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Silver Alicorn posted:https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1220/ML12205A469.pdf the mayak production association must have been a wild place to work, they had so many process accidents. and almost every one is "operator untrained in criticality physics improvised something that seemed quicker than the standard process". except the one where three experts experimenting with criticality in unfavourable geometries decide to speed up their cleanup and cause an unfavourable geometry leading to prompt critical big scary monsters fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Feb 14, 2022 |
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Feb 14, 2022 16:38
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:while nuclear power plants get a bad rap, nuclear weapons plants were heinously bad. just total ecological and safety disasters. idk about rocky flats but i know the hanford cleanup has been an unending shitshow. yeah well without em you'd be speakin russian right now so show some respect [salutes flag] anyway hanford is kinda weird because like a lot of the stuff there was just getting out of the research phase and yeah it was filthy and yeah the people building it knew it was filthy but probably didnt have a firm grasp on just how filthy it was. Rocky Flats, idk i haven't paid attention to it but generally i think people have an inflated idea of the dangers posed by radioactive waste and the cleanup efforts reflect that. Anyway there's a couple stories my dad told me, the one that stands out is that there was this machinist who was going through a rough divorce and started doing really unsafe poo poo because he had a deathwish or something and apparently started juggling pits inside the glovebox. That honestly seems a little far-fetched but who fuckin knows.
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Feb 14, 2022 18:44
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these artistic photos from rocky flats were posted a while ago, in some other thread, but i'm gonna repost them here https://www.awthompsonphotography.com/portfolios#/incendiary-iconography/
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Feb 14, 2022 21:46
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a fun excerpt from an account of the bombing of nagasakiquote:The heart of Fat Man was a grapefruit-sized core of plutonium—a newly manufactured, radioactive element that is more stable than most isotopes of uranium and more powerful. It was shiny, slightly warm, and weighed about 14.1 pounds. And someone had to carry it to the tiny Pacific Island of Tinian, where the bomb would be assembled and loaded on to a B-29 bomber...As described in his diary, Schreiber sat on a hard wooden chair strapped inside the big plane all the way to Tinian. Like everyone working on the Bomb, he was exhausted. So he slept sitting up, sometimes holding the bomb case in his lap. At one point, over the Pacific, he went up to the cockpit to get a better view of what was causing turbulence. One of the crew came up behind and tapped him on the shoulder: “Whatever that thing is you got, it’s rolling around the back of the plane. Maybe you want to corral it.” yeah, maybe https://thebulletin.org/2015/08/the-harrowing-story-of-the-nagasaki-bombing-mission/
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Feb 25, 2022 00:50
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Zlodo posted:same energy as the guy who invented leaded gasoline who inhaled the vapor of some of the additive during a press conference to "prove" that it was safe he's also the same guy who invented CFCs so he's arguably got the best K/D ratio of any human being
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Feb 26, 2022 00:36
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this thread is excellent
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Feb 27, 2022 04:19
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Captain Foo posted:this thread is excellent
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Feb 27, 2022 06:31
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I got to tour a nuclear plant as a 10 year old cub scout cuz my buddy Aaron's dad worked there and it was cool as poo poo. had to wear hard hats and the reactor water was this amazing blue color 
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Mar 1, 2022 05:36
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i visited the ill in grenoble once. i got to see the cerenkov radiation from the spent fuel elements, it was very beautiful. it was also nerve-wracking to work there. since i was working in the reactor hall i had an active dosimeter, so you’d see it count up the number of micro sieverts you’d accumulate. i had to get close to the reactor to do a few things (change out equipment or open a valve or whatever) and then it would start beeping because i was getting too much radiation. not like a lot, just enough that it’s over my administrative limit. but the first time it beeped freaked me the gently caress out lol. taking a peek at the spent fuel elements made it beep too. it’s more common to get physical dosimeters, they work based on radiation damage to crystals or something similar. no way to tell how much dose you get until they survey it. the weird part is that they almost always report 0 dose (which is literally impossible). they must just not report under a threshold.
