Cherenkov radiation>
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 ...
The flash was reported by the people present, but there was no camera to verify it. Could it have been optical illusion from other radiation?
I didn’t know everybody died!!! what a lousy ending lol
I though they lived long lives.
Just a few comments:
...she has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium (LOL, I presume she is getting that for a medical procedure, and millions of people do that with no ill effects, I know, because I have injected it into thousands of them myself)
...eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl (I probably wouldn’t do that, but...did they assay the apple? I know you probably wouldn’t want to eat wildlife up the food chain that might accumulate isotopes, but...not sure about an annual fruit.)
...being chased by a possibly rabid fox (okay, best steer clear of rabid foxes no matter where you live)
...picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands (how do they know that is what it is?)
...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 (This is most likely true. The Godzilla effect hasn’t been scientifically proven, but it works great in movies!)
...she pours liquid mercury over her bare hands, comparing the feat to smoking a single cigarette: not dangerous in limited doses, she claims (I don’t know if it is dangerous or not, but I do believe that it is the mercury vapor that is most toxic. And I can say that my siblings and I had a bottle of mercury my brother “found” (probably about 100cc) and we had it for about a year, and would pour it through our hands, onto the floor, watching it consolidate itself from many small pools into larger and larger ones until there was only one puddle of mercury. This was back in the Sixties, and none of us are dead...yet!)
LOL...EVERYONE did THAT!
DDT is nonpoisonous to mammals.
At least you were interested in keeping all the mercury. It’s mercury that sits out long enough that generates hazardous quantities of vapor.
I recall reading about that event in the excellent book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”
They had a shielded sphere, and they would use two screw drivers to pry the top half away, and could measure the increase in neutron production (I recall because the further away the top part got, the fewer neutrons were being absorbed, and you could measure the activity going up on a detector.
It was fun and games (with a very, very small amount of learning, but mostly the guy was doing it for jollies) and remained fun and games until one day he pried it up, and the top shifted off the screwdrivers, and they had a critical event.
Boom. It was only for a few seconds, but the daamage was done. What an awful way to die.
Depends on the amount of material they had
The amount of material in an atom bomb the size that was dropped on Japan was about the size of a grapefruit, if I remember correctly
There is a LOT of energy in atoms.
heh, as I recall, we threw it out (in the trash!) because it started to appear nasty to us, probably from all the dirt on the floors it picked up.
LOL, I know that, but heck, they could have been spraying cyanide for all I knew at the time!
I personally believe the blood of millions of people is on the hands of environmentalists and liberals for the banning of DDT. It is that scumbag Rachel Carson at the root of it.
I pass the Rachel Carson wildlife area on the coast of Maine on occasion, and always feel like spitting out the window as I pass.
The others besides Louis Slotin died many years later. The first "next" death occurred 19 years later.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/pdf/accidentsurvivorslanl.pdf
Wiki has a summary table with names and causes of deaths from this second incident.
Cherenkov radiation>
can I have some?
You did not try to wash it first?
i’ll say! a whole life ahead of him, why do that? But why do people jump out of planes and drive race cars, and eat 20 buffalo wings at a time, er, that last one wsan’t about me!!
Cherenkov radiation is typically seen in water. The interocular fluid being mostly water may have been the location of the blue flash.
I think he was the only one to get a lethal dose because he was standing right over it. The others were not standing as close.
Distance is pretty effective in a lot of cases, as increasing distance reduces dose due to the inverse square law.
Getting 100 units of exposure at 1 foot away drops to 25 units at 2 feet away. Going to 4 feet drops it to 6.25 units.
At the levels of radiation I dealt with, simply using tongs was enough (behind a body shield, of course!) Your hands can take a lot more than your body.
I presume my brother threw it out, but...I didn’t see him do it.
I will say, we both have had elevated LFTs for our adult lives, so there may have been an effect.
But, I suppose it could be the alcohol, too...
you moonshined!
The velocity of light through ANY medium is slower than in a vacuum, and so Cheronkov radiation is possible when the velocity of the particles exceeds the velocity of light in that medium
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