11:27 Eating 100 banana in one sitting does pose a different sort of health risk as anyone attempting the feat would find out on their next trip to the bathroom.
Yep, his house was located on the Reading Prong. His house’s radon levels were insanely high. Radon’s decay product, polonium, sticks to polyester due to static electricity. It used to stick to his clothes.
26:00 Just a day or two ago, I was watching a video about Chernobyl, and there was a passing mention that one or more of the cars on the Ferris wheel, in the amusement park (which, was to open May 1, which is, alas, after April 26), had an extraordindary amount of radioactivity. I could suggest how that might happen. One of those cars is essentially a bucket. There may be holes for legs, but if there are curved surfaces. and the bucket never moves, then rainwater could collect and, as the water evaporates, various minerals could keep accumulating. After some years, you could end up with quite a bit of radioactivity. Yes, uranium from sea water is totally an option, if you want to go all in on nuclear. I think there's enough to go for many thousands of years, especially if you use a reactor with high burnup. Running out of fuel is probably the weakest of all arguments against nuclear.
I agree with all of this, and would add Thorium is even more plentiful (and distributed everywhere). Build a breeder and off you go. Fuel for a VERY long time. Just the waste thorium (from REE mining) is good for several 100 to 1000+ years.
@@LFTRnow Actually, uranium from sea water is much more plentiful than thorium, which is not very water-soluble. IAC fuel supply is not an issue. But don't consider me pro-nuclear. It's not happening. But it's not because of any fuel supply issues.
@@samuele8361 Mostly it comes down to economic factors, but based on physical principles. Nuclear is expensive, and not getting any cheaper. Even if some of the ideas pan out for new designs, there is not going to be any rapid turn-around on costs. The central problem is mostly that reactors need to be built large to be feasible at all in cost. Because of that, you are building relatively small numbers of very large units, each of which is extremely complex. There are other reasons, but that basic problem probably outweighs all the others.
@@ronaldgarrison8478 @ronaldgarrison8478 1. By themself costs don't mean anything to the final electricity prices, nuclear can produce at full capacity almost all the time which is something that renewables cannot. A nuclear powerplant lasts a lot of time (3rd generations powerplants will last probably 100 years) and the costs of its maintenance and fuel are miniscule compared to fossil fuels so the only thing you have to do is amortize the initial costs, which is something you can do in a decade and once you do it nuclear energy becomes one of the (if not the) cheapest form of electricity we know of. If you take a look at electricity prices of countries with lots of nuclear energy (France, Ontario, Sweden, Finland etc.) you will find that their electricity bills, both for households and non households) are significantly lower than in countries that are aiming to go full ren and that have no massime amounts of hydroelectric potential. The comparison between Germany and France is the most striking example, the first one has 140 GW of ren capacity (its peak consumption is around 80GW) and its electricity prices are twice as high and its emissions are 7x times higher than France. Solar and wind have huge external costs on the electricity grid since they're very unstable and need backup all the time (in the case of Germany Gas and carbon are used for backup when wind is not blowing and there's no light and they are the price maker in the day ahed market). 2. Prices are not going down in the western countries because we decided to boycott nuclear energy in every possible way, we made absurd regulations that are not justified since the safety rates were insanely high even before 3rd gen. China is building reactors at a very fast pace with reasonable costs, Japan and France (and many other countries) were able to build lots of reactors in a short amount of time. The largest deployment of clean energy in the shortest amount of time are all nuclear and hydro. If we want to decarbonize our economies with reasonable costs nuclear energy is essential, 100% ren is impossible, unless you have geography and low population density by your side, and there are entire sectors that can't be decarbonized without it.
Remove the speaker from my Geiger counter? Nah. I don't give a fuck. I take it on every flight I go on, and turn it on when it goes through the security x-ray machine... yes they always think it's a bomb and swab it for explosive residue lol
I realize I am little behind the curve here however as a retired medical physicist it irks me that economy of medicine care/research is even a consideration.
How in the world do we have not enough sample size for testing LNT, given billions of people living under hugely different levels of background radiation? Shouldn't this be the biggest sample size of all time?
Harvesting radioactive elements from the oceans will have unforeseen consequences I surmise we will regret it. If we didn’t put it there, it belongs there. Everything has a price we don’t understand. Same as pulling energy from the air, or oceans, or stealing hundreds of hundreds of thousands of acres of sunlight from the soil. Just like cutting down forests or dredging reefs. Even pulling out from deep within Earth’s innards had consequences we didn’t imagine and still cannot. Everything has a cost. Everything.
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Thank you MIT for the public educational service!
34:43 Inaudible part is "an arduino". A type of microcontroller/hardware referred by the name of the producer brand.
Thanks for your note! The caption has been updated.
11:27 Eating 100 banana in one sitting does pose a different sort of health risk as anyone attempting the feat would find out on their next trip to the bathroom.
Plus the hospital trip if you survive the bathroom extended stay.