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Mar 2, 2022 06:30
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Eeyo posted:
That sounds about right. I janitored a cluster that sat on top of a synchrotron (beamline scientists are fuckin weird and like to be able to pet their hardware) like 10 years ago and remember being surprised by my dosimeter report despite having to climb past "CAUTION: RADIATION AREA" signs to get to a console.  cluster and particle accelerator tax payment: 
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Mar 2, 2022 08:00
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I got a tour of superphénix back in high school, iirc not too long before it was decided to permanently shut it down. We even got to see the spent fuel storage pool because they hadn't stored any fuel there yet at the time, it was very cool. I remember being mostly impressed by the scale of it all. Like they showed us the containers that were going to be used to store the spent fuel rods and they were huge hollow columns of cast iron tall as houses weighing something like 200 tons. The cap alone weighed 2 tons. There was a huge overhead crane to move those and it was specced to be able to lift like twice the weight of one of these things.
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Mar 2, 2022 12:16
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https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status...r%3D323lastpost
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Mar 4, 2022 02:04
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Louis Slotin's first words after his demon core accident were "Well that does it." Imagine knowing you are already dead, and that you killed yourself with your own stupidity. 
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Mar 7, 2022 21:53
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Since there was mention of common misunderstandings, I wanna highlight one thing that I hadn't quite appreciated until five or so years ago. Something being radioactive doesn't mean that it's dangerous, and even if something is ionizing radiation, it only means that it's dangerous if the doses are big enough. For example, the MR scan I got after surgery is part of the electromagnetic spectrum but is not ionizing radiation - unlike CT scans, PET/CT-scans and IMRT that I got as part of the cancer therapies.
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Mar 7, 2022 22:02
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:Since there was mention of common misunderstandings, I wanna highlight one thing that I hadn't quite appreciated until five or so years ago. my modern physics prof liked to tell the story about having to take a radioactive tracer or something at the hospital and then it hosed his experiments for a little bit because he kept lighting things up
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Mar 7, 2022 22:49
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Another big misunderstanding about radiation is that if something is "highly radioactive" then it necessarily has a short half-life. But something being radioactive for "X million years" means that as far as radioactive contamination actually goes, it's not much of a hazard. So there is no need to bury nuclear waste for 10million years as most nuclear waste is basically inert after <100yrs. There is also not much of a difference between inert nuclear waste and any other kind of industrial waste. Both will cause long-term problems, but with fossil fuels we are ok as a society to dump it into a river, or exhaust it into the air whereas nuclear waste needs to withstand the end of humanity plus whatever future civilization would replace us. It's ridiculous.
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Mar 7, 2022 22:51
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mediaphage posted:my modern physics prof liked to tell the story about having to take a radioactive tracer or something at the hospital and then it hosed his experiments for a little bit because he kept lighting things up ate poo poo on live tv posted:Another big misunderstanding about radiation is that if something is "highly radioactive" then it necessarily has a short half-life. But something being radioactive for "X million years" means that as far as radioactive contamination actually goes, it's not much of a hazard. So there is no need to bury nuclear waste for 10million years as most nuclear waste is basically inert after <100yrs. There's been a bunch of fairly reasonable suggestions, but also ones like breeding cats to bioluminess when in the presence of dangerous levels of ionizing radiation and creating an entire religion out of it. There's a danish documentary called Into Eternity that covers the subject in some detail. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 7, 2022 |
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Mar 7, 2022 23:31
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Now we're all sons of bitches.
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Mar 8, 2022 00:59
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:That thing about radioactive half-life is really interesting in its own way, because the issues related to long-term nuclear waste warning messages are a seemingly unsolvable set; how do you you communicate with people two hundred thousand years in the future, when we don't have any idea what language was spoken back when humanity started working the earth, a mere twelve thousand years ago?  My point is that the timescale we need to worry about keeping nuclear waste secure is on the order of hundreds of years, not millions or even thousands.
