Thanks for watching! If you would like to see my reaction to another Kyle Hill orphan source video, please check out: ua-cam.com/video/kdYEDbodP7g/v-deo.htmlsi=3bPWVlcKd01l2N1S
so, my odd thought, unrelated to the video, but on the topic of nuclear waste. Instead of using the external casks, couldn't the high level nuclear waste be repurposed to make RTG's and then have an alternative source of backup power. Sure you'd need alot of them, but the same thing can be said for solar panels and wind turbines. Perhaps to at least offset downtime operations for fuel transfers or maintenance shutdowns of a plant. Or, is the waste material simply not strong enough to be used for this purpose or, emits the wrong kind of radiation, such as too many neutrons like you mentioned. Unsure, but it's always been a confusion to me, I always find myself thinking "surely the spent fuel can be repurposed for some further use" until it's more or les all gone and "inert" for a lack of better words.
Fellow nuclear engineer here. You should check out channel called "plainly difficult". He has entire series about nuclear accidents, even the more obscure ones that I've never heard about.
Kyle's recent video about Fukushima's current water release plans demonstrates his journalistic integrity as much if not more so than the quality of his education on nuclear safety.
Kyle and those he works with definitely seem to have a good measure of integrity. He also proved quite capable of accepting criticism recently and doing a bit of a mea culpa with that whole fake science video bit.
@@RangerMcFriendly No no, his video here wasn't inaccurate. I'm referring to one he did about fake and misleading "science" channels on UA-cam; content farms, really. He had a lot of good points in that, though one of those channels he mentioned made a rebuttal, to which Kyle responded in a very fair, measured, and mature manner. Like, exceedingly so; Kyle's response was a model for engaging with criticism of oneself.
I know that losing track of 1000 orphan sources is entirely unimaginable, but also, the reason why it happened was unprecedented. The idea of a national government with full nuclear capability, the USSR, dissolving over the course of months is hard to grasp. The amount of bureaucratic paperwork, knowledge, and oversight that just evaporated overnight is terrifying. So much invaluable information, such as the location of these estimated 1000 orphan sources, was simply lost. I don't know what could have been done to prevent this. No government ever plans ahead for what happens after it has dissolved.
@@nicholasneyhart396 Sure, but the government body that governed the nuclear side of things completely dissolved, leaving Georgia without the financial ability or access to the records it needed. My main point is that Georgia itself isn't at fault here.
The answer is that every government should have redundant plans in place for massive disasters and should have several copies of its records filed with multiple groups. If the Soviet civilian nuclear authorities had, for example, annually filed copies of their records with both the IAEA and the Georgian government, one or both of those organizations would have been able to deal with the fallout (pun intended) of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and get any potential dangers under control. The United States should frankly be doing the exact same thing now as a standard procedure - annually filing information on various sources or other potential radiological hazards with each relevant state and the IAEA, just in case - but I doubt we are.
@@theheresiarch3740yeah, this would be an ideal situation for sure. in the unfortunate reality, it is just like someone not being able to find the file for a client at my job. forget contigency plans for what to do if someone is fired and you lose all the knowledge they had of where there folders are or who their contact are with. You are lucky if they have a plan for those things while still working there.
In many ways, one could imagine they would draft plans on how to HIDE assets as opposed to how to safely make sure they end up in "enemy hands" .. even in the case of something as dangerous to the environment as orphan radioactive sources 🤔🤷♂️
“We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” -Carl Sagan
Your explanation of absorbed vs. equivalent dose finally made it make sense to me. Thank you for this! It's incredibly important for experts like you to talk about incidents like this for the same reason I listen to pilots talk about flight incidents--knowing how these incidents are handled and how much has been learned from them greatly reduces anxiety around them. I'd love to see you react to a video about Three Mile Island, since it's closer to home for you. Kyle and Plainly Difficult both have excellent videos on the subject, though Kyle's emphasizes the PR aspect more.
There is actually a really good talk about 3 Mile Island by a guy called Nicholas Means. He usually talks about aircraft disasters and how systems & leadership strategies helped or hindered the situation. His talk on 3 Mile Island goes into how the systems & training really set the stage for a meltdown. The talk is called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?" and is here on UA-cam.
I imagine it would be the DROP AND RUN sign that the caesium type sources in medical equipment often have to try to prevent a repeat of the brazil incident , if these orphan sources were labelled.
If I'm out and about and see a smallish device out in the middle of nowhere and everywhere is snow packed except where the device is and is steaming I'm getting nowhere near it.
A lost nuclear weapon is an Orphan Source. It is **also** a Broken Arrow - an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon. There have been 32 publicly known Broken Arrows, six of which have never been recovered.
Surprise, that's the case with most everything, in every country. When the US commissions construction of a new plant or new weapon, a design criteria is sent out to bid.....and the lowest bidder usually gets the contract 🤷♂️ It's a horrible operating parameter.....
interesting story about one needing to know what you're dealing with: back in the olden days, there was a horrific condition common among east german silver miners, which was essentially a combination of radiation poisoning and lung cancer. this was because the soil in the southern mountains of east Germany wasn't just rich in silver ore, but also uranium ore, the value and danger of which was unknown to people of the time, this meant that miners were digging through uranium ore trying to get to the silver, not knowing what it was, inhaling dust particles, getting them on their clothes, going home in these clothes and spreading the contamination to their homes, resulting in nearly constant exposure. when the east german government began mining uranium ore in earnest after WW-II under the supervision of the soviet union, the mines became much safer, anyone working there knew what they were dealing with, they had two locker rooms and a shower room in between, they'd leave their street clothes in locker room one when arriving, go through the shower room into locker room two to change into their work clothes. after the shift they would leave their work clothes in locker room 2, hose each other down in the shower room (nobody washed themselves as that involved the possibility of you missing a spot) and then they would put on their street clothes again in locker room one, the work clothes never even left the mine, they had washing machines inside and the waste water was dumped back into the mine.
You would be astounded at the greenhouse gasses from dams. Not just the obvious CO2 from decomposition of submerged organic materials, but the underlying permeability which allows methane to seeping up at far greater rates than natural lakes as well as conditions which encourage more local methane off-gassing from biological processes.
@@ArtisChronicles Unfortunately, the ecosystem's demand for new atmospheric carbon is pretty inflexible - and when we do manage to change it, it's normally by killing off plants and reducing demand. Plants have plenty of co2 without any need for human emissions.
@ArtisChronicles The tricky part with methane is determining its GWP. In the first decade, it traps significantly more heat than CO2 in the atmosphere, but most of it's broken down in the first 10 years in the atmosphere. However it breaks down into CO2 and H2O. I think methane from fossil sources used for heating and electricity are 36 times worse than carbon dioxide and sources like livestock and waste are 34 times worse. Some studies are suggesting that it might be closer to 40-38 times worse. The impact of methane is certainly under rated and I suspect that it has more to do with political barriers than anything else.
