Life Lessons, Learned the Hard Way

This post will stand in fairly stark contrast to the rest, it's much more personal and hopefully informative from a personal development perspective. This isn't telling you how to live your life nor is it how everyone should, but it's been on my mind this morning and I'd like to share my personal thoughts.

One of my fairly good friends and peers with whom I work with a lot had started a steady downward trend. Call it senioritis, laziness or life, it was affecting my work and my organization's productivity. We're training for our future jobs and working on personal habits as well as building those under us up to replace us and move on, kind of like an internship or any job training. In this situation, the friend was in charge of me. He tasked me with stuff, I reported to him on my progress of the people under me and we should've had a constant dialogue. Imagine manager in charge of team leader leading a couple of other employees in a project.

Well, my manager started off fairly strong, model of fitness, work ethic, compassion and behavior and throughout the semester slowly trended downward. He started talking to me less, replying to me less, and to get tasked and to report on our progress, I decided to start finding ways to include people above him into conversations so I knew it was getting up to them (Problem 1). We meet as a group each day at various times to do various things where attendance is required, one day in February, he overslept and was late to our group meeting (Problem 2). World ending? No, but how does your project team feel when the guy they're working for isn't there when he is supposed to and you've been working hard on your job? We have other weekend meetings to plan out the next 2 weeks of project goals and discuss the previous week of accomplishments. Throughout the time, my friend is showing up just on time or a few minutes late(Problem 3). Again, not world ending. Next up we have spring break, time to relax, and then school slaps us in the face again and so does the project we're working on. Yeah it sucks but we're adults and we should be able to get back to it. Manager sleeps through alarm again and is late to a requited meeting (Problem 4). Next, my friend/manager tells his manager says he'll be at an extra meeting that's kind of not required but it's nice to see a senior employee at your overtime meetings once in a while to know they share the suck. He decides it's not a big deal and bails day of, but after telling people he'd go, it's seen as another meeting missed, this time by personal choice (Problem 5).

We as a project group decide it's time for an extra meeting to hash out some problems with everyone as a whole getting lazy and performance falling, which this friend/manager should attend and sleeps through (Problem 6).  String of problems over a few weeks and the CEO(also my friend) decided he's fed up with his manager screwing up and we decide to sit him down and formally reprimand him. It sucks since all 3 of us sitting on the reprimand board meeting are friends with each other as well as with the kid who's getting reprimanded.

This is where things get hairy and why I spent time above detailing the situation. Since in the real world, you're probably not going to be really close friends with people at the bottom, middle, and top levels of a large company just due to age difference and the job, but playing at it here in a learning situation it's the reality you face putting peers in charge of each other. We sternly talked to him about screwing up and put him on some extra tasks to correct him. Now, while that may seem obvious, here's the part that I myself am learning and working on. Where did I go wrong? Where did I fail to act or help to stop this snowball before we had to put this guy on the brink of being fired? This is the part that makes the meeting suck since as you go through, hopefully you're as critical of yourself as you are him and you pick out places you say "I could've said/done something here to at least warn him to stop his destructive behavior." I've always had a problem with doing this too much, being too judgemental or critical of people and it's something I fought sophomore and junior years to stop because it hurts people more when you do it wrong. Telling your roommate in a harsh manor to quit something he's doing is as bad as after he messes up, telling them you told them so. But, done correctly in either situation can help guide them to a better path or at least let them know you care for them and genuinely want to help. Conversely, this means if you're in that situation you need to take criticism well and not snap. Yes, the first few times it will be hard but if you critically evaluate it and care about improving yourself, you'll strengthen yourself and your friend. Win-win, right?

Let me get on my soapbox real quick (probably doing what I said I shouldn't) but I'll try to put it in my perspective.  If you've got a manager that suggests you to do something, it's probably more than a suggestion and if you suspect it is, it's probably also okay to ask for clarification. It'll pay dividends when we're working our way up the corporate ladder since you'll look like a rockstar. If you don't do that (or know you've been dodging the work altogether) and get reprimanded, take it to heart and work to improve yourself. We are grown-ups now and soon to be on our own (36 days until graduation). Take the situation and make the best of it. It's an "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade," kind of deal. And if you're wondering where the lemons came from, ask yourself first. You might have been giving them away and are now just getting them back. We are the future, we are the (hopeful) leaders of a developing energy field with immense possibilities. We all learn but we learn especially well through mistakes and adversity. Go beyond the minimums. Like investments, whatever we put in now while we're young will hopefully show immense return later. Getting down off soap box, now.

We've spent almost 2 years together and aside from occasionally joking about swapping to PolySci, I wouldn't go back to change my major. We've had great discussions and expanded our views and we've had short discussions where the discourse was harsh, myself being a particular contributor to the latter.

Comments, criticism and rebuttals appreciated!
-Michael

Funny Phrases and New Words

What started off as maybe a blog post about jumping the shark and nuking the fridge ended with me learning a new word that seemed kind of ridiculous to me.

First off, jumping the shark, if you aren't familiar with the term, talks about the moment a TV show does something ridiculous or outlandish to gain back viewers and generally comes soon after the show starts to decline. It also generally cements the fall in popularity because you can't keep doing things that ridiculous. The phrase itself refers to this scene from Happy Days when Fonzie literally jumps a shark on water skiis. My dad always used to talk about this phrase when I was a kid so I'm fairly familiar with it. After some research on its history, I ran into a similar term applied to the firm industry: "nuking the fridge."

