Platystemon posted:

If gorging on Burbank Russets doesn’t cause sickness, eating the Lenape in moderation won’t.

The Real Amethyst posted:

quote:

The vibrant emerald green cloth on these bindings gets its shocking color from copper acetoarsenite, more commonly known as arsenic. The inorganic pigment was also famously used in Victorian era wallpaper.

The bindings seen here, along with others in our collection, were tested by Melissa Tedone, Conservator at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, in December 2019 as part of the Poison Book Project. The sample is comprised largely of green cloth case bindings, but some green paper (upper left) also tested positive. They have since been properly rehoused, along with updated safe handling instructions. Read more about the Poison Book Project here.

ekuNNN posted:

Cancelbot posted:

How does that even happen?

minato posted:

I was curious as to what it would take to get that back on the tracks.

The Real Amethyst posted:

Can they just drive it backwards to get it back on the main track? I hope it's as easy as that because that would rule.

fishing with the fam posted:

All I saw and all I care about.

Artemis J Brassnuts posted:

How is radiation bad for people but okay for food? Like, aren’t we all basically meat anyway? Is this a “the dose makes the poison” scenario?

minato posted:

I was curious as to what it would take to get that back on the tracks. According to Google, those locomotives are probably around 220 tonnes. Most large mobile cranes can only go up to 100 tonnes, but the big ones can do 200-700.

And I stumbled across the Taisun dock crane, which can lift 20,000 tonnes.

CommieGIR posted:

Here's an Amtrack locomotive being recovered back onto the rails:

A White Guy posted:

The other issue being that radioactive elements go everywhere, mainly air but also the water, where it then goes into animals and humans directly, or indirectly through livestock/soil. Aside from the nuclear detonation and accompanying human holocaust, a nuclear explosion is kind of like a glitterbomb full of radiation.

The main difference being that a nuclear detonation simply doesn't expend that much nuclear material at once, because you don't need that much fission/fusion capable uranium/plutonium to get the intended effect.. That's why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are today thriving urban areas, and why Fukushima/Cherynobyl are ghost towns- the failure of those two reactors spread a huge amount of radioactive elements basically everywhere. Of course, to get into the weeds, the Cherynobyl disaster was basically the worst possible way a nuclear reactor can fail. Fukushima was still pretty bad, but orders of magnitude less so.

Scratch Monkey posted:

Additionally gamma radiation can penetrate deeply into a human body, so it's not really necessary to ingest something that is radiating gamma/x-rays. Just being too close for too long to a gamma emitter is enough to kill you. Beta particles are fairly easily stopped by thin sheets of metal or plastic, so it's relatively easy to shield yourself from them. Alpha particles are blocked very easily so as long as they don't get into your body through inhalation or ingestion they're pretty harmless.

WarpedNaba posted:

Three Mile island was also a bit of an outlier, if I recall correctly.

chitoryu12 posted:

Overall it’s surprisingly hard to get a nuclear reactor to definitively kill people. It’s hard to even tell whether an accident causes an increase in cancer deaths in the area decades later.

On the other hand, it’s estimated that nuclear power has prevented as many as 1.8 million deaths that would have otherwise occurred if all of that electricity was replaced by fossil fuel plants. Everything from the mining to the pollution is hideously damaging to the planet.

fishing with the fam posted:

All I saw and all I care about.

B33rChiller posted:

You can use water in approved deep fryer fire suppression systems, it just needs to be highly atomized. We had water fog systems in all the galleys and in high risk machinery spaces on the last cruise ship I worked on. https://youtu.be/4liOYmVjyB8

Edit sorry to dig this post up, I'm playing catch up.

fishing with the fam posted:

All I saw and all I care about.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

I had a coworker who once told me she didn't use the microwave because of radiation. In the least condescending tone I could muster, I explained what the word radiation means, and different things it can refer to. Proud to say she now uses the microwave.

chitoryu12 posted:

Overall it’s surprisingly hard to get a nuclear reactor to definitively kill people. It’s hard to even tell whether an accident causes an increase in cancer deaths in the area decades later.

