Funranium Labs

The fun thing about this one is that I know a lot of people out there have treated their cats for hyperthyroidism, but the number of responses from people that’ve experienced radiopharma medical care for humans that I’d call “inadequate, bordering on actionable” is high.

[The seventeenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

Thyroid ablation is one of those fun treatments where we intentionally do a thyroid destroying uptake of radioiodine, specifically I-131 to limit the body burden, to get rid of diseased thyroid tissue. And it’s one that is comparable between humans and cats. Radioiodines are annoying because they are very preferentially deposited in the thyroid when you have an uptake. This is why your “RadAway” pills for reactor accidents are just regular iodine, so that you absolutely flood your thyroid and there’s no room for more to be absorbed. 

NOTE: You have to take the pills *before* the radioiodine release gets you. Your body can’t tell the difference between the two and will take up one just as happily as the other. Biochemistry ain’t picky. 

But in this case, you’re counting on the diseased tissue already in your thyroid to be much more delicate than the healthy tissue around it. Load it up with some 8 day radioactive half life I-131 and let it kill the hyperactive bits. Afterward, all that’s left is healthy tissue and a normally functioning thyroid. Sometimes, when things were advanced before treatment begins, you can go all the way to hypothyroidism and now need to supplement with drugs. Well, a healthy thyroid and all the residual I-131…

As usual, I chose my words carefully and referred to the 8 day *radioactive* half life of I-131. This is because for anything in the body we also need to consider it’s biological half life, because were constantly cycling through everything we eat, drink, and excrete. For people with normally functioning thyroids, the half life of any given uptake of iodine is ~2 months. It’s only about one month in people with both hyper and hypothyroidism. This means you can’t hope that drinking lots of beer will clear your system faster, like tritium. The effective half life then, combining the rad & bio half lives, is just a hair under 8 days. The radiological half life dominates the calculation. And as we’ve previously discussed, we generally consider something to be “decayed away” after 10 half lives have passed. So, 80 days until all the I-131 is gone? Does the patient need to hide from everyone else? Do they need to poop into a rad waste drum? Burn all their bedding?

Uh, no.

Because American healthcare is deeply broken, thyroid ablations are often outpatient procedures. You’re held for observation to insure uptake and then released on to the street as one of the many surprise radiation sources people swinging meters may find. 31.4μSv/hr per 37MBq at 30cm is the gamma dose rate to others. Depending on how big you are, you may get an administration of 4-10x that activity. This means you become a source emitting a field at arms length of ~.3mSv/hr. OH YES, we can detect you. Which is why you get told to not put any babies in your lap or hug pregnant women and, ideally, go stay in a hotel or sleep in the garage. You are now a source of extraneous dose in the lives of others and need to stay clear of them, at least for a little bit to cool down. Also, after almost any radiopharma, it would be a great time to not do ANY travel. As they’ve gotten cheaper, radiation monitors have been installed all over the place. Your cops have questionable training, if any, of what to do if that alarm goes off. Freak out is normal. Also, no need to poop in buckets. Your radioactive flushes are already baked into the public dose calcs and discharges of your water treatment plants. Once you’ve been given your I-131, you are pissing, shitting, exhaling and sweating radioactive material and all of that needs to be controlled to keep others from taking it up. PROTIP: You shouldn’t be handling food for others at this time.

These are all instructions that I, the health physicist tasked to try to explain things people that nod, smile, and ignore me (SEE ALSO: masking compliance vs. COVID), can give to patients. Okay, now try to tell this to a radioactive cat. More responsibly than our normal dealing with humans in America, radioactive pets are kenneled for the first few *days* for cool down because, nope, not even letting you out. Your cat weighs considerably less than you, so its dose administration will also be smaller. I had the pleasure of meeting the Nuke Med Kitties at UC Davis during my masters course work. There is nothing more pathetic than a cat that desperately wants pets and you aren’t allowed within a meter of them.

This is why they have the ALARA Scritchin’ Stick. As you might imagine, the stick just is not the same. The cat whining was extreme.

You might be tempted to go grab one of the shielded glovebox gloves to pet a radioactive patheticat. This is kind of you, but you really need a full body suit. The cat is a whole body dose concern and it takes some of the beefier lead impregnated gloves to do this. Your dexterity with them is…not great. You end up incompetently and heavily petting a cat. Do not crush your cat with lead. Even then, the shielding isn’t good enough. Your distance with the stick was better.

You could try to accelerate the bio half-life by changing to a VERY protein rich diet to encourage more, volumetrically & speed-wise, pooping to clear the thyroid hormones the I-131 is getting excreted with a bit faster. The obligate carnivore will appreciate this all meat, all the time diet. But it doesn’t really shift the numbers all that much. You might get down to an effective half life of 6.5 days. Maybe. This is still a detectably radioactive kitty for two months. Also that’s gonna make a lot of poop. About that…

First, there is no such thing as anti-rad kitty litter. There is, however, kitty litter that you can flush down the toilet. As far as the water treatment plant is concerned, a radioactive cat turd is about the same as human one. My experience as a pet store employee says “flushable” is more marketing than reality. Keep your plumber’s phone number handy. So, instead, you get a new bucket to collect all the radioactive outputs of your cat and get to do a little thing we like to call “Decay In Storage”. That’s right, you get to stockpile all of your cat’s treasures for two months! Because if you throw it in your normal trash you run a VERY HIGH risk of setting off a radiation portal monitor (remember: they are cheaper and plentiful now) at a landfill and then getting a very hefty bill for illegal dumping of rad waste. You’re already collecting your cat’s carefully buried treasures anyway; to the cat, it just seems like you’re cherishing it for longer.

No, the real crime comes from treating your cat like a highly mobile and unwanted radioactive source for weeks. At a minimum, you are keeping your cat from snuggling with you for two weeks. No sitting in your lap, no jumping up into bed and snuggling with your head. It will seem like you Do Not Love Kitties. This is a crime again felinity and you will be taken to The Kitty Hague. 