Tyler, have you seen the Thought Emporium video from a few years ago where he discovered sketchy radioactive products on Amazon were full of Thorium being sold as "negative ion" snake oil? He had to get the NRC involved and everything, he ended up making two videos about it.
Makes me wonder why the hell they don’t put a radioactive symbol on things like this. All these incidents could be avoided if they just labeled this stuff as radioactive 🤦🏻♂️Seriously there was an incident were a source ended up getting melted down with scrap metal and contaminated a bunch of it. A bloody radioactive symbol would have prevented all of these accidents.
There was an incident where exactly this happened and they only found out when I truck took a wrong turn into a nuclear power station or research lab. As it left, it set off a radiation alarm and masses of steel had to be located as it was all contaminated
There were radioactive symbols on the frame of RTGs but it is believed they were dismantled yet work suddenly stopped and cores became lost, though even if they were lost in frames it is likely that paint would have worn off by the time it was found in 2001.
There's something about people who know their stuff politely saying something along the lines of "you don't really want to do that" (like entering a reactor's sheilding while it's on) that makes me laugh (not in a "ha ha" way)
@@YunxiaoChu would you enter a reactor's shield while it's on? Saying "you don't really wanna do that" it's a fairly nice way to say that it's a bad idea to do the thing.
I may be late to the party but in the US military, there is a term for nuclear explosives that are unnaccounted for that has been used since the Cold War. They are called "Broken Arrows", or the inadvertant loss of a nuclear warhead outside of conventional use. The US has since released documents since that time and from the early 50's to the late 80's there were 30 broken arrows. All have been recovered, except one. It is known where that one is and precautions were made for the prevention of detonation to include a 200 ft think concrete cap over the buried warhead and cordoned off to this day. Got any ideas where it is? I'll tell you! It's in a farmers field in South Carolina (this is public released information).
14:15 My understanding is that American scientists and similar fields use only Metric. Likely so there is lower miscommunication about, say radiation distance.
Yes, and when rules/regulations are made the scientists insist that metric is used - for the same reasons. There are industries that use imperial (architecture) , I wonder if their safety regs are in metric or not.
In this context, it's not as much of a concern, since the radioactive material itself was still inside its container. If the victims of this incident had inhaled or ingested the material, then it would be a much greater concern. That's a very interesting property of strontium though, and I think I remember hearing about that. I kinda want to look into that element more now.
@@GameDesignerJDG It's not something that's special for strontium. It's an alkaline earth metal (group 2) and your body kind of makes a difference between magnesium and calcium, but the strontium, barium and radium all gets grouped as "the important element calcium! I should stick that in the bone!".
@@soylentgreenbThat's a very poor explanation even tho with translation it is "correct". The body doesn't try to "hoarde" it. The reactivity is simply so similar that it can build all the "same compounds" with it and so it finds its way into the bones. This is simply a result of identical chemical behavior; the body doesn't magically "seek" it just because it is there.
That's one of the most dangerous sources because of the type of radiation. Cobalt-60 is another brutal source. People mistakenly think the long half-life sources, like u238 etc are the worst, when in fact, they are the safest because they release less radiation, over a much longer time. The short half-life sources absolutely dump radiation for a short time.
The one part that gets to me is they were just tossed aside and left laying there. Not inside an abandoned building or even hooked up to anything. Or covered with any form of shielding to reduce the radiation exposure.
Right?? How did they get there? Did someone physically leave them there? What happened to them? Did they get sick and die, with no one knowing or recording it??
1:53 "RTGs are great for spacecraft, but if they rupture around humans... No more humans." - Mark Watney. Question: would it be viable to encase spent nuclear fuel within RTGs so that it could still produce power?
That's pretty much already the case in some countries. Spent fuel is separated out and used to create fuel/sources for other use. They are almost all born within the confines of a fission reactor of some sort, be it a "standard" power reactor or in a purpose built reactor for converting and generating them. The remaining balance is typically created with a particle accelerator, many medical sources are derived this way, but can use products from reactors as a starting point. Check out "fuel reprocessing" for information on the basic idea of this type of process. The term mostly relates to uranium and plutonium but does also relate to other products that get used for other things such as RTG and medical. Currently the process is not practiced in the US due to proliferation concerns. The biggest threat being plutonium suitable for bombs, but other countries are known to be doing it just the same.
I think Kyle Hills video "What if you put your head in a particle accelerator?" is going to satisfy the history, story, security and math sides of your brain.
We had an orphan source here in Australia earlier this year which was the size of a coin. The whole country was up in arms about it. Apparently it...fell off the back of a truck I kid you not. Thankfully it was found and the people responsible grilled, but it does make me wonder about countries which do have nuclear power plants. The only nuclear plant in Australia is Lucas Heights which is a small plant outside of Sydney which mainly makes medical fissiables and so on and a small amount of power. Funnily, Australia sits on a massive amount of uranium which we do mine and sell, but many of those mines have been closed in recent years as they were encroaching on to native sacred lands.
There's a phrase for a military nuclear device that's gone missing: _Empty Quiver._ Words to pucker anyone's behind if they know what it means. If you have an Empty Quiver that turns _into_ an Orphan Source, presumably that means the bomb has been dismantled either intentionally or otherwise. Still a nightmare, but not _as much_ of one. Now, here's the question I've never seen addressed: the Lia men did _not_ find Radio-Isotope Thermo-Electric Generators. They found the discarded Strontium-90 _hearts_ of two RTGs. _What the devil happened_ to divorce two Strontium-90 cores from the whole RTG, that would've presumably shielded them?
The main environmental impact of damming, isn't diverting the waterway, it's the massive permanent flooding that is required for damming. The problem with dams re: carbon emissions is that the flooded region results in the flooded vegetation rotting and releasing a huge amount of carbon dioxide, along with the flooded and disrupted soils. The usual cited figure is that if you amortize the released carbon over the first 10 years of the dams life, it's as bad an emitter as a similar power output coal plant. However, since dams last a hell of a lot longer than 10 years, and don't release the mercury and radioactive particles that a coal plant does, I think that factoid is deceptive. Unlike nuclear power, dams are actively balanced on the edge of horrific disaster, and are hard to safely shut down at end of life. Nobody abandons a spent nuclear power plant, but abandoned and decaying dams are scattered all over the US. I'm in favour of hydro power, but it's definitely below nuclear, solar, and wind on my preference list.
you should do a review of the movie k19- widowmaker. the part where the reactor pressure side starts leaking collant and whole second half of the movie dealing with the radiation is terrifying.
