Camino Primitivo After Action Report, Part 1

Back in May, I posted this preliminary itinerary where, to quote that noted fool Phil of the Past, this was the optimum “everything goes as planned” schedule. It did not go as planned. We finished, we did the Camino Primitivo, we got our Compostela, but the itinerary went out the window on Day 2. This …

Ultraviolet Rant – Scorched Ape Eye Club

Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020. I am gonna try to very briefly summarize …

CYORA: Spicy Rock Shipping

Because people were missing the CYORAs and something popped into my head, you got the first one in quite a while. Moving radioactive rocks around is important because it lets us revisit one of my favorite topics: Regulations vs. Reality vs. What Actually Happens [The twenty-second in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for …

How I Learned What “Deliquescence” Is

Well folks, someone asked. As you may be aware, as a safety professional, I sometimes get asked to help clean out dead people’s office, labs, homes and storage units. This is because the deceased might have has a reputation or survivors/estate people Find Things They Did Not Expect/Want To. In this particular case, the call …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Terror Money

There’s a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place? You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money. [The twenty-first in an ongoing …

A Thank You From The Babushkas

UPDATE: It’s two years as of today. I’ve sent $8500 and Robyn has gotten it closer to $12k. Rebuilding continues, life feels tenuous still, and assholes in Congress are not helping. A year ago today, Putin decided that Russia should escalate and continue its invasion of Ukraine that began in 2014. This was a bad …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Rad Presents

I think he best way to start this is by shaking my ANGRYFIST at Amazon & eBay for being the gray/black markets of choice for all manner of things that should not be there. Bullshit Lasers only scratch the surface of their almost complete lack of policy enforcement. [The twentieth in an ongoing series of …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Drone Radiation

I’m very proud of all of you for identifying that these are all TERRIBLE IDEAS. The thing about terrible ideas is that they still occur to people and sometimes staggering amounts of money will be spent to try to make them real and marginally less terrible. Explainer time! [The nineteenth in an ongoing series of …

Fun With PUREX

Originally wrote this 16 years ago as I was getting my masters degree. As my adviser often asked “Don’t you want to learn normal things?” While PUREX may save us from being buried in nuclear waste it is not without peril, though it’s more of the did-you-actually-think-this-through-before-you-started-pressing-buttons variety of peril.  It is vitally important to …