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This thread is brought to you by Omaha, who will soon be a radioactive kitty. She’s incredibly whiny at the best of times and I fear how much worse it’ll be for those weeks.

Pour one out for Omaha, folks. She is a excellent void and eternally vigilant for eagles.

~fin~

The first thing to keep in mind with a rocket launch is that you don’t get to do a lot of “aiming” between pressing IGNITION and ABORT. Aiming, AKA mission planning, is what you spent the previous several months/years doing. These seconds/minutes are the shitfuckdammit stage.

[The sixteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

Part of the mission planning for the safety aspects is thinking the unthinkable and forecasting the debris fallout areas for where things are likely to impact if depending on when you press the big red button. And a lot like hurricane forecasting, you get cones of uncertainty. You get maps of that reduce “At time T, at this altitude and velocity, with X fuel remaining, the centroid of the debris field will be here with this much variation” to something that looks like a storm tracker, with colors mapping out probabilities. We can kinda sorta plan out where things are going to fall./ Of course, we don’t press that button if things are going to according to plan but we do have some idea if we press it quickly. But if you dawdle? Tricky.

The good news for all these scenarios is that I used a bit of hyperbole describing a RTG loaded rocket as a dirty bomb/space probe. This is because the RTGs for our probes are some of the most ridiculously, and necessarily, overengineered sealed sources ever made. They’re designed to survive fully fueled rocket detonation on pad and then burning in the pyre of their would-be-launch vehicle. They’re designed to take re-entry with the entire rest of the probe/spy satellite burning away so we can go reclaim & recycle them as needed.  Now, we aren’t thrilled with the idea of subjecting our radioactive sources to these levels of punishment but they approach Tick-like levels of nigh invulnerability.

Still, we want to get out to find them quick, just in case things went badly. If you wait as long as possible to abort, which theoretically means you’ve gotten as much altitude as possible, you are choosing in the event of losing integrity on the RTG that you would like to disperse it as widely as possible for dilution. That is certainly an option. Even with a large Pu-238 RTG where you get profoundly unlucky and finely distribute all that into the winds of the upper atmosphere, dilution will negate the radiotoxicity hazards. Oh, people WILL notice on their monitoring, but you won’t kill anyone. That’s likely to qualify as a severe public affairs incident with a side order of diplomacy required. And you will be a new footnote in a whole bunch of papers where researchers have a deep sigh and say “Please ignore this particular data point. That was due to The Incident.”

Back to the cones of uncertainty. The longer you wait, especially when things are already moving outside of your mission plan, the more uncertain things get and the faster it’s going. With the high likelihood your RTG survives, the field to find it in is HUGE. “But Phil, it’s a radioactive source” you say. “We have detectors to easily find them. You keep telling me that’s the great thing about health physics; that we have detectors to help find the invisible things.” …yes, I have said that. I’ve also mentioned Earth is big, right? Needle in a haystack doesn’t begin to describe it. Finding the one full can of beer among all the empties on the side of the road in Australia is more like it. And for well-built RTGs, it’s actually hard to detect them because we utilize all that decay. Of course, you may not have the option to wait until max altitude. Things may be going so badly that you want to abort on the pad before the rocket does it for you somewhere close to the pad that you’d really rather not hit with an almost full load of propellent. The RTG on board is very much a secondary thought in this situation where you’re about to lose a launch pad for a while because you’re going your damnedest to not lose the entire facility’s launch capacity.

READ: it would be bad to wherps a Delta into the VAB. 

The concept of the National Sacrifice Area was first created to describe the giant open weeping environmental nightmare wounds of huge open pit coal mines in the American West, that cannot be restored, which eventually lead to the creation of CERCLA, AKA Superfund. This term was denounced with a firm “We’re not calling it that” by elected officials; no one wanted to represent the part of America that America had abandoned. Behavior, on the other hand, suggests that the only objection was the term and other countries did much the same.  But do we aim our launches explicitly over these areas on the grounds of “Eh, what’s this compared to what we’ve already done?” No. Also, those are pretty small targets compared to the ocean.

 

I am happy to say we have no inspiring events of large RTGs lost during launch, but the long thread you’ve just made your way through is part of the thought process long before rocket ever sees the launchpad. RTGs lost on re-entry, however? That’s a different story.

Apollo 13’s RTG for the lunar module is sitting somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific, very intentionally near the Tonga Trench. There was some aiming in making that happen. Admittedly “hit the Pacific Ocean, in a deep part” doesn’t seem like the most precision of aiming but, considering everything else that went wrong, it’s still an achievement. Good enough that they made a movie about it, even if this little detail got left out.

~fin~

All of these choices technically cause legacy waste to take up less space, even if one is just a bullshit accounting trick. All of them have been tried, all of them have lead to uptakes, but like all of these quizzes my word choice is important. So, let’s define some terms.

[The fifteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

I specifically asked for “worst rad material uptake”, not dose/exposure. Obviously, if you get a lot of radioactive material into the body there will be some internal dose from that. What I am not worried about in this quiz is external dose from the drums. It means these are the wrong containers for their contents, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility. A while back, I discussed transportation index and how it gets harder to ship the higher the gamma dose rate coming off the package. You don’t want SPICY drums because moving those around sucks. But the drums we’re considering aren’t going anywhere. This brings us to our next term: Legacy Waste

At a basic level, for all fields, legacy waste is the garbage that’s been sitting over there in the corner, that likely predates your predecessor in this job, and almost all documentation & institutional memory about it is gone other than “It’s bad and hard to deal with.” But for DOE, there’s a more specific definition bad enough that Legacy Waste gets capital letters. Legacy Waste is the garbage leftover from the early nuclear weapons program, where choices were made, at speed, with the conscious decision of “We’ll figure out how to deal with it later.” For DOE, Legacy Waste more or less means “Any nuke related waste that pre-dates the 1974 creation of the Energy Research and Development Administration taking over from the Atomic Energy Commission.” So, waste that dates roughly 1938 to 1974. This doesn’t just mean radioactive waste. The majority of the waste generated by the Manhattan Project and subsequent weapons program work wasn’t radioactive, but a lot of it was toxic. SEE ALSO: Basin F at Rocky Flats, formerly known as “The Most Toxic Square Mile On Earth”.

