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I wouldn't have thought a liquid vortex made by hand would cause one of those happy fun time incidents. That's both really cool and horrifying at the same time.
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Oct 29, 2017 08:59
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Intoluene posted:I do wonder if Cherenkov radiation is like the auroras in that they look way better in photos than in real life. Nope way cooler in person.
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Oct 29, 2017 09:00
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What happens when a atom splits while attached to a molecule or compound? Does it fly apart from the energy of the split with the constituent parts forming new bonds?
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Oct 29, 2017 09:09
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illectro posted:In many criticality accidents witnesses report a blue flash, this doesn't show up in security camera footage, the blue flash is Cherenkov radiation from relativistic particles passing through your eyeballs. That's terrifying.
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Oct 29, 2017 09:18
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Something similar happens to astronauts
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Oct 29, 2017 09:40
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Mustached Demon posted:Nope way cooler in person. Great now I have the suicidal urge to see Cherenkov Radiation.
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Oct 29, 2017 09:44
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Intoluene posted:Great now I have the suicidal urge to see Cherenkov Radiation. Ah, the French call it l'appel du rayonnement
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Oct 29, 2017 09:50
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Not dangerous I guess because poo poo's under control but I like these videos of reactors starting up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJvaet-4T5k Pulse compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sve4qSlH3GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQdS0pbpKo
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Oct 29, 2017 10:19
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oohhboy posted:What happens when a atom splits while attached to a molecule or compound? Does it fly apart from the energy of the split with the constituent parts forming new bonds? Splits like nuclear reaction? Yeah it just flips out and flies away to figure out bonds when it's not so hot.
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Oct 29, 2017 15:59
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The Sausages posted:Not dangerous I guess because poo poo's under control but I like these videos of reactors starting up: yeah, water's a good shield for the neutrons and whatnot coming out of the reactor, all you're getting hit by is light of a fairly specific wavelength. If you want unsafe people have made unshielded pulse reactors before.... gotta be careful when you use it otherwise well, things start to melt and fail as the whole things goes a little too critical.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device Dr. Despair has a new favorite as of 16:08 on Oct 29, 2017 |
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Oct 29, 2017 16:05
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:That's one of the things I'd like to see before I die. Perhaps very, very shortly before. Get yourself employed in a maintenance crew when a pressurized water reactor plant is in scheduled for a fuel swap and inspection! Its actually perfectly safe if you are just loitering around the main access level of the reactor core building and if the core fluid level is topped up. You can even watch the fuel stacks go around the configuration grid with the manipulator arms.
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Oct 29, 2017 16:13
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Mr. Despair posted:yeah, water's a good shield for the neutrons and whatnot coming out of the reactor, all you're getting hit by is light of a fairly specific wavelength. If you want unsafe people have made unshielded pulse reactors before.... gotta be careful when you use it otherwise well, things start to melt and fail as the whole things goes a little too critical. One of the first documented cases of accidental criticality was the Godiva device. A scientist was learning over the core while working on it and noticed out of the corner of his eye that the radiation monitor lights had gone from sporadic pulses to continuous illumination indication thousands of counts per second. His body near the core had acted as a neutron reflector and moderator and allowing a chain reaction to be sustained. He stood up and caught it quickly enough that it didn't injure him - no blue flash.
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Oct 29, 2017 16:29
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ROCKET SCIENCE
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Kinetica posted:I wouldn't have thought a liquid vortex made by hand would cause one of those happy fun time incidents. That's both really cool and horrifying at the same time. It was a mechanical agitator, but still a surprising way to die.
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Oct 29, 2017 17:15
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Midjack posted:It was a mechanical agitator, but still a surprising way to die. PYF Dangerous Chemstry: A Surprisingly Novel Way to Die
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Oct 29, 2017 17:44
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Intoluene posted:Great now I have the suicidal urge to see Cherenkov Radiation. I toured the 1MW training reactor at Washington State. We even wore monitors for safety. It didn't record anything above regular background.
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Oct 29, 2017 17:51
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I got to see one of Sandia's pulse reactors do calibration pulses. It was awesome. When the reactor pulses, a bunch of the oxygen (in water) is converted into nitrogen, which then goes off to be free as bubbles. The nitrogen produced is radioactive, with a half life of a few seconds. The water pool is tall enough that the bubbles take 9 half lives to rise to the top, so <.1% remains when it gets to the surface, with the rest decaying back into oxygen.
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Oct 29, 2017 19:05
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this seemed up this thread's alley https://imgur.com/gallery/2TraE quote:A fire has been burning at a warehouse that's become a dump for things Dupont can't legally get rid of for more than 4 days in Parkersburg, WV. there's more in the imgur gallery
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Oct 29, 2017 21:01
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:this seemed up this thread's alley Jesus. 