I will admit I've gotten into your content because I'm wanting to learn about nuclear energy, but am also terrified because of the results that can happen when it goes wrong so I very much appreciate the knowledge shared about these events and the safety precautions we have today. Also, when they say knowledge is power, but people with knowledge are also burned with the fear of that knowledge, I completely understand now, cases like the radioactive man are perfect examples
Really great video as always! I love listening to your insights. You've helped me (and I am sure many others) get more comfortable and knowledgeable about nuclear energy. Keep doing what you're doing!
Do you know the channel Plainly Difficult? They have a bunch of videos that would fit your channel, since they've covered dozens upon dozens of radiation events and incidents. If you don't, it might be worth to check them out. Especially all their older videos (they've started covering other stuff like particle accelerator incidents, aviation disasters and fires recently).
The Sr-90 was sealed in a 2cm thick stainless steel capsule, so there was no beta escaping the capsule. Sr-90 emits essentially no gamma, and the high energy photons from the source are bremsstrahlung (x rays) from the betas decelerating.
just wondering, is it X-amount of dose increases chance of cancer or could a very small dose (say dental x-ray) also cause cancer if it just so happen to damage the 'right' part of the DNA? is there a safe amount your body can handle and restore itself or would you over time always get damage (even from background radiation in nature, given enough time?)
Radiation dose is based on probability. It’s not probable you’d have an increase in cancer risk from a dental X-ray, but it’s a possibility. Just a very low one. Time and distance affects probability. Like mentioned, reducing your time and distance reduces probability. It’s about managing your risks. The risk of dental decay is higher than the minute chance of radiation induced damage. In other words, yes there’s correlation of dose = risk and more dose = more risk and there’s also potential for the wrong particle at the wrong time but the risk is also based on probability.
Your own immune system and body will repair minor damage, especially if it’s low dose over a short period of time. Type of radiation matters of course and your skin is your greatest asset. Take care of it!
Mental note, if you find something oddly warm or glowing blue leave it alone. Fwiw these sources had 90Sr titanate in a titanium or stainless steel case. These were mounted in copper heatsinks surrouded by a bunch of TEG modules with aluminum heatsinks around them. These were the naked source capsuals, had it been the whole RTG unit they could have used it as a heater without ill effects. The copper and lead tulluride from the rtg would have shielded most of the radiation The intensity of this naked source would have been similar to an old GE dental x ray in both energy and intensity, except always on. 😮
@T.FolseNuclear Would love to hear your thoughts on a book called Lithium-6 by Risto Isomäki. That's naturally a bit more involved to read a book than watch a youtube video, but i can recommend it in case you like to read.
24:47 would be really interested in seeing examples of radioactive material that could hypothetically be found in the enviornment. What would these look like if were were to come into contact with them? In this case, there was heat, steam, and a lack of snow in the areas immediately surrounding these sources.
You have no idea how often we ask Kyle or Plainly Difficult to explain the difference between the units of measure. Thank you for explaining these. I know PD has done several on nuclear accidents, but yt tends to strip links when I post in comments.
24:20 A “Orphan source” equivalent of a nuclear weapon was nicknamed a “broken arrow” Yeah, that’s how common they were at one point, they got a nickname.
It's crazy how many peoples' immediate and actionable reaction to something they have no idea what it is comes to "I'm going to pick it up/open it despite it being clearly made to be VERY secure *Though I can understand why people down and out might interpret that as 'Oh There's clearly something of really high value in here and I'm going to get to it!"* or even bring it home with me to show my family/friends!" Instead of " Steer well clear and notify the authorities." ESPECIALLY if you're in the middle of heavy snowfall and yet this object is steaming and all the snow around it has melted. It really does make sense why Caesium 137 would be so exciting and enticing, especially to children due to the glow, which just makes the entire thing so sad to think about. We really do need not only more education on nuclear energy but also education in general so hopefully more accidents like this can be avoided and lives can be saved and bettered.
I'm guessing that Kyle switching between SV and grays is simply because that's how the data was recorded at that particular time. Btw, if I had been on the recovery team, I'd have at the least requested full US MOPP level 4 gear lol
I personally think hydroelectric power sucks compared to pretty much anything else, but that's just because I like fishing in rapids. From what I've read about it, it displaces a lot of people (towns get covered in water), causes geopolitical issues if a country upstream dams an important river and the damage is something quite special when they eventually fail due to poor build quality or lack of maintenance. I think country like Finland where I live in, nuclear is the way to go and can't understand the stupidity of Germany for shutting their nuclear plants down due to something that happened in Japan. I don't think there's much danger of earthquakes and tsunamis in most of Europe. They actually had to start building/using more coal again to keep up with the energy needs.
I love Kyle's videos about nuclear issues, but yeah, the mixing back and forth of numbers from different measurements is VERY confusing. It seems like it would be easy to put together a table explaining the different measurement types and equivalences. That would be awsome.
Very much appreciate Tyler's video and his intelligence. But I must admit, every once in a while, I find myself thinking of a young Dave Thomas (Second City TV) on the verge of making a snarky comment. "Bill Needle Presents: Nuclear Safety".
Could you please explain when you see the GRAVE DANGER sign? Would that be for example the process of transferring fuel rods from however they are shipped into a staging area for installing them in a reactor? Thanks in advance.
Reminds me of the time my friends and I were burning random things in one of our basements (we were outside, grabbing stuff from the basement to try burning). We burned something, I think it was a type of spray paint and the air didn't have any smoke in it, but we started breathing out smoke and immediately decided to GTFO. Can definitely see their whole sitting with the warmth, and then OMG no later
Shows your ethical behaviour towards design when you mention choosing an alpha emitter, but whenever discussing anything related to USSR forget ethics and always think ''what would be cheapest'' and u have ur answer
I'm already familiar with the south America mess, this one to. abandoned medical equipment is bad. personally, I'd be suspicious of any heat source that I can't identify the origin of. another bad deal with medical equipment is when the source gets mixed up with scrap metal then ends up in somebodies house as a building material.
18:25 honestly i cant help but thing that a heavily shielded excavator like 100mm of lead around the driver would have been a better option or better yet remote controlled then you use the bucket on the excavator to pick them rtgs and the dirt around them up and just dump all that in a lead box
Aaannddd that's why I own a dosimeter :) You just never know. Oh hey, that's an interesting piece of metal at that abandoned industrial site, I wonder what that is..
2:01 honestly seems like a great idea for back ups ant nuclear power plants .. unlike those diesel generators at Fukushima there probably dont mind getting wet lol
The Soviets would irradiate food to preserve it - which of itself is OK. But they did this at the farm, and its known that there are orphan sources in rural regions.