The mid-1970s were very important years in bureaucratic evolution and regulatory development. In the four years from 1974-78, not only did NRC and ERDA (which quickly became DOE) come into existence, but the recently created federal level EPA got most of the responsibilities they have today, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) which dictates how hazardous waste is handled and disposed of. Waste generated prior to RCRA might not be packed/stored properly. It might have incompatibles in the drum. It may have no documentation at all. And because those drums aren’t compliant and DOE has been ordered MANY TIMES to take care of all that shit that’s been lingering for decades, Things Must Be Done. Which is how we get to this quiz.

The easiest Legacy Waste to take care of is that which you have some idea of what’s in the drums. Enough that you can just slap some new labels on, declare that this is now typified and no longer Legacy Waste. High fives all around, it’s Miller Time! Everything’s cool, right? The level of coolness is a function of how much you trust what information you have. As an example, Glenn Seaborg’s lab notebooks are immaculate, clear and easy to follow. Seriously, I’m jealous of his penmanship. While they are very trustworthy for process, they are absolute pants for trying to figure out his waste. Documentation from ye olden nukes tend to be, to put it kindly, results oriented. The waste was something of an afterthought. Garbage cans were things for janitors to worry about (SEE ALSO: various contaminated landfills). But even the Bob B. Dobbs impersonating BOLD MEN OF ATOMIC SCIENCE recognized that some of the waste they made couldn’t just be thrown away willy nilly and tossed it in drums instead…a minimum of 45 years ago. Drums are not immortal, especially when filled with nasty things. You just kicked the can, uhh, drum down the road.

You aren’t likely to have any materials uptake from just applying a new label. But some unlucky bastard will be the one that has the drum fall apart on them. Or finds a puddle on the floor from the bottom that’s rusted out. Then you get to do a clean up which generates more waste drums than the original drums, but at least you know what it is now and it isn’t Legacy Waste. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

For our next vocabulary word, we have the waste treatment concept of “size reduction”. When wrangling waste, you have some options of how to process it to reduce toxicity and/or costs. Taking up less room in the landfill which charges by the cubic foot is absolutely essential. The people tossing things in drums back in the 1940s did things like throw One [1] Radioactive Tumbleweed in a 55gal drum and then put it behind a building to forget about for the next 60 years. So, yeah, there’s a lot of good and necessary size reduction you can do here.

This brings us to methodology. Most of you decided that an incinerator is a terrible idea likely to lead to radioactive materials uptake by a large downwind population because, well, that’s happened and it’s why we don’t have many of them anymore. Because a waste incinerator with no filters, no scrubbers, NOTHING, is no better than a burn pit that just happens to have a chimney to insure good lofting of materials. Proper waste incinerators let very little out the stack at all and leave you nicely concentrated radioactive ash and scale, which you then have to clean out and drum again, but you might have condensed 12 drums worth of Legacy Waste condensed down to one Ashy Boi. Nice!

For the workers that have to deal with that, the airborne contamination hazard of cleaning the incinerator is serious business. You only reduced the bulk of the drum contents, you didn’t make them any less radioactive. You also made them easily airborne as ash. Also, wouldn’t think I’d have to say this, but no matter how good your stack is, incineration is a terrible idea for tritium contaminated waste. On a positive note, the release limits for tritium are incredibly high, but you won’t make any friends in the neighboring communities.

So, if you can’t burn it, you can compact it. Just like any other trash compactor, we can try to squeeze any extra space out the drum by crushing the contents as small as possible. You could crush the entire drum, contents and all, but I don’t recommend that. You put the drum in the EXTREMELEY WELL VENTILATED compactor, take the lid off, and then let the crushing piston down to do the squishing, and this part is very important, in the drum. Don’t take things out and crush them elsewhere.

This is when you discover if there was anything breakable in the drum that contained nasty things. Or perhaps something pointy that now goes through the side of the drum with a poof of contamination into the air. Hopefully the air handling can cope with that. Drum compaction is a lottery except all the lights and sirens going off aren’t a jackpot, it’s a CAM alarm.

“Now Phil” you say, “Hitting surprises in the drum seems very careless. Didn’t you x-ray this thing first?” Of course we do, but an x-ray can only tell you so much as to what the contents actually are. It should, however, reveal things that should give you pause. A lot of things “should” happen. But what does happen is these compactors get shut down for decon, often for months or years and that the workers operating them usually end up get a snootful of something.

To avoid the problem of such surprises, we get to opening and manually sorting drum contents by hand. Digging through Legacy Waste drums is, hands down, my absolute least favorite thing about my profession and the thing that got me closest to quitting. That preliminary x-ray can only tell you so much about the items in there. Like that there’s a mostly empty can with some liquid in it. It cannot tell you that the drum is slightly pressurized from the volatilized organic compound in there and is going to give you a contamination burp on opening. It usually can’t reveal all the broken glass in there. It doesn’t tell you how everything is mercury contaminated in addition to radioactive, which means GODDAMMIT this is all MIXED Legacy Waste.

Honestly, most of it is mixed waste which is why no one wants to touch it. :(

Short of putting it into a glovebox to work on, no one is happy to crack open a drum and rummaging around in it because the potential for personnel contamination with unknowns is so high. Even in a glovebox, contaminated sharps will get you right through your shielded glove. While incineration and compaction may lead to releases with uptake by workers or the public, their engineering controls make it likely that the uptakes will be comparatively small for any one individual.

Drum sorting has a much higher chance for a significant individual uptake.