Nuking the fridge means about the same thing in reference to a movie series. Time Magazine defines the phrase to mean: "to exhaust a Hollywood franchise with disappointing sequels." This actually comes from the fourth Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where Han Solo I mean Indiana Jones escapes a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator. Not only would the shock from getting blown away and landing kill you, but the inch or so of lead probably wouldn't stop the radiation much less the heat from cooking you. But, here's that scene so you can see ol' Indy in action for yourself.

While researching that, I also came across this sentence in a Wikipedia article: In August 2014, the City Manager of Black Rock City, Nevada described Burning Man, an annual event at nearby Black Rock Desert, as having "jumped the shark," when the 2014 event — which had been previously noted for core values of radical self-expression and self-reliance — featured incongruously posh VIP lounges, cell phone towers, private jets, and "glamping."

What the hell is glamping, you ask? That's exactly what I thought and why I had to find out. Turns out it stands for "glamour camping" where you basically "21st century tourists seek the luxuries of hotel accommodation alongside the escapism and adventure recreation of camping." Sounds nice but to me, that tiny level of self-sufficiency that regular camping requires is half the purpose. Might as well park a full size RV somewhere and call it "camping."

Aside from my little "what has the world come to" tangent there, we appear to have a term for when a TV show goes too far and when a movie goes too far. What about videogames? They're another huge source of digital entertainment? I wonder if there's a term for when they go on too long? Call of Duty, Halo, Assassin's Creed, all big name games with many many sequels, one can only wonder when it goes too long. Most already argue that it happened with Call of Duty after Modern Warfare 1 & 2 were such huge hits that they made Modern Warfare 3, that series is often considered the "peak" of that franchise. And Halo, as much as I love it, was supposed to end and be done at Halo 3 ("Finish the Fight") but people loved it so much (and they made so much money) that they made Halo 4, 5, and soon 6. Book series as well.

Every series need a climax and resolution, it is a good book/show/game/movie that can make another climax feel just as important and the resolution to both mesh and be satisfying. Every good thing eventually comes to an end, as morbid as that sounds. Imagine if Harry Potter had to fight reincarnated mecha-Lucius Malfoy? As great as they were, the series had a great ending and left open a world for J.K. Rowling to explore separately. I was and am a huge Star Wars Extended Universe nerd. I loved the movies and got into reading the books in middle school. I loved having characters fleshed out, their children fleshed out, even grandchildren but I realized that 50 years into the hypothetical Star Wars future was a long time to extend something.

Tying this back to reality, I don't think nuclear energy is anywhere near this point. Our field had a rise and a fall but as the world pushes toward new and better energy sources, I think we're about to enter the "rising action" step of the nuclear story and it's exciting that we can have a direct influence on the field and its direction.

-Michael

Never Ask the Internet To Do Anything

Welcome back to another space-based post about nuclear energy! Psyche! This time it's about that neat ocean exploring stuff I oh-so-briefly mentioned. The theme for this post comes from here. I found this article hilarious, especially the other names they said were suggested (I love British humor). This sparked an interesting question: what powers it? There appears to be a significant lack of gas stations in the Arctic and long exploration missions away from land, researching and lots of moving to study the ocean floor and there appears to be a significant lack of gas stations in the arctic.

ENTER, NUCLEAR POWER!

It's probably not nuclear powered but Russia uses nuclear powered ships as icebreakers since they have a lot of power and can go for long periods without refueling. China is also pushing forward plans to build a nuclear plant, the ACPR50S reactor, capable of powering a small island or a ship. Old Russian nuclear icebreakers sound kind of scary but maybe Chinese-designed reactors are better? Depends on your opinion of China, I suppose. Nuclear power can also only extend your mission for so long before you have to stop for food and other supplies. We need power somehow, nuclear may be the way to go, the risks or sinking a reactor to the ocean floor are probably pretty small compared to on land. Do you guys have any other energy suggestions? Have you heard about and neat new technology?

-Michael

Future Speculations

So I had a really good talk yesterday with a friend if mine, Florian, over lunch and it got me thinking. If America can't agree on a power source tr direction or even energy policy, how do we expect the world to agree? And without that, how do we expect to colonize other worlds? Basically, since we cant communicate or agree, how are we going to expand past this planet?

Every day we're approaching the time when we'll outgrow this planet. The human race's desire to expand is so great that it will force us to starve long before we curb it, so the next step after we overpopulate Earth is somewhere else. We're looking at Mars but without a source of liquid water or much atmosphere, that's going to be hard. If we do find a new planet, we'll probably be unable to reach it. Have you ever seen the size comparison videos of space? Mars is about half the diameter of Earth and its a REALLY long ways to get to anywhere else outside our solar system. We can probably shoot something in the direction of another solar system but we just aren't there yet. Plus there are more than a thousand languages on this planet alone? Cut that down to the top 10% and its still a lot of different translations. 10% of that to languages from countries able to go into space? Still 10 languages to decipher and work with. Who gets the first new planet? America? Who governs it? All this stuff can't happen till we figure out problems here on Earth. That's not saying we need to make the world language English and take over space. How do we govern colony worlds? Do we set them free from all influence? It's not exactly the British colonizing the new world but it's very similar. Do we establish a world government at some point? If Mayor Bagodonuts is corrupt in big town X of state Y, then how can we expect a reasonable chance at a worldwide government? All these questions with so few available answers.Hope you've enjoyed the last few days of space related posts!