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Oct 29, 2017 21:11
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Ibblebibble posted:I found a bag of rotting onions that I had forgotten in the back of my cupboard once, leaking juices everywhere. I forgot a 20 kg bag of onions* on the hat rack in the break room of a place I worked at for maybe two or three weeks and years later heard that they'd had the entire ventilation system inspected because of a really foul smell until someone discovered my bag of rotten onions under a pile of beanies and gloves. *) I got it from my former place of employment which happened to be next door and a dude gave it to me when I popped over there on my break to say hi.
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Oct 29, 2017 21:19
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:this seemed up this thread's alley sometimes people ask me why i have kept cloud-to-butt installed all these years. it's just a stupid joke, isn't it? surely it's gotten boring by now and is little more than an inconvenience? 
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Oct 29, 2017 21:40
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I still have it installed. Also millennials to snake people
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Oct 29, 2017 21:48
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:That's one of the things I'd like to see before I die. Perhaps very, very shortly before.
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Oct 29, 2017 21:49
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:this seemed up this thread's alley Lol that we can't execute everyone involved in creating this fiasco.
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Oct 29, 2017 21:50
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Kinetica posted:I wouldn't have thought a liquid vortex made by hand would cause one of those happy fun time incidents. That's both really cool and horrifying at the same time. It's all down to geometry. The more surface area something has, the more energy it radiates out into the world instead of keeping it bottled up inside. Heat and light are both examples. A sphere has the least surface area of any shape, so it's the most efficient shape for achieving criticality. If a container of fluid has a barely sub-critical layer of sludge on the bottom, stirring it up into a rounder shape can be enough to start an excursion. For safety reasons, there are "favorable geometry" containers for fissionable liquids that are specifically not shaped compactly. Really tall, thin containers work well for that. They used to be called them "safe containers", but stopped being called that after it was discovered (the hard way) that stacking them too close together, even in separate rooms with a wall between them, can negate the effect. One of the more tragicomic criticality incidents happened when some Soviet workers used a steel stew pot to empty out a vat of uranium solution. Nobody would have died, except their supervisor snuck back into the evacuated area to try and... I dunno, pour it out or something? Lots of bad ideas were had that day, but his was the worst. One more cool thing I read involving favorable geometry containers. Some scientist had access to a few that were several meters tall but only a few cm wide They realized this was an opportunity to see what several meters of deuterium oxide looks like, so they filled one with heavy water and one with regular water and looked at them from above. The regular water had very slight blue tint, as is its wont, but the heavy water was comparatively colorless. 
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Oct 30, 2017 03:42
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:this seemed up this thread's alley 
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Oct 30, 2017 03:54
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Mr. Despair posted:yeah, water's a good shield for the neutrons and whatnot coming out of the reactor, all you're getting hit by is light of a fairly specific wavelength. According to What If?, trying to swim in a spent fuel pool could be extremely dangerous, but not because of radiation... 
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Oct 30, 2017 03:57
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Syd Midnight posted:It's all down to geometry. Not quite the same thing, but I remember reading about something similar when they were cleaning up that accident where the Russian woodcutters found some RTG cores from an old nuclear-powered lighthouse, cut them open, and slept beside them for warmth. This was discovered after all the affected people had already been admitted to the hospital, and the cores were in an isolated area, so the recovery team had plenty of time to plan out a safe way of picking them up. They designed a lead box of the correct shape and size and built special tools to grab them from angles that would minimize exposure. The storage box was loaded in a covered truck. As the team worked to recover the cores, they constantly measured the ambient radiation -- and found that as soon as they put the cores into the truck (but hadn't yet put the lid on the box), the radiation level increased beyond what they had predicted. It turned out that the radiation was shooting upwards out of the box, bouncing off the canvas roof of the truckbed, and scattering back down all over the team.  If you want to read more about that accident here's the whole report. Pretty spooky http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81061875.pdf quote:On a cold day of 2 December 2001, three inhabitants of Lia (later designated quote:In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, various types of be careful, though -- if you scroll down far enough you'll find the pictures of the guy who somehow hung onto life for two and a half years while his body (particularly his back, nearest to the radiation) gradually liquefied itself Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 04:15 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 04:13
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Syd Midnight posted:According to What If?, trying to swim in a spent fuel pool could be extremely dangerous, but not because of radiation... I love that book! Fairly certain he referred to the guards as kinetic lead injectors 
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Oct 30, 2017 04:46
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Mustached Demon posted:I toured the 1MW training reactor at Washington State. We even wore monitors for safety. It didn't record anything above regular background. I got to do the same at the Penn State reactor for a Philosophy of Technology class, it was really cool to look into a giant pool with a blue glowing reactor at the bottom.  Hmm, apparently it was also the first university licensed reactor under the atoms for peace program.
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Oct 30, 2017 06:38
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Plinkey posted:I got to do the same at the Penn State reactor for a Philosophy of Technology class, it was really cool to look into a giant pool with a blue glowing reactor at the bottom. Do they make various isotopes there for the medical and science communities too? I thought that was the neatest part of the tour.