I'd love to see your reaction/input to the movie The Martian, with Matt Damon. Specifically when he uses an RTG as a heat source in his Mars Rover. I always felt like he would've dosed himself immensely being so close to it but I'm no expert. That's why you're here!
Nuclear Weapon loss (and other nuclear weapons accidents) is referred to as a Broken Arrow incident in the US. A term obviously meant to prevent public or private panic, instead of communicating the real danger of an orphaned nuclear weapon. Personally, I'd call it a "Black Bomb" - black in this case referring to "a lack of" or "missing information", like a black hole, or when a radar map is incomplete. Plus, alliteration tends to stick in people's minds.
@PlainlyDifficult has some really great short videos on nuclear incidents if you're interested! He does tonnes of other disaster videos as well too, very interesting stuff. The last video he did on a nuclear incident was "the Ciudad Juárez Cobalt-60 Radiation Incident 1984" its only 14 minutes long
I wonder if you could do a video on Nuclear semiotics, long term warnings for when you have no clue who or what will find highly radioactive stockpiles or ruined power stations that are still active a thousand years in the future. It's one thing to track and secure radioactive materials with current day systems, but what if the US collapses like the USSR and stuff like this just gets lost, what if they don't speak english or english is now a dead language? I've seen people use long phrases that go on how bad the place is, brutalist architecture or some really cool skull polygons that can only be interpreted as a warning for the area.
Very soon I will work with a byproduct of the production of a metal and that product is in the form of a vitreous slag containing 4% uranium and 2% thorium and fortunately we only have to handle it from container to container since the machine that we will use is already shielded with lead since it use X-ray to mesure density We might get around a metric ton of that byproduct. You being a nuclear engineer what would you recommend as additional safety mesures,
Been binging your videos lately, great insight on stuff, really enjoyable. There's a video you might like reacting to about the EXTREME future of the universe assuming proton decay doesnt happen. The video title is "Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars" and it has been one of my favorite theoretical astrophysics videos since it was released.
Yes, another Kyle Hill video! I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I really like how you go into great detail, explaining the nitty-gritty to us viewers in a clear and concise way that is easy to understand. If you don't mind me asking, you say "worked in the nuclear industry". You no longer work there?
My field is industrial & food safety and you are so damned right to mention training twice. Training, communication will take you 80% of the way towards doing any hazardous task safely, with risks controlled.
Can you do a video on the Rado active mine dumps in Johannesburg. The mine dumps hve enough radioactive properties to be classified as nuclear plants and they need to be contained. There's over 200 mine dumps with these high levels of radioactivity around and in Johannesburg
their tools looked decent but honestly i think a sled would be way better. just a sled you can drag it onto or lift it onto and drag from quite far away, you just put some quite dense foamy material in there so it stays stable, then you can move it pretty far without being close for more than a few seconds.
You have an amazing channel. Very interesting and informative. The damage done to the body of these guys, how much was neutron radiation a factor, if any at all?
Given the rate at which sources become orphan sources, and the relatively low cost of geiger counters, it seems like something more people should just have around. Maybe mount them over the doors of public transport (e.g. Goiania would have ended much differently if that bus driver had to walk past a detector to get on his bus.) You'd probably have to use detectors that don't click for background count because idiots would flip out over a banana in someone's lunchbox, but an alarm if something actually hot walks past would be good. Given the number of orphan sources out there, the person carrying it probably wouldn't even _know_ it was dangerous.
You would want to at least spend a bit on getting a Geiger counter that will detect not only Beta and Gamma, but also detects Alpha (which tends to cost a bit more than the ones that can only detect Beta and Gamma), while Alpha can't really harm you outside your body, if you get ahold of something (food or drink or something else that goes into your body) that's contaminated with an alpha emitter and you ingest it, it's going to be all kinds of bad. The cheapest one i can think of that'll detect all 3 is the GQ GMC-600 which has a pancake Geiger tube that allows it to detect Alpha. I have the cheaper GQ GMC 320 plus V4 (which doesn't detect Alpha) for around $100, you can mute the audio Geiger click, mute the alarm, change the overall volume, and can set at what CPM the alarm goes off, and the same can be done with the GMC-600.
In the US a radioluminescent exit sign like you find in your local cinema is an NRC regulated source; and that's only about 40 times more activity than one of those novelty tritium keyfobs.
Like your channel and appreciate the obvious effort you put into it. However, you are clearly smart enough to make your own essays. Reaction videos are a tedious trend on UA-cam. I am by no means an expert, but you likely have enough of a follower base to expand your content. Look forward to seeing you grow.
Thanks for watching! If you would like to see my reaction to another Kyle Hill orphan source video, please check out: ua-cam.com/video/kdYEDbodP7g/v-deo.htmlsi=3bPWVlcKd01l2N1S
so, my odd thought, unrelated to the video, but on the topic of nuclear waste. Instead of using the external casks, couldn't the high level nuclear waste be repurposed to make RTG's and then have an alternative source of backup power. Sure you'd need alot of them, but the same thing can be said for solar panels and wind turbines. Perhaps to at least offset downtime operations for fuel transfers or maintenance shutdowns of a plant. Or, is the waste material simply not strong enough to be used for this purpose or, emits the wrong kind of radiation, such as too many neutrons like you mentioned. Unsure, but it's always been a confusion to me, I always find myself thinking "surely the spent fuel can be repurposed for some further use" until it's more or les all gone and "inert" for a lack of better words.
Fellow nuclear engineer here. You should check out channel called "plainly difficult". He has entire series about nuclear accidents, even the more obscure ones that I've never heard about.
Kyle's recent video about Fukushima's current water release plans demonstrates his journalistic integrity as much if not more so than the quality of his education on nuclear safety.
Yep! Here's my reaction to the Fukushima water release video: ua-cam.com/video/HiyOfDp5Cy0/v-deo.htmlsi=UByzQBHAZ-wXt0zO
@@tfolsenuclear oh I missed it and I didn't think to check! thanks!
Kyle and those he works with definitely seem to have a good measure of integrity. He also proved quite capable of accepting criticism recently and doing a bit of a mea culpa with that whole fake science video bit.
@@liesdamnlies3372why? Was his video dishonest in part? I just am unfamiliar with the reaction to that video.
@@RangerMcFriendly No no, his video here wasn't inaccurate. I'm referring to one he did about fake and misleading "science" channels on UA-cam; content farms, really. He had a lot of good points in that, though one of those channels he mentioned made a rebuttal, to which Kyle responded in a very fair, measured, and mature manner. Like, exceedingly so; Kyle's response was a model for engaging with criticism of oneself.