Also, if you believe the moon landing was fake then we're really screwed!

Other neat size comparison video about space ships for nerds like me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Loc7qX7FI

-Michael

Post Super-Duper Tuesday Job Status

So, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton having come out on top in the Florida Republican and Democratic primaries, I think it's about time to break down the candidates' stances on nuclear energy.

Ladies first, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is quoted as being "agnostic about nuclear energy." Most of her remarks tend to be toward pushing a clean/renewable energy policy and making the Unites States the "world's clean energy superpower." She promises

1. The United States will have more than half a billion solar panels installed across the country by the end of Hillary Clinton's first term.
2. The United States will generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home in America within ten years of Hillary Clinton taking office.

 What this means for nuclear energy, we have yet to see. This is also a huge goal to achieve, meaning she'd probably push a law through forcing the progress. Again, this is unknown as to how she'd consider nuclear waste, whether is passes the clean energy requirements and while waste reprocessing can mitigate the total waste, whether she'd support it.

Next up is business-mogul-gone-politician Donald Trump. Regardless of your views on him, if he's elected his policy will have an effect on the jobs in the nuclear community. The good news is he's fairly pro-nuclear. He supports nuclear energy and reforming the permitting process, which is bogged down with red tape and bureaucracy. He is cautious though, saying,“we have to be careful” because nuclear power “does have issues.” He also makes a good point, saying:  “I’m in favor of nuclear energy, very strongly in favor of nuclear energy. If a plane goes down people keep flying. If you get into an auto crash people keep driving.” He is, however, much more in favor of natural gas driven energy systems, saying we have Saudi Arabia x 100 but we don't use it.

So there you have it, the two most likely (maybe, probably, at this point, totally speculative) presidential candidates. One with a fairly uncertain future and the other claiming all sorts of good things for nuclear power's future. Open minded debate is more than welcome. Hopefully you voted in the primaries and you intend to vote in the presidential election, it's your civic duty. Remember, people sacrificed and continue to sacrifice their lives for this opportunity.

Also, anyone else notice how we refer to Hillary Clinton as Hillary but not Donald Trump as Donald? Aside from Former President Clinton, I don't really think it would be that confusing...

-Michael

(I tried to find a funny campaign picture for Hillary but failed, feel free to post one in the comments)

Sources:
  -Clinton: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/07/26/renewable-power-vision/
  -Trump: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/07/donald-trump-on-his-nuclear-doctrine-democracy-promotion-and-why-he-refuses-to-use-term-supreme-leader/
  -Both: http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/20/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-nuclear-power/

Daaaamn Michael, back at it again with the SPACE TECH

I know that's what you'll be saying after you read this awesome blog post. Because people seem to be so opposed to using nuclear power on Earth, they shouldn't get mad if we use it in space, right? Wrong, but it's worth a shot. There's a ton of different ideas for usage of nuclear technology listed on this page (thanks Wikipedia) but I think one of the most far-fetched is Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, because it's probably not something you've thought about before. Basically, the idea is to use this:

to propel this:

Now you're probably thinking, wouldn't detonating a lot of nuclear bombs on Earth be bad? You'd be right, and that's why we use it in space far away from Earth so we don't contaminate the globe. The idea is conventional rockets get the ship to space, then nuclear detonations are set off behind the ship to propel it with the pulses from the released energy. Of course heavy shielding and and resistance to shock would need to be designed into the ship, among other things. Unless we somehow figure out faster than light travel, we're going to try to make propulsion technology to get us as close as we can. A lot of the things that put nuclear power on the list like efficiency, long-lifetime, and high energy density also make it a foundation for new space travel ideas. Cancer, space, energy, nuclear has tons of possibilities.

-Michael

SPACE TECH

Space exploration is pretty neat, agreed? One of the things you always hear people say is that we know more about space than we do our oceans. I wont debate the validity of that claim but I will assert that both areas of exploration are REALLY FREAKIN COOL. So, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench is 6.831 miles deep and according to the time tested source Wikipedia, "There is no firm boundary where space begins. However the Kármán line, at an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level, is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping."

We can theoretically run trips down to the depths of the ocean faster than we can send stuff into outer space, plus there's the whole going with or against gravity thing. But powering an expedition down into the ocean is *seemingly* easier than one into outer space, since they have to go farther and last longer. So, you can't really burn stuff without oxygen and there is a significant lack of that out in space. No wind to power wind turbines. Batteries seem logical but how do you charge them? You're got 2 options so far: solar charged batteries and nuclear radioisotope thermal generators. What if your space mission takes you out too far from the sun? What to a really cloudy or dusty planet, or anything that would obstruct the sunlight? That's where nuclear power comes in.

Radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) are really just that, radioisotopes that generate thermal...energy. The main use is to get really really hot and provide heat to a thermocouple, where two metals are connected and temperature differences create an electric current. These RTGs are restricted to powering things that require less than about 100 Watts but they can last up to 50 years. Voyager 1 space probe was launched in 1977 and is expected to keep transmitting signals up until 2025.The drawback is that even though these things can last that long, they're still serious radiation hazards long after they've surpassed their useful power lifetimes. So, we can't ethically just go parking radioactive golf carts on other planets, inhabited or not. We're not likely to power any manned probes with these as they're too low power and potentially dangerous to support us, but they're pretty darn useful when the sun isn't shining in the depths of space. 