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Mar 8, 2022 02:39
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my only exposure to what radioactive stuff does are from the movie the widowmaker and that poo poo terrifies me to this day because of that movie
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Mar 8, 2022 11:00
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:Since there was mention of common misunderstandings, I wanna highlight one thing that I hadn't quite appreciated until five or so years ago. oh, poo poo, this reminds me of Therac-25, and that one's really on-topic for YOSPOS. Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine created by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), designed to give doses up to the "typical single therapeutic dose" of 200 rads. it was preceded by Therac-6 and Therac-20. I mention that part because, despite significant hardware changes from -6 and -20 such as "removing safety locks," they persisted in using much of the same software for -25. and, of course, they did the absolute minimum documentation: quote:Error messages provided to the operator were cryptic, and some merely consisted of the word MALFUNCTION followed by a number from 1 to 64 denoting an analog/digital channel number. According to an FDA memorandum written after one accident: "The operator's manual supplied with the machine does not explain nor even address the malfunction codes. The Maintance [sic] Manual lists the various malfunction numbers but gives no explanation. The materials provided give no indication that these malfunctions could place a patient at risk." so instead of making it physically impossible to give patients radiation overdoses, they wrote software to prevent them. and then the software to prevent them ran into the fun hazard of Race Conditions and failed horrifically at handling them! quote:They determined that data entry speed during editing was the key factor in producing the error condition: If the prescription data was edited at a fast pace (as is natural for someone who has repeated the procedure a large number of times), the overdose occurred. It took some practice before the physicist could repeat the procedure rapidly enough to elicit the MALFUNCTION 54 message at will. 25,000 instead of 200! so what happened to the patients exposed to this malfunction? well... - June 3, 1985: later hospitalized; "the patient's breast had to be removed because of the radiation burns. Her shoulder and arm were paralyzed, and she was in constant pain." AECL response: insisted it could not have been caused by the Therac-25, settled a lawsuit out of court. - July 26, 1985: complained of burning and pain, hospitalized July 30, died "of an extremely virulent cancer" November 3, "but it was noted that had she not died, a total hip replacement would have been necessary as a result of the radiation overexposure." AECL response: "could not reproduce," did a simulation with some stuff hardwired and got very minor issues that they "treated" with small software updates and a voluntary recall. - December 1985–January 1986: multiple overdoses to one patient, resulting in "a chronic skin ulcer, tissue necrosis under the skin, and continual pain," treated surgically with skin grafts. AECL response: "After careful consideration we are of the opinion that this damage could not have been produced by any malfunction of the Therac-25 or any operator error," because an overdose by the Therac-25 simply wasn't possible, especially after the software updates. - March 21, 1986: massive overdose, "eventually hospitalized for radiation-induced myelitis of the cervical cord causing paralysis of his left arm and both legs, left vocal cord paralysis (which left him unable to speak, neurogenic bowel and bladder, and paralysis of the left diaphragm," died five months later. AECL response: "The AECL engineer from the home office reportedly explained that it was not possible for the Therac-25 to overdose a patient," and also lied that no other radiation incidents had ever been reported, so this must have been an electric shock. - April 11, 1986, at the same location as the March 21 accident: "disorientation, which progressed to coma, fever to 104°F, and neurological damage." Died May 1. Because this happened in the same place three weeks later, the hospital physicist himself investigated, leading to the above quote where AECL finally discovered that, yes, their machine was causing horrific radiation poisoning. I quoted the bare bones stuff and the patient outcome stuff, but if you have time to kill, there are a lot of details about the hardware and the software fuckups in the two links.
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Mar 8, 2022 16:34
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I have a strong interest in Atomic stuff, reactor design, history, not so much the military side though. A pretty good read if anyone is interested is Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey. He's written a couple books on the topic and he's a decent writer. I find the historical stuff pretty fascinating. A couple things that I will add - the original Trinity test needed a way to detonate all the high-explosive shell parts at once, to create the implosion wall. One engineer invented the X-Unit, which they hadn't finalized the design of until a few weeks before the test. More details: https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/electronics-and-detonators The other thing that always stood out as crazy to me were the plans for an atomic-powered airplane. They got as far as building prototype engines and running some basic tests. These things were hilariously Cold War - they were a completely unshielded reactor. The forward thrust was the result of the inlet air being made super hot and expelled out the back. Along with all the fusion products. At the time of the tests, there was no metal on earth that could stand up to the exhaust heat. Thankfully they gave up on that eventually.
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Mar 8, 2022 17:37
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a concern early on during the manhattan project was that, because the fusion of two nitrogen atoms produces energy, there could be the possibility of the bomb's detonation triggering the fusion of enough of the surrounding air's nitrogen that this additional energy would trigger the fusion of the nitrogen next to it, and so on. the result would've essentially been a glorious wave of thermonuclear fusion spreading across the earth's surface and cleansing it of the horrible mistake that is life. sadly enough, this was calculated to be impossible as the energy generated by any nitrogen fusion event would dissipate over a larger volume far too quickly for it to be enough to ignite fusion reaction in nearby nitrogen atoms, and so we're still stuck in this god forsaken existence that didn't stop the scientists at the trinity test who were betting on what the actual yield of the test would be from asking if anyone was betting on the entire state of new mexico or the entire planet being destroyed. it kinda spooked some of the military people who were there to witness the test since they weren't exactly aware of that possibility, and even less about the fact that it was calculated to be impossible
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Mar 8, 2022 18:14
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:sadly enough, this was calculated to be impossible as the energy generated by any nitrogen fusion event would dissipate over a larger volume far too quickly for it to be enough to ignite fusion reaction in nearby nitrogen atoms, and so we're still stuck in this god forsaken existence Here's that report, if you're interested: https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf
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Mar 8, 2022 20:38
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Silver Alicorn posted:you can't just trust people will do things right, you have to make sure they can't do them wrong good intentions don't work, you need mechanisms
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Mar 9, 2022 03:33
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the power of the atom can only be kept in check by the cold infallible logic of the computer- hang on i'm getting a call they're running javascript on what?
