joined the Navy that I understood why my classmates never shared my enthusiasm for practitioners of the dental arts – having my wisdom teeth removed in preparation [...]
The unknown frightens us a whole lot more than the known – we can plan on how to deal with hazards we know about while the unknown leaves us unprepared. When my son was young, for example, he was afraid of the dark. Or, rather, he was frightened of the things he could not see [...]