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. [...]
Several months ago I was involved in an interesting conversation about improvised nuclear devices – specifically, the best way to tell the public what had happened. In particular I recall a several-minute discussion on whether or not the public should be told that an attack had taken place. I have to admit I was somewhat [...]
Growing up intermittently Catholic, I was taught about Limbo – a sort of antechamber to heaven that holds the souls of those who were never baptized by who had not committed a sin of their own. Those souls in Limbo aren’t admitted to Heaven, but neither are they sent to Hell – they are simply [...]
Over the weekend Earth was slammed by the biggest solar storm in about a decade. Days earlier a huge x-class solar flare (the most powerful category) had blasted millions of tons of hydrogen into space, with Earth in the cross-hairs. The eruption – called a coronal mass ejection – blasted through space at more than [...]
Anniversaries are important dates. They mark the return of the Earth to its previous position against the firmament – the completion of a year – they give us the opportunity to reflect on events that were important in our lives, on their significance, and how these events have affected us. March 11 – this Sunday [...]
Two billion or so years ago there was a brief moment of time (geologically speaking) when nature managed to make something that would not be seen again until the middle of the last century – a natural nuclear reactor. Earlier and there wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to mobilize uranium (uranium is only soluble [...]
My Great-Uncle Harvey was the only physician I knew as a kid. He delivered my father, my aunt, me, and my sister; he visited me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out; gave us our shots; and attended to all of the other minutiae of keeping us all healthy. In fact, it wasn’t [...]
I am a health physicist. And no, this is not the first admission in a 12-step program – more like a statement that means very little to most of the people in the US. If I tell the person next to me on a plane, for example, that I am a health physicist they usually [...]