I know that losing track of 1000 orphan sources is entirely unimaginable, but also, the reason why it happened was unprecedented. The idea of a national government with full nuclear capability, the USSR, dissolving over the course of months is hard to grasp. The amount of bureaucratic paperwork, knowledge, and oversight that just evaporated overnight is terrifying. So much invaluable information, such as the location of these estimated 1000 orphan sources, was simply lost. I don't know what could have been done to prevent this. No government ever plans ahead for what happens after it has dissolved.
I mean they were a federal republic of united nations, there was an easy solution.
@@nicholasneyhart396 Sure, but the government body that governed the nuclear side of things completely dissolved, leaving Georgia without the financial ability or access to the records it needed. My main point is that Georgia itself isn't at fault here.
The answer is that every government should have redundant plans in place for massive disasters and should have several copies of its records filed with multiple groups. If the Soviet civilian nuclear authorities had, for example, annually filed copies of their records with both the IAEA and the Georgian government, one or both of those organizations would have been able to deal with the fallout (pun intended) of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and get any potential dangers under control. The United States should frankly be doing the exact same thing now as a standard procedure - annually filing information on various sources or other potential radiological hazards with each relevant state and the IAEA, just in case - but I doubt we are.
@@theheresiarch3740yeah, this would be an ideal situation for sure. in the unfortunate reality, it is just like someone not being able to find the file for a client at my job.
forget contigency plans for what to do if someone is fired and you lose all the knowledge they had of where there folders are or who their contact are with. You are lucky if they have a plan for those things while still working there.
In many ways, one could imagine they would draft plans on how to HIDE assets as opposed to how to safely make sure they end up in "enemy hands" .. even in the case of something as dangerous to the environment as orphan radioactive sources 🤔🤷♂️
“We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” -Carl Sagan
Your explanation of absorbed vs. equivalent dose finally made it make sense to me. Thank you for this! It's incredibly important for experts like you to talk about incidents like this for the same reason I listen to pilots talk about flight incidents--knowing how these incidents are handled and how much has been learned from them greatly reduces anxiety around them. I'd love to see you react to a video about Three Mile Island, since it's closer to home for you. Kyle and Plainly Difficult both have excellent videos on the subject, though Kyle's emphasizes the PR aspect more.
There is actually a really good talk about 3 Mile Island by a guy called Nicholas Means. He usually talks about aircraft disasters and how systems & leadership strategies helped or hindered the situation. His talk on 3 Mile Island goes into how the systems & training really set the stage for a meltdown. The talk is called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?" and is here on UA-cam.
I imagine it would be the DROP AND RUN sign that the caesium type sources in medical equipment often have to try to prevent a repeat of the brazil incident , if these orphan sources were labelled.
If I'm out and about and see a smallish device out in the middle of nowhere and everywhere is snow packed except where the device is and is steaming I'm getting nowhere near it.
I'm going to sell it on eBay
@@mcpr5971 cool story bro
So if it was Pu238 instead of Sr90, they would have fine since Alpha vs Beta assuming the source wasn’t exposed.
A lost nuclear weapon is an Orphan Source.
It is **also** a Broken Arrow - an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon.
There have been 32 publicly known Broken Arrows, six of which have never been recovered.
The 6 are however reportedly in places where recovery isn't possible (like in the arctic ice or the bottom of the ocean)
a spade is a spade
Never thought of that
Can always know Soviet Era, nuclear stuff is going to be worst anytime something can be done "Cheaper"
Surprise, that's the case with most everything, in every country.
When the US commissions construction of a new plant or new weapon, a design criteria is sent out to bid.....and the lowest bidder usually gets the contract 🤷♂️
It's a horrible operating parameter.....
interesting story about one needing to know what you're dealing with:
back in the olden days, there was a horrific condition common among east german silver miners, which was essentially a combination of radiation poisoning and lung cancer.
this was because the soil in the southern mountains of east Germany wasn't just rich in silver ore, but also uranium ore, the value and danger of which was unknown to people of the time, this meant that miners were digging through uranium ore trying to get to the silver, not knowing what it was, inhaling dust particles, getting them on their clothes, going home in these clothes and spreading the contamination to their homes, resulting in nearly constant exposure.
when the east german government began mining uranium ore in earnest after WW-II under the supervision of the soviet union, the mines became much safer, anyone working there knew what they were dealing with, they had two locker rooms and a shower room in between, they'd leave their street clothes in locker room one when arriving, go through the shower room into locker room two to change into their work clothes.
after the shift they would leave their work clothes in locker room 2, hose each other down in the shower room (nobody washed themselves as that involved the possibility of you missing a spot) and then they would put on their street clothes again in locker room one, the work clothes never even left the mine, they had washing machines inside and the waste water was dumped back into the mine.
That sounds like chronic Radon exposure.
You would be astounded at the greenhouse gasses from dams. Not just the obvious CO2 from decomposition of submerged organic materials, but the underlying permeability which allows methane to seeping up at far greater rates than natural lakes as well as conditions which encourage more local methane off-gassing from biological processes.
That's actually interesting. Carbon emissions I have less issues with since plants actually use and require it.
@@ArtisChronicles Unfortunately, the ecosystem's demand for new atmospheric carbon is pretty inflexible - and when we do manage to change it, it's normally by killing off plants and reducing demand. Plants have plenty of co2 without any need for human emissions.
I didn't think about methane seeps! Thanks for your insight!
@ArtisChronicles The tricky part with methane is determining its GWP. In the first decade, it traps significantly more heat than CO2 in the atmosphere, but most of it's broken down in the first 10 years in the atmosphere. However it breaks down into CO2 and H2O. I think methane from fossil sources used for heating and electricity are 36 times worse than carbon dioxide and sources like livestock and waste are 34 times worse. Some studies are suggesting that it might be closer to 40-38 times worse. The impact of methane is certainly under rated and I suspect that it has more to do with political barriers than anything else.
Still pales in comparison to fossil fuels.
Tyler, have you seen the Thought Emporium video from a few years ago where he discovered sketchy radioactive products on Amazon were full of Thorium being sold as "negative ion" snake oil? He had to get the NRC involved and everything, he ended up making two videos about it.
Yeah he just reacted to both videos
The channel plainly difficult has a few gems covering radiological events. Would be worth checking out.
Yep. 'Slow is smooth - Smooth is fast" It's faster to go slow and steady than it is to rush and screw up.
Doing it slowly once is faster than doing it quickly three times.
Makes me wonder why the hell they don’t put a radioactive symbol on things like this. All these incidents could be avoided if they just labeled this stuff as radioactive 🤦🏻♂️Seriously there was an incident were a source ended up getting melted down with scrap metal and contaminated a bunch of it. A bloody radioactive symbol would have prevented all of these accidents.
