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 ...
They were “tickling the tail of the dragon”, bringing two slightly sub critical masses close together to calibrate the reaction rate. The top piece slipped and landed on IN CONTACT WITH the bottom piece. This produced a spike of radiation so intense there was a brilliant flash of blue ÄŒerenkov radiation. In effect it became a nuclear reactor at full power, with no shielding, the scientist grabbed the top piece and removed it, stopping the reaction in its tracks.
I would love to know what this means. It is hard to grasp. And harder for knowledgeable people like yourself to break down into idiot terms for people like me lol The scary part is you probably think you’ve already broken it down into idiot terms lol. What does that say about me!!
Yeah, no kidding. Stupid is as stupid does.
I mean name.
I want to look up the case study of his radiation poisoning.
I smell a new marvel superhero.
I’ll eat the apples. I’ll drink the water. I’ll walk barefoot over the destroyed reactor!!
Yes, I am that easy.
hubba hubba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
First incident
On August 21, 1945, the plutonium core produced a burst of neutron radiation that led to Harry Daghlian’s death. Daghlian, a physicist, made a mistake while working alone performing neutron reflection experiments on the core. The core was placed within a stack of neutron-reflective tungsten carbide bricks and the addition of each brick moved the assembly closer to criticality. While attempting to stack another brick around the assembly, Daghlian accidentally dropped it onto the core and thereby caused the core to go critical, a self-sustaining prompt critical chain reaction. Despite quick action in moving the brick off the assembly, Daghlian received a fatal dose of radiation. He died 25 days later from acute radiation poisoning.
Second incident
On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other Los Alamos personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting an experiment to verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass (core) of fissile material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors. The test was known as “tickling the dragon’s tail” for its extreme risk.
...Under Slotin’s unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the blade of a standard flathead screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist’s other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test almost a dozen separate times, often in his trademark bluejeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be “dead within a year” if they continued performing it.
On the day of the accident, Slotin’s screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch while lowering the top reflector, allowing the reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin’s skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second. He quickly flipped the top shell to the floor. The heating of the core and shells stopped the criticality within seconds of its initiation, but Slotin’s reaction prevented a recurrence and ended the accident. Slotin’s body’s positioning over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation. He received a lethal dose of 1000 rads neutron/114 rads gamma in under a second and died nine days later from acute radiation poisoning.
Louis Slotin is the one that died in this experiment.
Harry K. Daghlian, Jr died from an incident by working o his own one night.
Just so long as she doesn’t sprout extra eyes.
I also played with mercury in the 50s and in high school, and college exposed my skin directly to probably gallons of benzene, toluene, and other compounds including asbestos in the labs.
At this point in my life I should be a blob of festering tumors but low and behold I’m not. There is a big difference between that type of mercury exposure and exposure to dangerous radioactive materials and by the way, the tiny bit of tritium in old watches and other instruments is not going to hurt you.
Ah, but did you hoard mercury until you had enough to boil on the kitchen stove - undoubtedly inhaling the fumes in the process - attempt making various amalgams, occasionally ingest some, and, in short, play with it until your hands turned black?
Regards,
Thanks. I’ve lived long enough to see liberals, the FDA, the CDC et al (along with their captive study conductors - academia) reverse themselves on a number of items that are “bad for you.”
Seems okay to me...two hands and a....well, I’ll not go there.
There was a group at Los Alamos who were working on how to handle and separate the plutonium to prevent a critical mass. The reaction got out of hand and he was poisoned. His name was Haroutune Krikor Daghlian, Jr.
The second was Louis Alexander Slotin who received a lethal dose of radiation in 1946, after the war.
it could have gone critical and exploded
The hatter was mad because of mercury fumes.
So, in your contorted view, make the exposures, conditions and concentrations enough to cause a problem and then proclaim the substance is a “cancer causing agent” altogether.
Hysteric connections derived from contrived concoctions are not the norm except in the realm of those with ulterior motives.
Given your conditions of gassing, etc. What do you say about mercury vapor in broken CFLs in the home? Disregard them because it is ecologically friendly?
Unknowable, but it could well have killed everyone in the building.
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