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Mar 9, 2022 04:16
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Truman Peyote posted:taepodong h e h
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Mar 9, 2022 04:33
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:the power of the atom can only be kept in check by the cold infallible logic of the computer- i work for a company that makes SCADA software (thankfully not for nuclear reactors). we're currently in the process of rewriting our client software as a web app in javascript 
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Mar 9, 2022 15:52
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Mar 9, 2022 17:19
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Mr.Radar posted:i work for a company that makes SCADA software (thankfully not for nuclear reactors). we're currently in the process of rewriting our client software as a web app in javascript the inevitable lowest common denominator
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Mar 9, 2022 19:32
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worse really is better
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Mar 9, 2022 19:53
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go back to having a dude on top of the reactor pulling the rod
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Mar 9, 2022 21:16
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JavaScript has the dubious feature that you can make anything in JavaScript. Some people have therefore concluded that you should make everything in JavaScript.
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Mar 9, 2022 21:22
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it is not really about javascript anyway. the big deal is that web browsers are the best cross-platform set of standard apis, with huge amounts of effort and money spent on optimization and hardware acceleration, and on most platforms they are even at the outset a way more sophisticated package of layout and rendering technologies than the supposed native apis. which is kind of sad. but, meh, having tried to write a portable rich ui in a supposed good toolkit in 2021 i have kind of accepted that you really do want to be on this web garbage. or tk. those are the tiers, when tk wont do you go web.
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Mar 9, 2022 21:34
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^^^^^^^ yeah, basically that. right now our client is a fat client written in C#/WinForms which means customers need to have Windows workstations for all of their operators plus their IT staff need to manage rolling out updates for our client to all those workstations. also, customers increasingly want to allow read-only access for non-operators (such as management, engineering/planning staff, or repair crews in the field) to certain portions of their SCADA data and that means even more fat clients to install/manage. by making it into a web app we remove the dependency on Windows (allowing non-operators to view data on their phones/tablets/MacBooks) and vastly simplify the deployment strategy (just install/update the server). also, at least we're using typescript and not just raw JS which is slightly better, right???
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Mar 9, 2022 22:55
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well at least it's just the client app; i would assume the actual scada system has hard checks on the parameters it gets fed and doesn't just blindly accept any data ...it doesn't blindly accept any data, right?
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Mar 9, 2022 23:48
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correct. at least we perform a nominal amount of validation and permission checks on the inputs (though the backend is all written in C and C++ so if bad data does get through it can have an absolute field day destroying the operation of the system, especially since our database relies entirely on the individual services to enforce permissions and does no checks of its own, so if you pwn the service you can just write whatever garbage you want into the database with nothing to stop you)
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Mar 10, 2022 01:35
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some 15 years i was at a halloween party at the university of copenhagen life sciences dept & a friend and i drunkenly decided to walk the building looking for unlocked doors found a lot of cool stuff until we were looking inside a fridge looking thing & noticed that it had a radioactive warning sign on the door so we noped out went to his birthday this weekend, no mutations yet
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Mar 15, 2022 08:30
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Carthag Tuek posted:some 15 years i was at a halloween party at the university of copenhagen life sciences dept & a friend and i drunkenly decided to walk the building looking for unlocked doors back in college, a guy told me and a friend about "a computer graveyard" int he basement of one of the engineering buildings and drew us a little map. we used to go there at midnight and you could kinda shake the lock in a certain way to trick it open, and it was free pickings through a bunch of e-waste. got some old hard drives and ram sticks and a few computer monitors that all still worked, junk like that
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Mar 15, 2022 10:48
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Mr.Radar posted:^^^^^^^ use asp.net core op, no js needed
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Mar 15, 2022 11:42
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