There was an incident where exactly this happened and they only found out when I truck took a wrong turn into a nuclear power station or research lab. As it left, it set off a radiation alarm and masses of steel had to be located as it was all contaminated
There were radioactive symbols on the frame of RTGs but it is believed they were dismantled yet work suddenly stopped and cores became lost, though even if they were lost in frames it is likely that paint would have worn off by the time it was found in 2001.
There's something about people who know their stuff politely saying something along the lines of "you don't really want to do that" (like entering a reactor's sheilding while it's on) that makes me laugh (not in a "ha ha" way)
???
@@YunxiaoChu would you enter a reactor's shield while it's on? Saying "you don't really wanna do that" it's a fairly nice way to say that it's a bad idea to do the thing.
A nuclear weapon as an orphan source would be a broken arrow.
I may be late to the party but in the US military, there is a term for nuclear explosives that are unnaccounted for that has been used since the Cold War. They are called "Broken Arrows", or the inadvertant loss of a nuclear warhead outside of conventional use. The US has since released documents since that time and from the early 50's to the late 80's there were 30 broken arrows. All have been recovered, except one. It is known where that one is and precautions were made for the prevention of detonation to include a 200 ft think concrete cap over the buried warhead and cordoned off to this day. Got any ideas where it is? I'll tell you! It's in a farmers field in South Carolina (this is public released information).
14:15 My understanding is that American scientists and similar fields use only Metric. Likely so there is lower miscommunication about, say radiation distance.
Yes, and when rules/regulations are made the scientists insist that metric is used - for the same reasons.
There are industries that use imperial (architecture) , I wonder if their safety regs are in metric or not.
One of the other problems with Sr90 is it get incorperated into the bones where it tends to stay
In this context, it's not as much of a concern, since the radioactive material itself was still inside its container. If the victims of this incident had inhaled or ingested the material, then it would be a much greater concern. That's a very interesting property of strontium though, and I think I remember hearing about that. I kinda want to look into that element more now.
@@GameDesignerJDG It's not something that's special for strontium. It's an alkaline earth metal (group 2) and your body kind of makes a difference between magnesium and calcium, but the strontium, barium and radium all gets grouped as "the important element calcium! I should stick that in the bone!".
@@soylentgreenbThat's a very poor explanation even tho with translation it is "correct".
The body doesn't try to "hoarde" it. The reactivity is simply so similar that it can build all the "same compounds" with it and so it finds its way into the bones.
This is simply a result of identical chemical behavior; the body doesn't magically "seek" it just because it is there.
The way the smile faded at @8:19 when strontium 90 was mentioned
Tyler's laugh was like "BIG OOF"
That's one of the most dangerous sources because of the type of radiation.
Cobalt-60 is another brutal source.
People mistakenly think the long half-life sources, like u238 etc are the worst, when in fact, they are the safest because they release less radiation, over a much longer time.
The short half-life sources absolutely dump radiation for a short time.
The one part that gets to me is they were just tossed aside and left laying there. Not inside an abandoned building or even hooked up to anything.
Or covered with any form of shielding to reduce the radiation exposure.
Right?? How did they get there? Did someone physically leave them there? What happened to them? Did they get sick and die, with no one knowing or recording it??
You should watch Explosions&fire "which salt tastes the best?"
1:53 "RTGs are great for spacecraft, but if they rupture around humans... No more humans." - Mark Watney.
Question: would it be viable to encase spent nuclear fuel within RTGs so that it could still produce power?
That's pretty much already the case in some countries.
Spent fuel is separated out and used to create fuel/sources for other use. They are almost all born within the confines of a fission reactor of some sort, be it a "standard" power reactor or in a purpose built reactor for converting and generating them. The remaining balance is typically created with a particle accelerator, many medical sources are derived this way, but can use products from reactors as a starting point.
Check out "fuel reprocessing" for information on the basic idea of this type of process. The term mostly relates to uranium and plutonium but does also relate to other products that get used for other things such as RTG and medical.
Currently the process is not practiced in the US due to proliferation concerns. The biggest threat being plutonium suitable for bombs, but other countries are known to be doing it just the same.
I think Kyle Hills video "What if you put your head in a particle accelerator?" is going to satisfy the history, story, security and math sides of your brain.
We had an orphan source here in Australia earlier this year which was the size of a coin. The whole country was up in arms about it. Apparently it...fell off the back of a truck I kid you not. Thankfully it was found and the people responsible grilled, but it does make me wonder about countries which do have nuclear power plants. The only nuclear plant in Australia is Lucas Heights which is a small plant outside of Sydney which mainly makes medical fissiables and so on and a small amount of power.
Funnily, Australia sits on a massive amount of uranium which we do mine and sell, but many of those mines have been closed in recent years as they were encroaching on to native sacred lands.
The biggest issue I find with nuclear is cost savings. A lot of accidents seem to involve some form of cost cutting.
IMO Kyle Hill is the best pro-nuclear science communicator on the platform.
There's a phrase for a military nuclear device that's gone missing: _Empty Quiver._ Words to pucker anyone's behind if they know what it means.
If you have an Empty Quiver that turns _into_ an Orphan Source, presumably that means the bomb has been dismantled either intentionally or otherwise. Still a nightmare, but not _as much_ of one.
Now, here's the question I've never seen addressed: the Lia men did _not_ find Radio-Isotope Thermo-Electric Generators. They found the discarded Strontium-90 _hearts_ of two RTGs.
_What the devil happened_ to divorce two Strontium-90 cores from the whole RTG, that would've presumably shielded them?
Could you make a video about Brainiac75?
I’d love a collab video or interview video with you and Kyle together. Love both channels. Keep it up bro!
Really enjoying your content. I remember a lot of these incidents. Being an 80s kid. Nuclear power was something I found fascinating.
The main environmental impact of damming, isn't diverting the waterway, it's the massive permanent flooding that is required for damming. The problem with dams re: carbon emissions is that the flooded region results in the flooded vegetation rotting and releasing a huge amount of carbon dioxide, along with the flooded and disrupted soils.
The usual cited figure is that if you amortize the released carbon over the first 10 years of the dams life, it's as bad an emitter as a similar power output coal plant. However, since dams last a hell of a lot longer than 10 years, and don't release the mercury and radioactive particles that a coal plant does, I think that factoid is deceptive.
Unlike nuclear power, dams are actively balanced on the edge of horrific disaster, and are hard to safely shut down at end of life. Nobody abandons a spent nuclear power plant, but abandoned and decaying dams are scattered all over the US. I'm in favour of hydro power, but it's definitely below nuclear, solar, and wind on my preference list.
Then you have what happened to the West US where they couldn't generate power due to low water levels.
Solar thermal or photovoltaic?
Do nuclear workers count in any medical or airplane radiation dose to their allowed dose?
you should do a review of the movie k19- widowmaker. the part where the reactor pressure side starts leaking collant and whole second half of the movie dealing with the radiation is terrifying.