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In the events the inspired this, there was a Legacy Waste drum that was chosen to be hand processed due to its weird Co-60 gamma spec signature and higher dose rate than the rest of the drums. With a circa 1950 vintage, any appreciable Co-60 made little sense. The drum got cracked open. As per what seemed usual, there was a burp which than caused the Continuous Air Monitor (CAM) alarm to go off. After everyone evacuated, surveyed themselves for contamination, and found themselves to be clean, they got back in there to start unpacking.

What was in the drum is what is in most drums: contaminated PPE, much like the workers were making more of right now. Contaminated PPE is good because it’s compressible & combustible. Easy to size reduce. There were some other fiddly bits in there and an armadillo skeleton. What was not in the drum, however, was anything that which had an appreciable Co-60 signature. PPE was covered in actinide fun, but no Co-60.

That’s when they took a really hard look at the drum itself.

If Co-60 waste had been placed in the drum around 1950, it should have all decayed away by the 2000s. But if the drum itself had somehow been activated, it could have grown it’s own Co-60.

At some point in this Legacy Waste drum’s life, it got put somewhere that it really shouldn’t. Best guess is that at the drum got to live in/near an accelerator facility where the shielding wasn’t quite up to snuff. Or, at the very least, it was there long enough to grow enough Co-60 to notice.

Drum stopped being Legacy Waste and got a new drum of its own.

~fin~

PS – If you’d like to know more about properly taking care of waste, including your many options to deal with it, allow me to give you the Follow Friday recommendation of @nuclearkatie. She may not make you feel any better about things however.

 

I should preface that my primary vacuum tube experience is related to trying to fix the 1920s built-in wall radio made of redwood in a house my family rented when I was in elementary school.

Readers, I never fixed that radio.

[The fourteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

I am just old enough to remember asking “What’s that?” when I saw the vacuum tube tester in Thrifty next to the ice cream bar but young enough that there were no tubes for sale and the testing machine hadn’t worked in years. But in this scenario, we’re talking about tubes in something a titch more complex than a custom built radio to listen to Fireside Chats: a reactor control console. The fact that we have reactor control rooms running on vacuum tubes seems to have surprised some people. This points to the core (HA!) issue of Known Reliable Methods & Technologies and License Conditions that discourage you from changing things once you build them. If your license says you will do a thing then you will period, amen, ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DEVIATION, do that thing. This is specific to the United States and our AEC/ERDA/DOE/NRC regulations, as they’ve evolved of course. But it’s not all that much different for other countries. Your regulatory entities want to know what you have, that those things work, and you that haven’t messed with it. American nuclear reactors are OLD, with an average operating age of ~40 years. This isn’t just the vessel we’re talking about either; the license covers all equipment related to operation. 

But wait you say [does math] if the average age is 40 years old, how can there be reactors older than NRC, the agency that licenses them?  (NOTE: the NRC’s birthday is 19 January 1975, so it’s a Capricorn) It’s because the old reactors still have their original licenses from the Atomic Energy Commission. I tell you hwut, those dang ol’ AEC short form licenses are like six pages long for your reactor and reactor accessories. If you change NOTHING, you can keep renewing that original license. When you see a more current NRC license, you understand why people lock in. Preserving the configuration stated on your old AEC license is something that operators fight tooth and nail to retain because losing the grandfathered status is one whole hell of a lot of work. This is why blowing a tube is so critical. The most popular response, which was not one of the four choices, was to go get a spare from the supply cabinet of critical parts. And you can do that…for a while. Your predecessors certainly did that. But then they inconsiderately failed, or were unable, to restock for you. Because your predecessors have failed you, now you have the four choices as presented.

By far, the most popular choice was to pillage another tube from a less critical piece of equipment. If you’re lucky, that’s not a highly specialized tube and there’s one you can “reallocate”.  Of course, you should make sure that yanking the tube from the other location isn’t also failsafe critical system which is why your reactor shut down in the first place. That tube was important enough that your reactor was designed to NOPE if it isn’t there to do its job. If you pillage, I want to make certain that you do what @hawtgluh said to do. Make a note in the operator’s log for what you did so that people know what other thing they also need to repair. Your successors may still curse your name but at least they know WHY.

But maybe the only “spares-in-situ” of that tube are in other critical systems that would also scram your reactor if you yanked them. So, you head to Amazon to buy the replacement your predecessor should have bought for you? No? How about Grainger? Hmm. Ebay? The problem you’re running into is that vacuum tubes aren’t nearly as common as they used to be, used for niche maker projects, are collector items, and you’re also fighting everyone else with venerable equipment that they’re trying to keep operating. Those tubes won’t be cheap. Honestly, the shipping fees to get it AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE so that you can fire the reactor up again may be almost as expensive as the tube itself…assuming you can find one.

And if you can’t find it, you can try to make a replacement tube. Making vacuum tubes isn’t as easy as you’d hope. I mean, it’s not terrible, but just like the tubes are rare these days so too are the skills and facilities to make them. So, if you depend on vacuum tubes I recommend you go make friends with glass blowers now. The more reasonable tinkering project is to make an adapter to use a different tube in that socket.

[BUZZER NOISE] Sorry, you just got a NRC violation notice. 

That specific tube is part of your licensed configuration. In fact, making a bespoke replacement you may have to do silly things like handwriting a model number on the tube that matches what your license says it should have. Similarly, you will get asked “How do you know your bespoke tube works? What quality assurance do you have?” Fuck. You’re in trouble again and have blown your license. Mind you, if you want to start a artisanal craft tube making shop now, you’re never gonna be rich but you will be providing a desperately needed service to the world and you’ll thrill hobbyists. Please. Pretty please. The Soviet surpluses won’t last forever. 

Which brings us to Windows.

This is a wholesale replacement of your control systems with something more modern than an Atari 2600 that can run Windows, which means you’re submitting a new license application. It will be years until you turn the reactor back on. While many of you had UNCOMPLIMENTARY THINGS to say about Windows system integration, it has happened. The important thing to know is that critical equipment like this is very, VERY airgapped from the outside world. You can be a bit more confident under those circumstances.