-Michael

South Park Season 13 Episode 14

Hey there, today I'm going to talk about something I'm sure you've always wanted to read about: a basic course in environmental pathway modeling. I'll be attempting to do this through the breakdown of a smaller scale and more relatable situation, which is where it gets fun.

Environmental pathway modeling is a figure detailing each way radioactive contaminants can be released into the environment and make it back to humans. The model shows the source, environmental medium and transport mechanism, exposure point, exposure route, and potentially exposed populations. A great article for working through model examples can be found here.

Think of it like group of kids peeing in one specific ride at a water park. Now, like a nuclear plant, the water park rides have filters to keep the water clean and circulating. Assume that these kids pee in the water and the systems fail so the same water keeps circulating. The source would be the kids peeing. The environmental mechanisms would be the pool itself as well as leakage along the ground from splashing/overflow, that pee-water circulating through other pipes near other areas of the park, and people wet with that water walking around to other areas of the park. The exposure points would then become the ground covered in pee water, drips and splashes from the water, any leakage from pee water pipes, and anywhere the wet people touch or go swim afterwards, The pee concern is similar to radiation in that no one wants to eat or be covered in it, therefore the exposure routes would be getting any of those exposure routes in your mouth or getting it on your body either by swimming in it, walking in it, or otherwise touching it. The potentially exposed population can be the water park workers, guests, or even the general public outside the gates all being contaminated with pee water.

If this wasn't a graphic enough description of it, make a good investment of 2 minutes of your life and watch a clip of the South Park episode I saw fit to make the title here. I wasn't able to find the full episode on Comedy Central's website but if you're courageous, you can find some links on Google. 

All jokes aside, this method is useful for analyzing how contaminants more through the environment but it is only as good as how creative its maker is. There are many ways contaminants can travel and unfortunately we find out too late that people are dying and after some backtracking, we connect the dots and figure out a new pathway. There are a lot of modeling codes and analysis tools available (probably not freely) to help with this but again, they are used to assist but not define contaminant movement. Hope today wasn't too vulgar or immature, thanks for reading!

-Michael

Well, sadly we're back at school. During break, I got the chance to go explore most of the East Coast, from Charleston up to New York. While up in New York, I found more than a few pictures like this:

on their subways. Like we've talked about before, the nuclear industry gets a bad rap for pollution and toxic waste, in a Simpson-esq style. The picture shows a dude catching a three-eyed fish with a barrel of what is shown to be nuclear waste floating nearby, indicated by the trifoil on the side of the barrel. The poster is mostly sarcastic, the way it depicts people who live in lofts and the way the people shopping in the fancy market look are stereotypical and funny. Thus, looking at the toxic waste segment and applying that same logic, it's easy to find it funny and appreciate the joke. I understand the joke but how many thousands of people see that every day and don't?

The Gowanus Canal is heavily polluted, but to the best of my researching ability, it is through other industrial problems, none of which are nuclear. Yes, it is disgusting and polluted but no it's even remotely related to being a problem for the nuclear industry. Just another example of playing off of the public's association of nuclear with nasty barrels of green sludge.

I also got a chance to check out Charleston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Columbia. If you're ever passing through Philly, the Liberty Bell is free to check out and really moving.

-Michael

MUTANT ZOMBIE CANCER PLANTS

Not BRAAAINNNSSS...
It's GRAAIINNNNSSSSS....

Well, now that that's out of the way, let's get to talking about those mutant zombie cancer plant's I mentioned. Most of the radioactive food we eat comes from one path: plants absorbing radioactive water/soil isotopes and us eating those or plant absorbing stuff then transferring it to animals that eat them which we then eat. What happens to humans after they start drinking radiation contaminated water or eating radiation contaminated food from those nasty radioisotopes spreading through the environment from fallout/improperly disposed of nuclear waste/facility accidents? Bad stuff: cancer, nausea, defects, possible genetic repercussions for you and any future children. Yeah, nasty stuff. Similar stuff happens to animals, most people know cancer isn't specific to just humans. But, did you know plants can get cancer as well?



Cancer is usually associated with the terrible thing that afflicts upwards of 40% of humans and is frequently fatal. Cancer is really just rabidly reproducing cells. That's it. Something so simple can cause so much pain and suffering and cost so much money. It sucks, a lot, when your own body just fills up with a mass of useless cells in places where they don't belong. I went over this in a blog a few weeks ago but I'll summarize it briefly. Cancer comes in stages 0-4. 0 is in-situ, like brand new, single location cancers that aren't as bad, relatively. Stage 1 is localized where they start growing in place and being a big nuisance where they shouldn't, moving to adjacent tissues, moving nerves, pressing on things, like a golf ball inserted somewhere in your body. Stage 2-3 is where the cancer enters the lymph and starts to mobilize. A lot of time Stage 3 is showing up in the lymph nodes and causing problems. Eventually, stage 4 starts where there are too many mobile cancer cells for the lymph nodes to strain out and they spread throughout the body, overwhelming the immune system. Tons of golf balls and damaged tissues all over the body. Bad.
All this comes from a couple strands of DNA getting hit by the ionizing radiation in the contaminated food. So, can plants get cancer? The answer is yes since plants are made of cells, and these cells can also be damaged or infected and start to reproduce rapidly. Plant cells, if you remember your old Biology lectures, have cell walls made of cellulose which makes them much more rigid. Because of this, it is very hard for cancers to move far from their origins. This tends to produce bumps or knots in the wood that look like:

 

So there you have it, a possible treatment for cancer is making our cells stronger and stopping the spread of cancer. The human race has mimicked Mother Nature before so this may be one more time she can help us.
The cure for cancer may not be out there but maybe ways to preempt it are! Plants found a way.
Sorry for lack of mutant and zombie related themes.