I will admit I've gotten into your content because I'm wanting to learn about nuclear energy, but am also terrified because of the results that can happen when it goes wrong so I very much appreciate the knowledge shared about these events and the safety precautions we have today.
Also, when they say knowledge is power, but people with knowledge are also burned with the fear of that knowledge, I completely understand now, cases like the radioactive man are perfect examples
Really great video as always! I love listening to your insights. You've helped me (and I am sure many others) get more comfortable and knowledgeable about nuclear energy. Keep doing what you're doing!
Do you know the channel Plainly Difficult?
They have a bunch of videos that would fit your channel, since they've covered dozens upon dozens of radiation events and incidents. If you don't, it might be worth to check them out. Especially all their older videos (they've started covering other stuff like particle accelerator incidents, aviation disasters and fires recently).
The Sr-90 was sealed in a 2cm thick stainless steel capsule, so there was no beta escaping the capsule. Sr-90 emits essentially no gamma, and the high energy photons from the source are bremsstrahlung (x rays) from the betas decelerating.
builded RTG...Wait I read that in "The Martian" book :D
just wondering, is it X-amount of dose increases chance of cancer or could a very small dose (say dental x-ray) also cause cancer if it just so happen to damage the 'right' part of the DNA? is there a safe amount your body can handle and restore itself or would you over time always get damage (even from background radiation in nature, given enough time?)
Radiation dose is based on probability. It’s not probable you’d have an increase in cancer risk from a dental X-ray, but it’s a possibility. Just a very low one.
Time and distance affects probability. Like mentioned, reducing your time and distance reduces probability.
It’s about managing your risks. The risk of dental decay is higher than the minute chance of radiation induced damage.
In other words, yes there’s correlation of dose = risk and more dose = more risk and there’s also potential for the wrong particle at the wrong time but the risk is also based on probability.
Your own immune system and body will repair minor damage, especially if it’s low dose over a short period of time. Type of radiation matters of course and your skin is your greatest asset. Take care of it!
Mental note, if you find something oddly warm or glowing blue leave it alone. Fwiw these sources had 90Sr titanate in a titanium or stainless steel case. These were mounted in copper heatsinks surrouded by a bunch of TEG modules with aluminum heatsinks around them. These were the naked source capsuals, had it been the whole RTG unit they could have used it as a heater without ill effects. The copper and lead tulluride from the rtg would have shielded most of the radiation The intensity of this naked source would have been similar to an old GE dental x ray in both energy and intensity, except always on. 😮
@T.FolseNuclear Would love to hear your thoughts on a book called Lithium-6 by Risto Isomäki. That's naturally a bit more involved to read a book than watch a youtube video, but i can recommend it in case you like to read.
24:47 would be really interested in seeing examples of radioactive material that could hypothetically be found in the enviornment. What would these look like if were were to come into contact with them? In this case, there was heat, steam, and a lack of snow in the areas immediately surrounding these sources.
You have no idea how often we ask Kyle or Plainly Difficult to explain the difference between the units of measure. Thank you for explaining these. I know PD has done several on nuclear accidents, but yt tends to strip links when I post in comments.
ahah i wrote a comment like few hours ago listing the videos i'd like to see you comment and this was one of them and here we are :)
Thanks for the idea!
@@tfolsenuclear ahah no way you reacted this fast and done it because of my comment but
Unfortunately this type of lax behavior was rampant during the existence of the USSR and almost as bad in Russia. They just didn't care.
24:20
A “Orphan source” equivalent of a nuclear weapon was nicknamed a “broken arrow”
Yeah, that’s how common they were at one point, they got a nickname.
It's crazy how many peoples' immediate and actionable reaction to something they have no idea what it is comes to "I'm going to pick it up/open it despite it being clearly made to be VERY secure *Though I can understand why people down and out might interpret that as 'Oh There's clearly something of really high value in here and I'm going to get to it!"* or even bring it home with me to show my family/friends!"
Instead of " Steer well clear and notify the authorities."
ESPECIALLY if you're in the middle of heavy snowfall and yet this object is steaming and all the snow around it has melted.
It really does make sense why Caesium 137 would be so exciting and enticing, especially to children due to the glow, which just makes the entire thing so sad to think about.
We really do need not only more education on nuclear energy but also education in general so hopefully more accidents like this can be avoided and lives can be saved and bettered.
I'm guessing that Kyle switching between SV and grays is simply because that's how the data was recorded at that particular time. Btw, if I had been on the recovery team, I'd have at the least requested full US MOPP level 4 gear lol
I personally think hydroelectric power sucks compared to pretty much anything else, but that's just because I like fishing in rapids. From what I've read about it, it displaces a lot of people (towns get covered in water), causes geopolitical issues if a country upstream dams an important river and the damage is something quite special when they eventually fail due to poor build quality or lack of maintenance. I think country like Finland where I live in, nuclear is the way to go and can't understand the stupidity of Germany for shutting their nuclear plants down due to something that happened in Japan. I don't think there's much danger of earthquakes and tsunamis in most of Europe. They actually had to start building/using more coal again to keep up with the energy needs.
I love Kyle's videos about nuclear issues, but yeah, the mixing back and forth of numbers from different measurements is VERY confusing. It seems like it would be easy to put together a table explaining the different measurement types and equivalences. That would be awsome.
Very much appreciate Tyler's video and his intelligence. But I must admit, every once in a while, I find myself thinking of a young Dave Thomas (Second City TV) on the verge of making a snarky comment. "Bill Needle Presents: Nuclear Safety".
Interesting.... I just watched that video two hours ago...
Could you please explain when you see the GRAVE DANGER sign? Would that be for example the process of transferring fuel rods from however they are shipped into a staging area for installing them in a reactor? Thanks in advance.
Reminds me of the time my friends and I were burning random things in one of our basements (we were outside, grabbing stuff from the basement to try burning). We burned something, I think it was a type of spray paint and the air didn't have any smoke in it, but we started breathing out smoke and immediately decided to GTFO.
Can definitely see their whole sitting with the warmth, and then OMG no later
Shows your ethical behaviour towards design when you mention choosing an alpha emitter, but whenever discussing anything related to USSR forget ethics and always think ''what would be cheapest'' and u have ur answer
I'm already familiar with the south America mess, this one to. abandoned medical equipment is bad. personally, I'd be suspicious of any heat source that I can't identify the origin of. another bad deal with medical equipment is when the source gets mixed up with scrap metal then ends up in somebodies house as a building material.
After those 2, they found 300 more, and there are still from these things in lighthouses at this moment.