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In the inspiring events for this scenario, it wasn’t a reactor but an accelerator built in the 1950s. The control room’s consoles were completely filled with special vacuum tubes, most of which were custom made. Eventually, the tube shop closed and the cabinets of spare parts dwindled away. It took decades, but it happened. Because the licensing is different, they were able to sever different parts of the control systems. Only one panel could not be altered. But the other eight consoles? They salvaged thousands of tubes.

The first time I walked in and asked what that flatscreen TV and single server blade in old, otherwise completely empty equipment rack was?

ANSWER: the replacement for the entire rest of the control room, in addition to all the data capture. 

I said that was a neat upgrade but what redundancy did they have in the event of something like a water leak. There was a pained slow blink.

The next time I went back there were two blades in that rack. You know, for redundancy. [facepalm]

~fin~ 

When I put these polls up, one of the most common responses is “Why on Earth would anyone ask *me* to do this?” That’s fair, but this is my game. ;)

But for reactor siting? The number of different fields we talk to is astounding, lest we miss something. You never know when you might get a call.

[The thirteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

In light of the day that this explainer was written, a 747-equivalent plane slamming into your brand spanking new nuclear energy center is extremely credible. So much so, that this is absolutely part of the current design specifications and has been for quite a while. Even old reactors, like SONGS and McClellan, were built to take such impacts because a “whups, eat plane” incident was considered very credible due to their location. But not necessarily the out-buildings of the old power stations. As we learned courtesy of Fukushima Daiichi, those out-buildings are very important to keep the reactors actually running. If you’re gonna build one part of a power station to eat a plane, you should for all of it. 

Believing in the willingness of the military to shoot down passenger planes, of those passengers to happily die, and that a locked door on the cockpit makes everything hunky dory to protect your reactor is trying to work on the cheap. You build for credible threats. This one is.

Also unpleasantly credible, because it’s already happened once in recent memory, is inundation by hurricane. Except Hurricane Sandy was kind. Sandy, huge as it was, was merely a category 2 hurricane when it smacked NYC. That’s not the worst that the Atlantic can throw at a poor barrier island. But the danger of storm surge and wind is that, once again, your vitally important support out-buildings may get swept away or so badly flooded that the equipment in them is inoperable. ~9m storm surges are not out of the realm of possibility. For added Fun Gravy, slap another 1m on top of that for estimated sea level rise over the life of the new power station. So, we’re talking sea walls that may look familiar from episodes of The Expanse when they pan over UN HQ. This is quite credible, but will greatly exceed the budget for your power station. You’ll have to do much more local storm barriers for the site instead. This will contribute to a some what fortress like appearance for the site, including the moat-like drainage system. 

Which brings us to the tradition of strong and vigorous civic debate on Long Island. You’re already building a a nuclear facility that has to be compliant with NRC security requirements and hardened enough for MegaSandy, you’re most of the way there to hold off light irregular infantry. One of the comments yesterday was along the lines of “insurrectionists will leave it alone because they want electricity too.” This is one of those things we like to call a behavioral norm. Norms are only that right up until the moment they aren’t. It was a norm to not attack hospitals or first responders as well. We call those war crimes for a reason, not that we’ve done a great job stopping any of those lately. Seizing a nuclear power station has tremendous strategic value, as does the madman threat to destroy it.

But is a Free Long Island Army likely to stand up and be able to fight off any assisting forces that might want to help protect the power station? Ehhhhh, I’d be more worried about the power station promptly joining them because they hate Manhattan just that much. What you have is already is likely adequate to cover insurrection if you’re ready for what Planet Earth is likely to throw at you any given year.

But how about any given 10,000 years? The Azores and Canary Islands have this very bad habit of dramatically calving into the sea. I want to take moment to reflect that the “NYC Problem” is every disaster planner’s most or least favorite. It is the Kobyashi Maru scenario. You never get to “win”, you can only try make it less bad. Much like the geologic record of Seattle shares the repeated apocalyptic tsunamis from the Cascadia quakes and Mt. Rainer’s lahars scraping Puget Sound clean, the Hudson River Valley bears the scars of tsunamis caused massive underwater landslides. The tsunamis from these landslides are unpleasantly massive. Like, Michael Bay-worthy massive. Generally, when you find a xenolith (literally “alien rock”) in a New England landscape you usually assume it’s a glacial erratic, a rock from somewhere else glacially transported and left behind by the melting ice. But sometimes it’s something ripped off the seafloor and plopped in the middle of a farm.

Half of Isla Flores could fall into the ocean tomorrow but it’s the same long odds as asteroid impact. And this is one of those events where you’d have MUCH bigger problems to worry about.

---

The inspiration for this scenario comes from the events of the Arab Spring. Once upon a time, there was a young scientist who lived in a country that got overthrown by a dictator. Because he kept his head down, he eventually got put in charge of the reactor. This was a Soviet reactor and, well, the Soviet Union went away. US sanctions made any spare parts you might be able to adapt for use very difficult to get. But he and his crew did his best to keep things running through the decades and continuing to make radiopharmacueticals for the country’s hospitals. 

Eventually, the dictator began to shed some of his pariah status, lifting some sanctions, allowing spare parts start to flow in. The reactor instrumentation could finally be calibrated for the first time in over 15 years. 

Then the Arab Spring began. As one might guess, the dictator was not pleased with this.

Much of his country’s budget was devoted to the military, with base after base after base on a casual drive through the capital. Looking around for VERY defensible locations, the reactor facility was noticed. The reactor director suddenly found himself assigned a brigade and told to turn the nuclear center into a fortress, to protect it at all costs, and that it might be a fall back position for the dictator if needed.

The director cared about the reactor. Not so much the dictator.