Stanley Watras, Limerick Nuclear Power Plant, 1984
Yep, his house was located on the Reading Prong. His house’s radon levels were insanely high. Radon’s decay product, polonium, sticks to polyester due to static electricity. It used to stick to his clothes.
Excellent
26:00 Just a day or two ago, I was watching a video about Chernobyl, and there was a passing mention that one or more of the cars on the Ferris wheel, in the amusement park (which, was to open May 1, which is, alas, after April 26), had an extraordindary amount of radioactivity. I could suggest how that might happen. One of those cars is essentially a bucket. There may be holes for legs, but if there are curved surfaces. and the bucket never moves, then rainwater could collect and, as the water evaporates, various minerals could keep accumulating. After some years, you could end up with quite a bit of radioactivity.
Yes, uranium from sea water is totally an option, if you want to go all in on nuclear. I think there's enough to go for many thousands of years, especially if you use a reactor with high burnup. Running out of fuel is probably the weakest of all arguments against nuclear.
I agree with all of this, and would add Thorium is even more plentiful (and distributed everywhere). Build a breeder and off you go. Fuel for a VERY long time. Just the waste thorium (from REE mining) is good for several 100 to 1000+ years.
@@LFTRnow Actually, uranium from sea water is much more plentiful than thorium, which is not very water-soluble. IAC fuel supply is not an issue. But don't consider me pro-nuclear. It's not happening. But it's not because of any fuel supply issues.
@@ronaldgarrison8478what are the reasons then?
@@samuele8361 Mostly it comes down to economic factors, but based on physical principles. Nuclear is expensive, and not getting any cheaper. Even if some of the ideas pan out for new designs, there is not going to be any rapid turn-around on costs. The central problem is mostly that reactors need to be built large to be feasible at all in cost. Because of that, you are building relatively small numbers of very large units, each of which is extremely complex.
There are other reasons, but that basic problem probably outweighs all the others.
@@ronaldgarrison8478 @ronaldgarrison8478 1. By themself costs don't mean anything to the final electricity prices, nuclear can produce at full capacity almost all the time which is something that renewables cannot. A nuclear powerplant lasts a lot of time (3rd generations powerplants will last probably 100 years) and the costs of its maintenance and fuel are miniscule compared to fossil fuels so the only thing you have to do is amortize the initial costs, which is something you can do in a decade and once you do it nuclear energy becomes one of the (if not the) cheapest form of electricity we know of. If you take a look at electricity prices of countries with lots of nuclear energy (France, Ontario, Sweden, Finland etc.) you will find that their electricity bills, both for households and non households) are significantly lower than in countries that are aiming to go full ren and that have no massime amounts of hydroelectric potential. The comparison between Germany and France is the most striking example, the first one has 140 GW of ren capacity (its peak consumption is around 80GW) and its electricity prices are twice as high and its emissions are 7x times higher than France. Solar and wind have huge external costs on the electricity grid since they're very unstable and need backup all the time (in the case of Germany Gas and carbon are used for backup when wind is not blowing and there's no light and they are the price maker in the day ahed market).
2. Prices are not going down in the western countries because we decided to boycott nuclear energy in every possible way, we made absurd regulations that are not justified since the safety rates were insanely high even before 3rd gen. China is building reactors at a very fast pace with reasonable costs, Japan and France (and many other countries) were able to build lots of reactors in a short amount of time. The largest deployment of clean energy in the shortest amount of time are all nuclear and hydro. If we want to decarbonize our economies with reasonable costs nuclear energy is essential, 100% ren is impossible, unless you have geography and low population density by your side, and there are entire sectors that can't be decarbonized without it.
Remove the speaker from my Geiger counter? Nah. I don't give a fuck. I take it on every flight I go on, and turn it on when it goes through the security x-ray machine... yes they always think it's a bomb and swab it for explosive residue lol
That's... Interesting.
Any cool findings?
34:00 I would so love to see Short talk about radiation exposure on a mission to Mars! But I have a sinking feeling that he's not going to.
23:30 - Bismuth Half-life of 2x10-19 y is missing (it was fairly recently discovered to be {barely} radioactive)
Great Lecture
Learned something new
Thank you for a great lecture. I like having info to quantify risks. ie chest xrays vs cosmic rays vs bananas. Hah!
I realize I am little behind the curve here however as a retired medical physicist it irks me that economy of medicine care/research is even a consideration.
Ionization
How in the world do we have not enough sample size for testing LNT, given billions of people living under hugely different levels of background radiation? Shouldn't this be the biggest sample size of all time?
Harvesting radioactive elements from the oceans will have unforeseen consequences I surmise we will regret it. If we didn’t put it there, it belongs there. Everything has a price we don’t understand. Same as pulling energy from the air, or oceans, or stealing hundreds of hundreds of thousands of acres of sunlight from the soil. Just like cutting down forests or dredging reefs. Even pulling out from deep within Earth’s innards had consequences we didn’t imagine and still cannot. Everything has a cost. Everything.