18:25 honestly i cant help but thing that a heavily shielded excavator like 100mm of lead around the driver would have been a better option or better yet remote controlled then you use the bucket on the excavator to pick them rtgs and the dirt around them up and just dump all that in a lead box
Aaannddd that's why I own a dosimeter :) You just never know. Oh hey, that's an interesting piece of metal at that abandoned industrial site, I wonder what that is..
2:01 honestly seems like a great idea for back ups ant nuclear power plants .. unlike those diesel generators at Fukushima there probably dont mind getting wet lol
The Soviets would irradiate food to preserve it - which of itself is OK. But they did this at the farm, and its known that there are orphan sources in rural regions.
Within a reactor's biological shield, what level of radiation are we talking? Kilosieverts? Megasieverts? Gigasieverts?
Looking fresh with the new hair!
I'd love to see your reaction/input to the movie The Martian, with Matt Damon. Specifically when he uses an RTG as a heat source in his Mars Rover. I always felt like he would've dosed himself immensely being so close to it but I'm no expert. That's why you're here!
This video very nearly broke Elina Charatsidou, let's see how Tyler handles this cluster f**k.
Good mention of infectious control. Your points apply to COVID but also rabies and smallpox.
2:55 god if we could just get really really good thermocouples like 30% + efficiency my god
"he level of humanities' ineptitude is disheartening.
Those men where under educated, nobody told them...
U say if towards the abandoned nuclear weapon but isn't there one still lost in the USA?
Nuclear Weapon loss (and other nuclear weapons accidents) is referred to as a Broken Arrow incident in the US. A term obviously meant to prevent public or private panic, instead of communicating the real danger of an orphaned nuclear weapon. Personally, I'd call it a "Black Bomb" - black in this case referring to "a lack of" or "missing information", like a black hole, or when a radar map is incomplete. Plus, alliteration tends to stick in people's minds.
@PlainlyDifficult has some really great short videos on nuclear incidents if you're interested! He does tonnes of other disaster videos as well too, very interesting stuff. The last video he did on a nuclear incident was "the Ciudad Juárez Cobalt-60 Radiation Incident 1984" its only 14 minutes long
I wonder if you could do a video on Nuclear semiotics, long term warnings for when you have no clue who or what will find highly radioactive stockpiles or ruined power stations that are still active a thousand years in the future. It's one thing to track and secure radioactive materials with current day systems, but what if the US collapses like the USSR and stuff like this just gets lost, what if they don't speak english or english is now a dead language? I've seen people use long phrases that go on how bad the place is, brutalist architecture or some really cool skull polygons that can only be interpreted as a warning for the area.
Very soon I will work with a byproduct of the production of a metal and that product is in the form of a vitreous slag containing 4% uranium and 2% thorium and fortunately we only have to handle it from container to container since the machine that we will use is already shielded with lead since it use X-ray to mesure density
We might get around a metric ton of that byproduct.
You being a nuclear engineer what would you recommend as additional safety mesures,
Been binging your videos lately, great insight on stuff, really enjoyable. There's a video you might like reacting to about the EXTREME future of the universe assuming proton decay doesnt happen. The video title is "Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars" and it has been one of my favorite theoretical astrophysics videos since it was released.
Yes, another Kyle Hill video! I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I really like how you go into great detail, explaining the nitty-gritty to us viewers in a clear and concise way that is easy to understand.
If you don't mind me asking, you say "worked in the nuclear industry". You no longer work there?
My field is industrial & food safety and you are so damned right to mention training twice.
Training, communication will take you 80% of the way towards doing any hazardous task safely, with risks controlled.
Can you do a video on the Rado active mine dumps in Johannesburg. The mine dumps hve enough radioactive properties to be classified as nuclear plants and they need to be contained. There's over 200 mine dumps with these high levels of radioactivity around and in Johannesburg
Yessir new video let’s go
their tools looked decent but honestly i think a sled would be way better. just a sled you can drag it onto or lift it onto and drag from quite far away, you just put some quite dense foamy material in there so it stays stable, then you can move it pretty far without being close for more than a few seconds.
You have an amazing channel. Very interesting and informative.
The damage done to the body of these guys, how much was neutron radiation a factor, if any at all?
Interesting!
If people had these things to heat and power their remote cottages, I guess people would learn how to handle them.
So dont order the atomic ball warmer off wish, got it! Kinda wished that was a joke too, saw atomic personal heaters on there before
I had it under control, dudes. No damn dams, but MY damn dams!! 😢 - Mr. and Mrs. Beaver....
I thought lost bombs were called broken arrows?
Dams are only enviremently friendly when used as storagesee. These river things kill all the salmon.
when it comes to strange shit happening in the middle of nowhere, whatever you do, don't.
a missing nuclear weapon is called a broken arrow
Given the rate at which sources become orphan sources, and the relatively low cost of geiger counters, it seems like something more people should just have around. Maybe mount them over the doors of public transport (e.g. Goiania would have ended much differently if that bus driver had to walk past a detector to get on his bus.) You'd probably have to use detectors that don't click for background count because idiots would flip out over a banana in someone's lunchbox, but an alarm if something actually hot walks past would be good. Given the number of orphan sources out there, the person carrying it probably wouldn't even _know_ it was dangerous.
You would want to at least spend a bit on getting a Geiger counter that will detect not only Beta and Gamma, but also detects Alpha (which tends to cost a bit more than the ones that can only detect Beta and Gamma), while Alpha can't really harm you outside your body, if you get ahold of something (food or drink or something else that goes into your body) that's contaminated with an alpha emitter and you ingest it, it's going to be all kinds of bad.
The cheapest one i can think of that'll detect all 3 is the GQ GMC-600 which has a pancake Geiger tube that allows it to detect Alpha.
I have the cheaper GQ GMC 320 plus V4 (which doesn't detect Alpha) for around $100, you can mute the audio Geiger click, mute the alarm, change the overall volume, and can set at what CPM the alarm goes off, and the same can be done with the GMC-600.
I thought distance decreases by the inverse cube
dude this is 🔥🔥🔥
TDS has a whole other meaning now 😂
Do not touch spicy rock
did you get a haircut? lookin good
Wait so a case goes missing each day in united states or did I misunderstood that? And if so how are these things just "lost"
In the US a radioluminescent exit sign like you find in your local cinema is an NRC regulated source; and that's only about 40 times more activity than one of those novelty tritium keyfobs.
There were (if I remember correctly they were recovered) 2 abandoned American nuclear warheads in Spain.
Yup. Tyler already did a video on Kyle's video about lost nuclear weapons.
Like your channel and appreciate the obvious effort you put into it. However, you are clearly smart enough to make your own essays. Reaction videos are a tedious trend on UA-cam. I am by no means an expert, but you likely have enough of a follower base to expand your content. Look forward to seeing you grow.