-Michael

The fallout on fallout in Fallout

Completely unrelated and shameless plug for what I'm listening to while I write this:
since you're either perusing the internet for nuclear related topics or a Nuclear Eng. classmate "encouraged" to read this, I'm guessing there's a decent possibility you're a Star Wars fan,. If that's true and you fancy EDM music, I would highly recommend the new Star Wars Headspace album produced by Rick Rubin.
"Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine."

Okay, back to business! This post came about from the idea that Fallout 4 may actually be a semi-accurate depiction of survival and long term effects of thermonuclear war. After some reading, i found 2 articles that really summed up what I wanted to say, i didn't think it necessary to butcher them and put it here. Instead, here's the first one that talks about almost exactly what I wanted to say. Next, here's one that simplifies a lot of the hard to understand stuff about dose terms, decay rates, and other background explanations that might help you understand better rather than just accept what is being said.


Basically, Fallout may actually be a good depiction of what the landscape would look like after a thermonuclear war. The mechanics behind it (like immediate curing from radiation poisoning)  and the mutant animals, not so much.

Moving on from the reference in the blog title that grabbed your attention, it's time for a real world reference and application of the topic!

Fallout lore states, in reference to what caused it to be a nuclear wasteland: "the city of Las Vegas, from Fallout: New Vegas, was the target of 77 nuclear warheads alone" and page 11 of the Fallout 1 game manual states "the average size of a nuclear warhead is between 200-750 kilotons." Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site
 ranging from 10 kilotons to 1 megaton yield. So, why doesn't Nevada look like Fallout? Well, it kind of does, being a desert, but again, no mutants. The main difference is the manner in which the detonations happened. In Fallout, they hit cities which caught on fire and pumped tons of carbon into the atmosphere all while poisoning the landscape and water supplies. In real life Nevada, most of the tests were underground and in the middle of no where, thus no giant city to burn and mostly contained poisoning. But what about the groundwater and landscape?

This is of growing concern to Nevadians (? Help please ?). The contained radioactive fallout is still there. Fortunately it's underground in a desert with a naturally low water table but eventually, it still reaches the water table and can then be transported wherever the water goes. Unfortunately, once it gets there, it cannot be removed except by time and we can only monitor that transport and decay progress. This article says about 300 million Ci is contained in the slow-moving aquifers underneath the desert. For now, it's a waiting game to see if the contaminated water will move out from under the test site and how fast it will decay. Moving 12 - 18 inches a year, it's no Usain Bolt, but it is steadily moving to dangerous water table locations where people in Nevada drink from (if not already there). Nevada is petitioning the government for recompense for the damages and is fighting against a "massive part of their state [becoming] a permanent environmental sacrifice zone." 
Gotta go! More next time!

-Michael

Big Ass Post for a Big Ass Bomb

The biggest bomb ever detonated, in fact. Tsar Bomba. The design allowed for a 100 MT blast but it was scaled down to *only* produce 50 MT to avoid too many problems from the fallout. 50 MT. M as in Mega. Little Boy, the first atomic bomb dropped in an act of warfare, detonated with a 15 kt yield. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a 21 kt yield. Tsar Bomba was over 2500 times more powerful of an explosion than either of those. and it could've been double that, 5000 times larger, had the Russians figured out a safe way to detonate it!!

To give the Soviets some credit, they decided not to build the 100 MT version because of the serious health hazards a detonation of that size would've posed to the northern areas of the USSR. The resulting mushroom cloud being 64 km high, about 1/5 of the way to where the International Space Station orbits (330), would lead you to believe it would have immense fallout repercussions, I'll get into this later on.

The weapon itself weighs 27 tons, they had to strip just about everything they could from the plane they dropped it from, a Tu-95, including extra fuel tanks and the bomb bay doors. This is the Tu-95,

 which for reference, is about 2 times the size of a Boeing 737:

So, basically you've got this big plane carrying a big bomb which is going to make a big explosion. But, lot of people forget that you've gotta watch out that the bomb you drop doesn't have an explosion so large that your bombing run becomes a suicide run. To prevent this, they attached parachutes to the bomb so it fell slower and gave the pilots 45 extra seconds to gtfo. The bomb detonated 4 km off the ground, about 6.5 miles high, but the actual fireball never touched the ground, the shock wave was so immense that it kept if from actually reaching the ground. This shock wave was so large, it circled the earth at least 3 times before dissipating.

Onto the fallout aspect since that's what triggered this and last post in relation to atmospheric radioisotope dispersion. Like I already said, the bomb was supposed to be 100 MT but to modify it to 50 MT, the Soviets put a lead shield around the third and (people think) the second stage to cut down on fast fission of the U-238 there. That's right, I said third stage, as in the bomb had 3 stages.