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Oct 30, 2017 06:40
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Mustached Demon posted:Do they make various isotopes there for the medical and science communities too? I thought that was the neatest part of the tour. I don't think so, but who knows, when I was there like 10+ years ago they were doing some experiments on radiation causing bit flipping in electronics for space applications. There was basically a room that was closer than you should to the reactor that they would run computers in to find the probability of flipped bits, errors...etc. So they lower all the rods or whatever, open a door and wheel the computers close to the reactor them start it all up again. e: or they might be able to move the reactor around the pool for different experiments. http://www.rsec.psu.edu/Research_Papers.aspx Plinkey has a new favorite as of 06:56 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 06:51
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:That's one of the things I'd like to see before I die. Perhaps very, very shortly before. Intoluene posted:I do wonder if Cherenkov radiation is like the auroras in that they look way better in photos than in real life.
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Oct 30, 2017 07:10
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Modern cameras have filters that pretty closely replicate the human eye’s response to light. The “point a TV remote at a cell phone camera to see if it’s working” thing doesn’t work on most recent smart phones. UV the filters are even better. Ordinary glass blocks UV quite well. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 07:44 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 07:41
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Metal Geir Skogul posted:Also snake people to snake people 
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Oct 30, 2017 12:01
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Sagebrush posted:Not quite the same thing, but I remember reading about something similar when they were cleaning up that accident where the Russian woodcutters found some RTG cores from an old nuclear-powered lighthouse, cut them open, and slept beside them for warmth. This was discovered after all the affected people had already been admitted to the hospital, and the cores were in an isolated area, so the recovery team had plenty of time to plan out a safe way of picking them up. They designed a lead box of the correct shape and size and built special tools to grab them from angles that would minimize exposure. The storage box was loaded in a covered truck. As the team worked to recover the cores, they constantly measured the ambient radiation -- and found that as soon as they put the cores into the truck (but hadn't yet put the lid on the box), the radiation level increased beyond what they had predicted. It turned out that the radiation was shooting upwards out of the box, bouncing off the canvas roof of the truckbed, and scattering back down all over the team. I guess I never thought that RTGs would be so dangerous, I kinda expected that the containment would have provided enough shielding to safely handle them. edit: never mind, saw where they had been stripped of all their shielding. Scary poo poo. Luneshot has a new favorite as of 16:19 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 15:28
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Sagebrush posted:Not quite the same thing, but I remember reading about something similar when they were cleaning up that accident where the Russian woodcutters found some RTG cores from an old nuclear-powered lighthouse, cut them open, and slept beside them for warmth. This was discovered after all the affected people had already been admitted to the hospital, and the cores were in an isolated area, so the recovery team had plenty of time to plan out a safe way of picking them up. They designed a lead box of the correct shape and size and built special tools to grab them from angles that would minimize exposure. The storage box was loaded in a covered truck. As the team worked to recover the cores, they constantly measured the ambient radiation -- and found that as soon as they put the cores into the truck (but hadn't yet put the lid on the box), the radiation level increased beyond what they had predicted. It turned out that the radiation was shooting upwards out of the box, bouncing off the canvas roof of the truckbed, and scattering back down all over the team. Was there any investigation into how the RTGs ended up lying in the woods in the first place. I skimmed the write up a couple of times and didn't see anything.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:09
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Nth Doctor posted:Was there any investigation into how the RTGs ended up lying in the woods in the first place. I skimmed the write up a couple of times and didn't see anything. They were just abandoned in the woods, after the Soviet Union fell apart. The batteries themselves were used for navigation aids and "radiometric devices", whatever that means. Best note of all: 2/8 of them were unaccounted for at the time the report was written! 
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Oct 30, 2017 16:16
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Luneshot posted:I guess I never thought that RTGs would be so dangerous, I kinda expected that the containment would have provided enough shielding to safely handle them. Someone had previously stripped them of their shielding, presumably to sell as scrap metal, but thoughtfully left the radioisotope container for someone else to find. Apparently that happens to a lot of abandoned Soviet RTGs. Nth Doctor posted:Was there any investigation into how the RTGs ended up lying in the woods in the first place. I skimmed the write up a couple of times and didn't see anything. They were power sources for radios at remote hydroelectric substations that were being constructed but had no power yet. Construction was halted, when the USSR collapsed the project was forgotten, and the construction sites were looted. There's still 2 more of them out there somewhere. fake edit: beaten by IoS
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Oct 30, 2017 16:19
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That explains it. Leave the magic heat boxes alone, y'all.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:21
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There's an abandoned US RTG on earth. You just have to go really deep into the pacific to get it. It's the RTG for the LM for Apollo 13. All the other RTG equipped LMs are on the moon. They overengineered it for a potential launch pad explosion or re-entry. iospace has a new favorite as of 16:28 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 16:24
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