Posted on 04/22/2015 7:10:13 AM PDT by BenLurkin
For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands. When a freakishly large catfish appears on camera, she calmly explains that it’s probably not a mutant—“They are just that way because nobody catches them,” she says in a video, watching a six-foot-long catfish, eerily like a shark, swim around a murky pool of water.
In a few non-Chernobyl-related videos, she pours liquid mercury over her bare hands, comparing the feat to smoking a single cigarette: not dangerous in limited doses, she claims. Her most popular videos are driven by a need to explain why things commonly seen as dangerous are in fact not, hence her typical lack of protective gear. It’s so odd to see her protecting herself, in fact, that she will begin some videos with an explanation about why she felt the need to don something as basic as a pair of gloves.
What is her secret? “Push away your fears and everything you've heard, and embrace the Zone,” she writes Atlas Obscura in an email.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlasobscura.com ...
I watched a few of her videos,at one point she does admit that the filter mask she had been wearing saved her life.This was at the end of the video where she went into the plutonium lab at Chernobol.
I’ve got 12.5 pounds of it sitting on my office shelf.
For years I have said, in most research projects ‘the person/entity funding the research will get the result they are seeking’. And after that one ‘if you are frightened by a research project’s result, wait 6 months and some other research project will likely come up with the exact opposite result’.
The animals around Chernobyl are amazingly healthy. It is hardly a dead zone.
If she isn't planning on having children in the future, the actual risk may be next to nothing. Note that she isn't living there and eating nothing but radioactive produce, she is just demonstrating that acceptable levels are much higher than what is commonly believed.
“But what is the material? Plutonium?”
I’m not sure, it depends on what kind of bomb they were building.
“why does a certain amount more cause critical mass?”
It’s just the nature of radioactive material. Nuclear radiation is actually the particles giving off mass and energy, as they are decaying into a different kind of atom. A radioactive element is inherently unstable, and the way they achieve stability is to shed off little bits of themselves until they are a different element that is stable.
Now, normally that radiation just shoots off in all directions and is gone. When you put enough radioactive material together in just the right configuration though, some of that radiation will be absorbed by the other nearby radioactive atoms. When that happens, they can’t simply hold on to that additional mass an energy, because they are too unstable. So they have to “re-emit” the radiation that struck them, along with the radiation that they would be already be emitting.
In the right configuration, that creates a chain reaction, one ray hits an atom, that atom emits two more rays that hit two more atoms, which then emit four rays, that hit four atoms, etc, and it just continues until all the material that can keep the reaction going is used up.
that makes sense. How scary!! I read about that Tsar Bomba. It damaged windows I think thousands of miles away. 40 megatons I think. Probably wrong.
I DO KNOW that the Russian scientist said there is a point where adding more material wont make the explosion bigger, but I forget why.
Very interesting read.
Thank again.
That’s simply because he walks with a tilt.
Uranium was used for Little Boy on Hiroshima.
Plutonium was used for Fat Man on Nagasaki.
Both incidents described above resulting in deaths were on a plutonium core. Critical mass was not achieve by creating more plutonium above subcritical. It was achieved by reflecting more neutrons into the plutonium core.
The first incident used tungsten carbide bricks to reflect neutrons that would have normally escaped back into the plutonium.
The second incident used beryllium half spheres, also to reflect.
In both incidents, the material dropped was the neutron reflecting material into direct contact. The amount of neutrons reflected back into the core greatly.
You could think of it as a mirror near a light, the amount of reflected light increases as the mirror approaches.
More neutrons reflected back into the core versus being cast away from the core decrease the amount of mass needed in the core to sustain fission reaction.
Cherenkov radiation is produced only by charged particles (not neutrons, or gamma radiation) travelling in a medium at a higher phase velocity than light in that medium. If generated within the fissile material itself - which was opaque - the Cherenkov radiation wouldn't be visible.
I don't believe that Beta particles would fill the bill as a possible source, either. They are not very penetrating, and their velocity is considerably lower than that of light.
Regards,
The Tsar Bomb had a yield of approx. 50 megatons. Actually, it was designed and built for 100 megatons, but was - prior to detonation - deliberately "downgraded" to only 50 megatons.
Regards,
Well, whatever the cause, the good news is that his italicized posts always lean to the right :D
My IQ is 140, though I find it doesn't really help in everyday life lol, and I still find it VERY hard to understand a lot of this stuff.
They say it's not impossible for a reaction at the facility in Long Island I think to get out of control and swallow the earth. The odds are ridiculously small though. Still, fascinating. They made a movie based on it.
Swallow the earth? "They" would be fiction writers.
So, will a black hole consume the planet?
Some people have suggested that a microscopic black hole, spawned by the powerful crash of subatomic particles racing through the LHC’s tunnels, could potentially suck up the Earth.
But physicists say these fears are unfounded. For one, creating a black hole at LHC is extremely unlikely based on the laws of gravity alone, CERN officials say. But even if it did happen, as a few highly speculative theories suggest, the miniscule black hole would be so unstable it would disintegrate immediately before it had time to gobble up any of the matter on Earth.
You were right lol!
You forgot the REST of the story. He told everyone not to move. He then chalked around his feet, and then the feet of everyone else, to get their position and distance relative to the critical mass.
Yes, he died, within days. And most of the others, within weeks or months.
But he got the data from the event.
And THAT, friends, is a genuine scientist. . .
Boys will be boys, playing with dangerous things.
Finely powdered Pu is a horrible cancer risk when breathed, but as a chemical in aqueous solution it’s no worse than caffeine.
Or, it would [oh what’s that cavern behind m
The idea doesn’t have that much appeel. /rimshot
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