If you aren't familiar with how thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs work, here's a quick update(I'll probably be on some government watch list for a while after this). Like a regular bomb, nuclear weapons work by putting as much energy as you can in as small a space as you can until it is all released at once. Nuclear fission, things splitting apart, releases a lot of energy if done right. That's how nuclear power works; split uranium-235 apart, use the heat to boil water to steam, use steam to turn turbine and make electricity flow. Little Boy and Fat Man were fission type bombs. Make an assembly that isn't critical but can be made to go supercritical somehow and then hold it together as the energy builds until it blows itself apart. Very dirty. They typically blow apart before they're burned up all the nasty stuff thus spreading the radioactive junk everywhere. Most hydrogen bombs have 2 stages, fission and fusion. Fusion is combining atoms for WAY more energy, but also harder to achieve. Hydrogen bombs use a fission explosion to create a fusion explosion, the "smaller" fission explosion pushes the fusion part together so hard that the atoms combine and release WAY more energy. This explains why Little Boy and Fat Man only had 15-20 kT yield but shortly after the US was detonating 10 MT bombs fairly easily. So, little explosion causes big explosion. For Tsar Bomba, there was a third, bigger explosion set off by the second big fusion explosion, another fusion assembly ready to be pushed together and go boom.

Back to why fusion bombs are cleaner. Most bombs are made in a uranium-238 container both to shield the users and contain the explosions. Like I said, fission blows itself apart before it burns up and spreads its nastiness. Fusion bombs, however, burn up much faster and thus are able to burn up a lot of the nasty before it is physically able to be propelled apart. Tsar Bomba is reported as "the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield [100 MT] on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%."

Since even the Russians didn't want to irradiate the entire world, they put in place lead shields around the second an third stages to stop fast neutrons from interacting with the uranium-238. According to nuclearweaponstests.org, "This reduced the yield by 50% and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of about 51.5 Mt), yet still proved the full yield design." So, basically it was a massive explosion but because most of that came from massive fusion reactions which clean themselves up for the most part, it was relatively the cleanest detonation. For perspective, the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had an efficiency of only 1.4% and 17%. This means that 1.4% and 17% of the fissile material in the bomb reacted, the rest was blown all over the place by the detonation.

Now, the bomb was huge, but relatively inefficient as well. Most of the power of the blast was channeled upwards into space by that shock wave that prevented it from touching the ground. Again, it was a freakin huge bomb so it leveled the crap out of the island, Novaya Zemlya Island, that it was detonated over. It melted the rocks. It broke windows and destroyed houses 34 miles away. It could've given you 3rd degree burns 64 miles away. You could feel the heat 170 miles away. Impressive but....


The best part of all of this, which puts the whole arms race flexing of the Cold War into perspective is this sentence from tsarbomba.org: "The bomb served no military purposes. For that, it would be too heavy to carry and there was no plane able to do intercontinental flights with such a load."

It was useless. Relatively useless. The moment you've all been waiting for:

here's the video of it exploding. 

Awe inspiring and chilling at the same time, isn't it?

Here's another Ronald Reagan one because I think it's fitting.

-Michael

Nuclear fallout, it's a...blast?

Alright. That's it. All my creative genius wasted in one terrible pun. Now the rest of this blog is going to be lame, right? 

(really old reference, if you've got 2 minutes of your life to waste, check out the Youtube video that started it)

I'm going to talk about nuclear fallout, the residual radioactive material, from weapons tests and the far reaching environmental effects it can have. First of all, there's 2 primary kids of detonation, air burst and round burst, both with different implications on how the fallout behaves. Air bursts occur when the bomb detonates above the ground and in this case, the fission products from the bomb vaporize and are drawn up quickly into the stratosphere. Depending on winds and other meteorological conditions, they settle back toward the earth more slowly than ground bursts. In a ground burst, the ground around the bomb is vaporized and drawn up with the mushroom cloud, but because its chunks of rock or whatever was on the ground, the particles bond to the radioactive particles from the bomb and up to 50% of the fallout falls to the ground within 24 hours afterwards.

If viewed from the "solution to pollution is dilution" aspect, the air burst has less fallout since it falls slower and thus is more spread out. The larger particles from the ground burst contaminate the area immediately as well as spread through the air like an air burst. The largest example of an incident like this was the Castle Bravo incident in 1954, where a theoretically 6 Mt air burst bomb test produced a 15 Mt explosion and coupled with poor weather conditions, spread farther and had much worse impacts than were anticipated. Pretty gruesome radiation exposures of nearby island and more in the Pacific Ocean became a national incident which led to attempts to end atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, finally done in 1963.

In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the U.S., Soviet Union, and Great Britain and tests moved underground, though France and China continued atmospheric testing for 11 and 17 years, respectively. There are also radioactive fallout concerns from these, just not as environmentally destructive. From 1952 to 1962, there is evidence showing an increase in cancers in counties around the Nevada nuclear test site. Iodine-131 is the main contributor to thyroid cancer since thyroids tend to gather iodine that enters the body. Additionally, caesium-137 and strontium-90 pose significant health concerns from the fallout because of their half lives and decay modes (30.17 y and 1.176 MeV beta and 28.79 y and 0.546 MeV beta, respectively).

