According to Thomas Jefferson “The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.” In a nutshell, government exists to serve and to protect the public. This view of government (not surprisingly) echoes the Preamble [...]
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 [...]
This week’s posting is a bit tardy – in the continuing aftermath of Hurricane Sandy I’ve been helping on the night shift at one of the city’s shelters and, more recently, been helping to check on the occupants of high-rises and housing project buildings in some of the areas affected by the storm. It’s been [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Quick note – I haven’t exhausted the topic of thorium, and I am incredibly gratified at the number of comments my last two postings have attracted and the thought that’s gone into them. But I wanted to take a short break from thorium since I know that not everyone is completely enamored of that particular [...]
Last week I wrote a little bit about how fertile thorium can be turned into reactor fuel. A discussion of how a thorium reactor might differ from a uranium reactor seems a reasonable follow-up topic. The reactors I worked with in the Navy were light-water pressurized water reactors. Like virtually every reactor we have on [...]