On the other hand, it’s estimated that nuclear power has prevented as many as 1.8 million deaths that would have otherwise occurred if all of that electricity was replaced by fossil fuel plants. Everything from the mining to the pollution is hideously damaging to the planet.

quote:

Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. * [See Editor's Note at bottom]

At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels.

Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.

Dirk the Average posted:

Other people have chimed in on this, but to explain further, there are three types of radiation:

Alpha particles are literally just helium without the electrons. They don't travel far, and they lose their energy quite quickly, which renders them harmless in most scenarios (don't eat something that emits alpha particles).

Beta particles are electrons/positrons. Again, the initial emission is dangerous, but after that they just behave like any other bit of matter and do their thing normally.

Gamma rays are similar to x-rays in that they are a type of electromagnetic radiation (similar to light). They are harmful until they are absorbed, which is typically done by lead or some other dense material.

The point here is that once radiation actually interacts with something, it's no longer dangerous, as the dangerous part of the radiation (the energy) has already been absorbed. Alpha particles just become helium, beta particles become electrons, etc. Something is only radioactive if it emits radiation, and things that absorb radiation do not themselves emit radiation or become radioactive.

Now, in the case of nuclear fallout or other accidents, the danger is that particles that emit radiation are thrown into the air, which then can be breathed in. At that point you have radioactive material in your lungs that is emitting radiation directly into your tissue, which is very very bad.

Scratch Monkey posted:

Additionally gamma radiation can penetrate deeply into a human body, so it's not really necessary to ingest something that is radiating gamma/x-rays. Just being too close for too long to a gamma emitter is enough to kill you. Beta particles are fairly easily stopped by thin sheets of metal or plastic, so it's relatively easy to shield yourself from them. Alpha particles are blocked very easily so as long as they don't get into your body through inhalation or ingestion they're pretty harmless.

Dirk the Average posted:

Other people have chimed in on this, but to explain further, there are three types of radiation:

Alpha particles are literally just helium without the electrons. They don't travel far, and they lose their energy quite quickly, which renders them harmless in most scenarios (don't eat something that emits alpha particles).

Beta particles are electrons/positrons. Again, the initial emission is dangerous, but after that they just behave like any other bit of matter and do their thing normally.

Gamma rays are similar to x-rays in that they are a type of electromagnetic radiation (similar to light). They are harmful until they are absorbed, which is typically done by lead or some other dense material.

The point here is that once radiation actually interacts with something, it's no longer dangerous, as the dangerous part of the radiation (the energy) has already been absorbed. Alpha particles just become helium, beta particles become electrons, etc. Something is only radioactive if it emits radiation, and things that absorb radiation do not themselves emit radiation or become radioactive.

Now, in the case of nuclear fallout or other accidents, the danger is that particles that emit radiation are thrown into the air, which then can be breathed in. At that point you have radioactive material in your lungs that is emitting radiation directly into your tissue, which is very very bad.

CannonFodder posted:

Don't forget the fact that waste from coal power plants is more radioactive that waste from nuclear power plants.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

CannonFodder posted:

Don't forget the fact that waste from coal power plants is more radioactive that waste from nuclear power plants.

Groda posted:

This argument is dumb and bad.

Pickled Tink posted:

You left out Neutron Radiation, which is absolutely horrible since it irradiates everything nearby though it has its uses in imaging.

As the joke option, Neutrino Radiation is another type that no one thinks or cares about because it is so weakly interacting that the only way to suffer a lethal dose of it would be to be inside an exploding star.

Nocheez posted:

Ah, Chessie System. We found a kitten on the tracks in my hometown, and my brother named her Chessie because of their logo.


Chess was a good catte

starkebn posted:

https://i.imgur.com/hnukMx4.mp4

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

What about the chicken to go is OSHA?

CannonFodder posted:

Here's the cotter pin thing that keeps the pintle hook locked. Also, check out those beefy chain loops and my high vis gloves.

Blindeye posted:

They're just photons - for all intents and purposes they're identical to X-Rays except general are a little higher energy, though it's a bit fuzzy because some gammas are less energetic than some high energy x-rays (like bremsstrahlung generated x-rays).