This graph shows the per capita thyroid doses resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site from 1951-1962.  This post is already really long so I'll cut it off here, I could talk about this stuff for a while since it's so interesting. Hope you learned something about how dangerous the nuclear testing age and the Cold War were, I also hope you didn't grow up in the red region of that map between 1950 and 1960. 

-Michael

 

   (Too ironic not to add)

Let's Play Acronym!

We all know it's challenging to read laws or standards, really anything more than a fairly simple bullet point list and I'll start to lose interest after the first paragraph or less. These are very important documents but you're pretty unlikely to read them for pleasure, unless you're a really bored masochist or it's your job/assignment to. Added to the dry, complex nature of all the regulations out there for the nuclear community are infinite acronyms and backronyms that serve to confuse the casual or unfamiliar reader even further. So, here's a list of a bunch that you might need to concern yourself with as a member of the public:

1. NPP: Nuclear Power Plant
2. NRC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
3. IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency
4. BWR: Boiling Water Reactor
5. PWR: Pressurized Water Reactor
6. CERN: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or
                 European Organization for Nuclear Research
7. DBA: Design Basis Accident
8. DOE: Department of Energy
9. SNF:  Spent Nuclear Fuel
10. HLW: High Level Waste
11. ILW: Intermediate Level Waste
12. LLW: Low Level Waste
13. INSAG: International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
14. MOX: Mixed Oxide (fuel)
15. PSA: Public Safety Assessment
16. CFR: Code of Federal Regulations
17. ATWS: Anticipated Transient Without Scram
18. GDC: General Design Criteria
19. LOCA: Loss of Cooling Accident
20. AFW: Auxiliary Feed Water
21. IRPA: International Radiation Protection Association
22. ANSI: American National Standards Institute
23. ALAP: As Low As Possible
24. ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable
25. ALARP: As Low As Reasonably Practicable
26. ALATA: As Low As Technically Achievable
27. ARGONAUT: Argonne Nuclear Assembly for University Training
28. ARMS: Rrea Radiation Monitoring System (not appendage on your body)
29. ARS: Acute Radiation Syndrome
30. FSAR: Final Safety Analysis Report

31. RSIC: Radiation Shielding Information Center

32. ICRP: International Commission on Radiological Protection

33. ASME: American Society of Mechanical Engineers
34. RPV: Reactor Pressure Vessel
35. JANAP: Joint Army-Navy-Air Force Publication
36. USPHS: U.S. Public Health Service

37. LEP: Local Emergency Protection

38. BTS: Brazilian Thorium Sludge

39. COPS: Containment Overpressure Protection Systems

40. B&W: Babcock & Wilcox Co. (now Framatome)

41. BONUS: Boiling Nuclear Superheat Reactor

42. BPVC: Boiler and Pressure Vessel Committee
43. PA: Protected Area

44. BOL: Beginning of Life

45. ATWT: Anticipated Aransient Without Trip

That's 45 right there and you probably skipped to the bottom of the list to read down here and now that you realize there isn't much, you went back up and read the rest of the list because you felt bad. It's okay, this is just an example of the how the human brain reacts to vast lists of information. This was a list of 45, here is a list of 4500 acronyms published by the NRC. I pulled these off of this Nuclear Energy Agency website and that NRC list in the sentence above. Nuclear safety is important it's everyone's right to know what you're being protected from and how.

-Michael

How Can Radon Hurt You?

So tonight's blog idea comes from my roommate who has lived in the Central states with a basement his entire life and had only heard of one Radon, Radon Randell, quarterback from the TV show Blue Mountain State. Since it is a fairly large concern with a fairly simple solution, I'll go ahead and talk about it but leave the heavy lifting to the EPA. Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive element that is a stage in the decay chain from uranium and thorium to lead. Natural uranium and thorium, having half lives of 4.468×10⁹ years and 1.405×10¹⁰ years respectfully, were all created when the earth was created and decay continuously. Eventually, they both reach lead and are stable, but it's this steady production of radon underground that slowly leeches upwards that is dangerous. Because it is such a heavy gas, it tend to stick to lower areas, thus, without air movement it will settle in depressions. 

The most dangerous part of this is that is slowly gathers in basements and without ventilation, it will stay there, growing in concentration, as the unsuspecting  homeowner breaths it in continuously. Because it has a fairly short half life of ~3.8 days and emits alpha particles, it is fairly harmless unless ingested or breathed in. Once inside your lungs or stomach, the cells there aren't able to deal with the emitted alpha energy and are damaged, leading to cancers. 

<sup>Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer following smoking. Studies of this are further complicated because it's hard to study the effect of radon on lung cancer because the results are so obscured by smoking. The upside to the dangers of radon is we've grown accustomed to it's constant presence as a species. This means that once you can reduce its levels to near background, then you've done about as much as you can to reduce your risks. 

So, TLDR: solution to pollution is dilution. In this case, ventilate your house to the outdoors and move on with your life to more serious concerns like the radiation from the bananas in your kitchen. For more on if your county is at a larger or smaller danger, check out this map from the EPA. Also, test kits for your house are free or cheap so its worth it to check them out! 

Plenty of things in the world can kill you, this is thankfully one that can be mitigated easily so you can keep on being 'Murican.