The dictator died, the country collapsed. It’s been nine years but I’ve never heard from that director again nor heard the name of that nuclear center mentioned in the news. It’s still there but I couldn’t tell you who is running it these days.

~fin~

To reiterate, the good news here is zero chance of zombies.

The bad news is that you have to cope with the living instead. Unlike the shambling dead, who are fairly goal oriented (re: your brains), the living have Opinions™ and they are often contradictory.

[The twelfth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

The reason I like to ask questions like these is because there’s often not a good answer and we haven’t really had to figure it out. This means this is the best time to do it is now, rather than as a game time decision when the crisis is already in progress. And there is few better places to work on this than the edge cases where Regulation Set 1, inspired by technical & safety concerns, runs face first in to Regulation Set 2, inspired by cultural & religious taboos.

If anyone’s ever said an anthropology degree is useless, they’re dead wrong. 

Failing to appreciate or, often worse, respect what inspires Reg Set 2 is what lands you in deep shit with crying families on the news calling you a cruel and heartless representative of organization that is, clearly, immoral. This looks very bad on your performance appraisal. IN PARTICULAR, people get excited about how you treat the remains of the dead. I want to be very clear that I am, at best, an amateur onlooker at the processes and rules of death work, especially their religious overlap but daaaaang it’s interesting. 

As humorous anecdote, I was once introduced to the head of the back of the house at a funeral home who was shocked I’d shake their hand. Friend then explained to their boss that I handled plutonium for a living. Boss then had to run off and go wash their hands. Rad workers are unclean to death workers, yo. 

But back to handling the dead, depending on religious preferences in question, you may be on a very tight clock. If, for example, you’ve got three days to get that body in the ground that’s not allowing much cool down time for short-lived, particularly nasty radionuclides. As for anointing the body before burial, I had a lot of fun contemplating making lead shielded PPE vestments for my friend @lukei4655 who is a Dominican priest or, in the case of particularly nasty radioactive death, possibly the Blessed Hot Cell for manipulator arm anointing. Other funerary practices, such as unmarked simple burial, would otherwise normally be considered illegal disposal of radioactive waste, kind of like sending the interns/privates to go bury drums “somewhere out on the reservation” without actually noting where you did it. 

Cremation would look a lot like waste incineration, as discussed in a previous CYORA, except cremation retorts don’t have that kind of filtration. However, it certainly does reduce the body to a much more manageable size for high level radioactive waste disposal. Your urn in this case would probably be a small Type B container.

Where the Reg Set 1 vs. 2 fight is really going to come down to it is public dose consideration. If your body, after processing and burial, is still a public dose hazard such that anyone near the remains could receive a dose in excess of .02mSv in an hour from them, Reg Set 1 will win. People operating under Reg Set 1, will want a “burial” that is more in accordance with waste disposal concerns, i.e. a hole in the ground in one of the waste burial areas at NTS (no, I will not use it’s current name). You can offer it, but the family doesn’t have to accept. 

Which means if you’re going to have a burial somewhere else and The Dose Rate of the Dead is too high, you now have to do some work to insure that the people wandering through the cemetery, especially those that work there, are safe. As these are dead soldiers, in America you have a bonus option: Arlington National Cemetery. If you die in good standing with Department of Defense, you may request burial in Arlington or any open and available military cemetary. Circumstances likely to create several dead very radioactive soldiers might also merit group burial with a handsome memorial, like the USS Thresher, USS Scorpion, and Challenger. While you can request it, DOD can never demand it though they might hint VERY FORCEFULLY that they’d like to do interment at a national cemetery. A group memorial would be very convenient to build a single shielded vault with monitoring to hold the remains of the unlucky crew. 

As a bonus military option, if you were either active duty or closely associated with the Navy you can do burial at sea. There is, however, the minor issue that this *might* constitute a violation of the London Convention of Sea Disposal of Radioactive Waste. Burial at sea regs for various nations already specifies specific locations you can do it and also requires that you make sure that the body sinks promptly. Because no one is happy for a body to float ashore, especially a radioactive one. Also, are human remains waste? Oops, you just ended up on the news again with grieving family members for being a heartless bastard again, because you referred to their loved ones as “waste”. This is very tricky territory. 

But in America at least, burial is very likely going to be in a family plot that needs a special casket/vault for the body. We actually maintain a registry of all such burials so that we know to go check on them and make sure that the cemetery hasn’t since been abandoned. Abandonment happens because human/human institution time scales are just out of sync enough relative to the radionuclides of general concern where 10 half-lives is in the 10-10000yr range. As an example, internment done 300 years ago in America is now a full, abandoned, hopefully not built over colonial graveyard. So, project 300 years forward from today and what does the graveyard and surroundings look like? Hell if I know, but based on wandering around in Boston and Cambridge you can only hope they’re that well cared for. But I do know you’ll still be responsible for monitoring. 

But what if the cemetery has to be moved? Now you have all the family issues of disinterment combined with, well, let’s call them legacy waste issues. The only way I can think to make it more ugly is if it was a tribal burial ground too, like in this documentary Poltergiest.

---

In the inspiring events for this scenario, we kinda sorta killed three people with reactor oops. You may review the SL-1 incident here. There’s a 3hr version somewhere, but I can’t find it:

For the three victims, the answer was everything but burial at sea, despite the fact that one of them was a sailor and their family, theoretically, could have requested it. 

To make the burials in private plots and Arlington work, without great expense, not all of the remains got to in the caskets. Some bits got to be drummed and disposed of as rad waste at the site of SL-1. In this case, families agreed to this but, to be clear, they didn’t have to. You’d hope that the result of this is that people organizing such work would recognize that the ideal way to deal with this is to write contracts where the course of action is set in advance. Except we don’t like to think about death and this is also nightmare lawsuit territory.  Reg Set 1 & 2, with all their attendant issues, will politely ignore the each other exists right up until they once more can’t.

Hopefully that isn’t going to happen again anytime soon.

