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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]