-Michael</sup>

 

The Demon Core, Nuclear Work Related Risks Then and Now

Nuclear Engineering, if Tom Cruise worked in the field, you might call it a "Risky (Cancer) Business"

Too far? Okay well today's topic is cancer risk of radiation, specifically to people who work in the nuclear field. The blog title credit comes from our class lecture Feb 5 when we watched the clip of "Fat Man and Little Boy" when John Cusack, playing fictional scientist Michal Merriman, performs a criticality experiment to measure how a plutonium source behaves in the early stages of a nuclear bomb detonation. He's holding two things that aren't supposed to touch apart with a flat blade screwdriver, turns out this was a bad idea when the screwdriver slips, they two halves to this sphere come together and the experiment goes wildly out of control, irradiating him and the others in the room, him dying of radiation poisoning 9 days later and the other surviving. This was a real situation with a real core, nicknamed "The Demon Core" (Professional Wikipedia Source) and it was really held apart by a screwdriver, although the scientist killed was actually named Louis Slotin. This was the second person killed by this exact core, the first being another scientist, Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. exactly 9 months earlier.

All very interesting, but onto the real meat of this post and how that all relates to cancer risk. It's a stereotype that nuclear engineers or any other nuclear workers face that their job sucks or is terrible because they're going to get cancer from it, if they haven't already, and that nuclear things are terrible for the world because: cancer. Most of this is caused by innocent ignorance of the topic, less than 1% of the US population will ever operate or work on a nuclear project, and most of what the public hears is bad news about accidents or what prominent people say about nuclear energy, see my last blog post about media and nuclear accidents or my friend's post to start on what relevant US figures might say.  Don't get me wrong, cancer is a very real risk when dealing with radioactivity, but an important caveat to this is that there is A LOT of effort that goes into protection of the workers and even MORE (10-100x lower limits) that the public is allowed to be exposed to. 

 To try to spark ideas, provide valuable topics /explanations, and expand the amount of readers I may have, I've decided to try to ask friends or family that have almost no nuclear experience besides knowing me if they have any immediate questions that pop up when I the next few weeks' blog topics. I came to this attempted direction when the blog came up while talking to a good friend of mine on deployment in the Army, the exact way I put it was, "do you have any questions about cancer risks and nuclear engineering sh*t." He asked what the average amount of exposure you would encounter across your career is and if it is detrimental to your long term health. Well, here comes the part the media would quote: It depends based on what you do relating to nuclear, reactor repair, operation, national lab experimentation, etc but it is limited to 5 rem/year and yes, it can be detrimental. 

Next, the part the media may not quote. 10 CFR Part 20, Title 10 (Energy) of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 20 deals with radiation exposure of workers and public as well as monitoring, controlling, and dissemination of such information to the public and workers. For the year 2013, 135,681 people were monitored, 57,115 of which received a measurable dose. The average dose per person was 0.15 rem.

This value can be compared with the 0.31 rem that the average person in the United States receives annually from natural background radiation. Worldwide annual exposures to natural background radiation are generally expected to be in the range of 0.1 rem to 1.3 rems, with 0.24 rem being the current average worldwide value (right from 10 CFR 20's Radiation Exposure Information and Reporting System, REIRS, from 2013). 

So, the average is 0.15 rem added onto the 0.31 rem you receive every year from stuff like the sun, bananas, and radon gas leaking out of the ground. Take this with a grain of salt, remember it varies by what actual job you do, but the average is an okay number to use for this purpose. Like skin cancer from the sun, sometimes you get it and you weren't even in the sun for long and sometimes you get it after you've burnt yourself crispy more than enough times. Cancer sort of follows this trend for other nuclear exposures as well: if you get some dose, you can develop it and you can be reasonably sure that if it does, it'll be in the area affected by what you were exposed to. It is a stochastic radiation effect; cancer's probabilistic, it is random in nature. We only know that increased radiation exposure has led to increases in cancer rates from post accident or WWII analysis.  We know that the radiation might penetrate your skin, depending on what type it is. We know that it might interact with your skin or any other tissue/bone/organ it passes through. We know that it might damage a piece of the DNA contained in the cells in that body part. We know that depending on that body part's replication rate, it may not matter for some cancer but for other radiation sickness effects, more frequent replications mean worse consequences from the jacked up cells being replicated. We know cancerous cells tend to go haywire and replicate much faster and that their real problem is they make tumors that may spread and do internal damage to the body from blockage or random lumps of cells tearing things or pressing on things that shouldn't be pressed on.

If you subscribe to hormesis, you believe that some level of radiation is actually good for things because we're developed in an environment with low levels of background radiation for so long. This is a fact, we have lived some level of background radiations the entire lifetime of the earth. However, the effects (good or bad) of this background radiation are unknown. Hormesis theorizes that it is not very small, long term doses that harm you but rather larger doses in smaller time frames. To finally answer my friend's question, my average exposure at a power plant would be approximately 1.5 times that of any normal person, but well within levels where it should be negligible. The NRC regulations are very conservative limits, and I will receive much less than the max limit. Yes, this may affect me long term by increasing my risk for cancer, but this is also assumed negligible because of  low levels. Taking into account I will have less radiation exposure to myself from radon, bananas, and the sun on a submarine, I'll probably have much less total dose per year than an average person and thus actually have less cancer risk.

I'll end here before I go on forever. If you're interested in more, look up the USS Ronald Reagan crew exposure after their humanitarian aid to Fukushima or passing on radiation induced genetic deformations to offspring. Next week brings radon and lung cancer risks, radiation protection standards, and atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides!

-Michael