~fin~

ADDENDUM: to everyone that thinks the technocratic Reg Set 1 should and will always win in a fight with cultural/religious Reg Set 2, which feel like a “nice to have” in your opinion, I’d just like to remind you that the underpinnings of Reg Set 2 have been around a lot longer. They tend to win.

A good place to start is that counting labs rarely (read: I have never seen one) end up on the top floor with beautiful views of your surroundings. No, you get the dungeon labs where sunlight & windows are a rumor, but the radon down there is quite real.

[The eleventh in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

How much radon you have in your subterranean science lair is very much a function of where you are and what your local geology is like. But even in the newest, most freshly heaved from ocean sedimentary formations you’re going to have some. GOOD NEWS! Your building HVAC takes care of this. Well, it should take care of it. If the HVAC is balanced to actually move air through your room. Have you made friends with the Facilities folks yet? You should really do that. 

If you live around some really nice old cracked granite, you’ll have extra fans to blow it clear. In a fine parsing of the language of the scenario and the explainer tweets so far, you’ll notice I just said “radon”. I didn’t give you any specific radionuclides, like Rn-222. This is because for naturally occurring radon, you get all of the them, all the time. But with a half-life of just shy of 4 days, Rn-222 is the only one that really gets a chance to accumulate. The next longest lived is measured in hours. But they’re all there. But assuming your HVAC is working properly, this isn’t a issue. You know the radon evolution rate in your area and you ventilate appropriately. In most places, the typical air changes to blow your human stink out of the building is sufficient. In Wisconsin, you might want extra. 

Also, we don’t *really* detect radon. Radon is an annoying noble gas which means it doesn’t stick to anything, so it’s hard to get enough in any one place to detect. But it’s decay products when it spontaneously stops being radon? Oh yeah, we can work with those.

NOTE: for anyone about to share radon immersion dose stories and calculations, please smugly keep your edge case to yourself.

But what your instrumentation is telling you is that you are experiencing events where you are getting WAY more radon than normal and that’s weird. The question is from where. The game “What the hell is this signal?” is the unofficial hobby of all counting labs. Because you put your sample in the counter, you know what you expect to see and then when you a huge signal of something extra, well, that’s like a big wet fart from the man in front of you playing his Brown Note Solo during the quietest part of a symphony. In the CYORA: Surprise Positrons, an inconsiderate researcher managed to throw off pretty much every counting experiment in the entire building with their insufficiently shielded Na-22 source. Hooboy, those other researchers were hunting for that source.

If someone was rude enough to set up a SURPRISE ACCELERATOR next to your counting lab without so much as an Employee Right-To-Know chat over coffee, they’re probably using the other side of the wall from your detector as their backstop to be Maximally Inconsiderate Colleague. But again, an accelerator, even one operating in a mode/power that can cause activation, isn’t going to give you a radon signal. It’ll give you a big honking Bremsstrahlung curve to absolutely wipe out your detector, but not radon. Seriously, SURPRISE ACCELERATORS are rude, but they aren’t subtle. You tend to notice when one shows up before they turn it on and can have very productive discussions about shared spaces, resources, and institutional research priorities. It’s also a super great time to make new enemies for the rest of your respective careers.

Oh dear. 

As several of you identified, an elevator shaft is a lovely low space where you could collect radon but the pumping action of the elevator tends to flush it out regularly. Admittedly, you’re flushing it into the rest of the building but that’s what your HVAC is for. Having a DU counterweight means there’s a chance to evolve a teensy extra bit of radon in the elevator shaft from the decay of the U-238 as it heads toward equilibrium with its daughters. Mind you, hitting equilibrium is gonna take about a million years so it’s a teensy amount of radon. There are, however, several amusing gammas coming off the 2000kg+ slab of DU regularly going up and down the shaft. If your counting lab is near the elevator, you’re going to see it every damn time it goes by, but it’s not radon.

For very sensitive counting labs, watch the weather closely. 

---

For the events that inspire the scenario, there was a counting experiment that was getting pronounced Ra-226 lines showing up in their overnight runs at least once a month over the course of a year. There was no rhyme or reason other than “only overnight runs”. I was asked to help find the source of this mysterious source because one researcher had had their experiments ruined three times in a row and it was driving them crazy.

Keeping in mind what they told me, I started by looking at the experimental setup. Experiment looked solid and I found no signs of stray contamination leftover from previous experiments. All sources were accounted for and secure when I performed an inventory. I took a step back, sort of cleared my mind, and took in the whole space. That’s when I figured it out and moved one item. The random radium peaks vanished. 

They were very thankful. Then, six months later, it happened again. I got an angry phone call saying the peaks were back and I hadn’t fixed it after all. 

Me: Did you move your trashcan next to your experiment again?
Them: Uhh [clearly looking to check], yes. What’s that got to do with anything?
Me: As long as it was by the door, the janitor with a SPICY radium watch didn’t have to walk into your lab and near your incredibly sensitive experiment to empty the trashcan.
Them: WHY DOES A JANITOR EVEN HAVE A WATCH LIKE THAT IN MY SPACE?!!?
Me: Why didn’t you leave your trashcans out in the hallway like they were supposed to be in the first place. The janitor was doing you a favor by even entering your space to collect up your trash.

MORAL: Don’t blame the janitor for your fuck up.

~fin~ 

When you’re regarded as a teacher/professor’s favorite student over their entire career, it makes it very likely the school administration or alumni association will drop you a line for help, no matter what you went on to do in life.

This may encourage you to move far from home.

[The tenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

If you have memories, happy or otherwise, of your teachers having a seemingly endless supply of weird and concerning apparatus for demonstrations, I want to assure you there were SO MANY MORE they didn’t use in the backroom and back at their homes. The things your teacher’d bring out for demos are a function of a few things:

• Where/how old is your school district?
• How comfortable are they are using it?
• How likely is it to break/easy to fix again?
• Have they been specifically forbidden to use it by administration? 

The collection your teacher has to draw on is made up of the collective things ALL the science teachers that have ever taught there have left behind, everything of their own, and everything donated to the district over the decades. Because if you can give it away, and they accept it, it isn’t waste and you get a tax write off for the donation. You know, for kids! SEE ALSO: Navy base cleanup CYORA 

Sooooo, if you live near a military base, university, or national lab interesting things may sneak into your local high schools. Especially if your former teacher used to work at any of these institutions. They knew exactly what to grab from the surplus sales. 

It’s entirely likely the four items in this quiz are in the demo collection. For example, Luis Alvarez, his students, and Oppenheimer’s sons used to build cloud chambers and hand them out to anyone and everyone that wanted one within a several hundred mile radius of Berkeley, CA. What they didn’t typically give were radioactive sources to go with the cloud chamber. Not because the rules were strict or that the Nobel Prize winner was stingy but rather because a suitable radioactive source was very easy to lay hands on for most anyone those days. If it isn’t already mounted in the cloud chamber, there’s likely a box somewhere near it with a Ra-226 tipped needle or a small piece of pitchblende. Of course, this might be when you find the cabinet with a century worth of collected rad sources, but that’s a different CYORA. Old enough radium needles and crumbly ore will shed material, which is annoying and you have to clean up, but they aren’t a big dose concern. Use your GM to find all the bits and bag them all nicely.

But even in this blighted Year of Nergal 2020, your cloud chamber and the associated bits are probably the newest of the four at ~80 years old. Sears-Roebuck, however, made ABSOLUTE BANK selling medical quackery, pretty much from the first 1894 catalog. I’m not going to link to any of the modern inheritors of the 19th century hair growth stimulation wands, but suffice it to say this product class has never really gone away. Various specific products have been pulled from the market over the decades and dozens of new ones take their place. In summation, yes, I know all about the damn laser hats and have reported several to the FDA. Speaking of the FDA, as many of you noted, the peak of electricity based quack devices matches nicely with the rise of the radiation-based ones. And this all predates the Clean Food & Drug Act. 

 

There were absolutely manufacturers who reasoned MORE VOLTAGE, MORE RADON, MORE FUN, SIX FLAGS!!! and then they did the Mr. Six dance all the way to the bank. But the wand is more of an electrocution hazard than a radiological one with it’s fraying fabric insulation. The uranium or thorium in the glass of the wand’s discharge tip will glow nicely thanks to the discharge, but the dose rates won’t be much worse than depression glass.

Speaking of electrical fun, this brings us to the Van de Graff generator. A 450kV Van de Graff is about this size and works roughly like so for fun demos.

450kV will do good zaps, raise hair, and stick balloons everywhere. And while you can use a Van de Graff’s as an accelerator, you need to hit about 10MeV before I’m worried about you activating things with electrons. This one’s safe and will make the Halloween party look good. 

Which brings us to the hand-blown Crookes Tube. Hand-blown isn’t particularly concerning as that’s just how most of them were made, especially if you want something inside the tube as a target like a Maltese Cross or phosphor strip. If you aren’t familiar with this bit of apparatus, they look like this. I’m posting this video with a wince and going to have a nice sip of my cocktail. 

A Crooke’s Tube is more generically known as a cathode ray tube (CRT). CRT covers everything from this 19th century delight, to your old tube TV, to your x-ray unit. What they all have in common are electrodes, glass, vacuum, voltage…and the generation of x-rays. Did you notice the sound in that nine second video? That was their rad meter out of the shot reacting to all the x-rays emitted when voltage was applied to the tube. Very old tubes still function, though you may need to bake them out a bit before they’ll work well enough to give you a good glow. But why didn’t you ever hear about x-rays from your old TV’s CRT? Ever notice how heavy those damn things were compared to your flatscreen? Because we learned lessons quickly and added a bunch of lead to the tubes of consumer products. We also made the FDA’s responsible for them after one holiday shopping season production whoopsie.

The Crooke’s Tubes have none of that. Their soft x-ray emission *and how it aims* is a function of applied voltage, target material, how good the vacuum is, and what magnets you add. Some are highly directional. Others spew x-rays EVERYWHERE. Get your meter for this one. And I use the plural “tubes” because no self-respecting teacher has just one, unless that’s the only one left intact after a century of instruction. For public instruction, you want the dose rate <2µSv/hr. You might discover you need to move some desks to use them. 

---

For the inspiring events for this scenario, while my high school physics/chemistry teacher had all the things listed in the quiz and so much more (especially the Sears medical quackery instruments), P.Q. le Boom’s Collection is not the subject in question here. 

A physics demo group had a remarkable collection of hand-blown Crooke’s Tubes, dozens in all kinds of configurations, with the newest having been made by Zeiss in 1923. The oldest had been made in-house by the demo group’s predecessors over a century earlier. They’d been in continuous use for ~100yrs for classroom demonstration for professors. Nor had the demos changed much in a century. Then SOME COMPLETE BASTARD asked if anyone had ever done a dose rate measurement of them in operation as set up by professors for instruction. And so, one by one, each of the configurations got set up in every single one of the classrooms to assess the setup, tubes, and teaching space.

PROTIP: Do not aim your tube at students. That’s rude. Use a camera if you want them to see the Maltese Cross shadow. 

At a basic level, they needed to determine if there were any dose rates in excess .2µSv/hr in the classroom.

ANSWER: Each and every one of the tubes was in excess of that for the professor at the front of the classroom. But that’s fine, they’re rad workers.

With the worst of the tubes, even in the largest auditorium, you’d have had to evacuate the first six rows. In the smaller class rooms, you wouldn’t have been able to let any students remain physically present at all. Of the dozens of tubes, it was whittled down to five acceptable ones and only allowed to be used in certain spaces. If there’s a positive aspect to remote instruction in the COVID-19 era, you won’t be in the front row of class, looking down the bore of a 120 year old Crooke’s Tube.

~fin~