Funranium Labs

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.]

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.]

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

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 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. 

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.]

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.

Oh dear. 

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.]

• 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 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

~fin~

Mooching off of other departments is always a challenge, if for no other reason than they’re gonna mooch right back at you later.

Of course, the things they’re most willing to give you is their garbage. As the saying goes, “It’s not waste if someone else has a use for it.”

[The ninth 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.]

• Are dense enough to block things from outside your counting experiment
• You can actually afford/find/work with (sorry tungsten)
• Do not contain too much rad signal of their own to mess things up 

Getting “quiet” steel is not easy. For a while, there was deep lust in the research community for normalization of relations with Cuba so they could get their hands on all that pre-WWII steel preserved in the old American behemoth cars there. Also WWI & II shipwrecks. The steel you might steal from MechE would be fine for building the outermost layer of your counting experiment, but the Co, Fe, Ni, and V lines (depending on the type of steel) are going to drive you nuts. Also, it’s just not dense enough to shut out enough of the outside world.

A few of you suggested “Why not just use a lot of water?” That is actually an excellent solution, except that we’re talking A LOT of a water. [imagines cooperative lab space inside @MontereyAq‘s Outer Bay tank] Also remember, this is poverty constrained. Building an underwater lab is, well, kind of anomalously wealthy criminal mastermind territory. We can do hydrogenous shielding to block out neutrons with a “brick” of water, which I would normally describe as a fish tank picked up at the thrift store for $2. But that’s not gonna help here. You want gammas and cosmic rays gone and can’t afford a Science Submarine. 

But there is that giant bin of scrap copper…

If there’s away to get the cops called on you as fast than stealing things from a museum collection, it’s trying to grab that. Most institutions jealously guard their scrap copper because it has more value. Also, that bin may not belong to the institution but rather a contractor they hired where “scrap metal reclamation” was part of their contract and is considered part of the compensation. If you mess with someone’s livelihood, they’re gonna come for you, maybe with a hammer. But if you can get it AND you have the tools to make some fresh copper bricks/plates, you’re in business. Well, other than problem that scrap copper is rarely pure copper. You just smelted an alloy and that’s has the same issues as the steel, but not as badly. So, it’ll work, but you need quite a bit of copper to block everything from the outside world. Enough that you’re gonna want a security system to deter other thieves.

Anyway, as long as were thinking about theft, how about that museum? 

When looking for lead to use in shielding, just like all the rest, we want quiet, pre-WWII lead. Because some naturally occurring isotopes of lead are radioactive, the older the better. And when looking for old things, you can’t beat a museum. Unfortunately for you, the things in museums get these fancy labels like “specimen”, “collection”, “cultural heritage item” or “National Treasure On Loan From The Ministry Of Antiquities”. So, they probably aren’t going to let you melt those down to cast new brick with old lead. But sometimes, SOMETIMES, they may be willing to work with you. For example, if the museum itself is quite old and they saved the previous lead roof to show how the museum used to be built but they don’t need all of it. In fact, you’d be doing them a favor to help make room if you took some of the excess roof sheeting off their hands. In this example, you will want to clean that lead first because it was a roof and thus has a small signal of atmospheric testing thanks to fallout. You won’t get it all, but you can make it quieter. Smelt cleanly, don’t accidentally add anything new in and you’re in good shape! 

But maybe there’s nothing available or the Anthropology department won’t play ball with you. With a heavy heart, you go to the place you know has plenty of lead bricks: Chemistry. They don’t use them quite as much any more, so they’re fairly happy to share with you. Chemistry bricks have been loved. Good news is that most of them are pretty old. Might not pre-date the Manhattan Project, but old. Unfortunately they’re also battered, gouged, and oxidized from having been constantly used in different setups for decades. Building your counting cave was probably gonna get you in the lead worker monitoring program anyway, but you definitely will be after handling these manky bricks.

And while they might be fallout and smelter recycling clean, they have been in the presence of Chemistry. They aren’t CLEAN clean. Chemistry is messy. When you get one of these bricks, you hope against hope that the white crusty stuff on them is just lead oxide. The reason chemistry has so many lead bricks is because they’d been doing radiochemistry. So, get the meter and start surveying them for rad contamination. Good news here is that lead is soft. If you find fixed contamination you can’t just wipe off, you can gouge it out to make a much smaller bit of contaminated lead waste to rid off and keep most the brick. Or, maybe, you can give this brick back to them and ask nicely for a less crapped up one. It’s worth a try.

Researcher was rich in available labor pool, resourcefulness, and skills but with a budget that had been entirely blown on the ABSOLUTE BEAST of a detector, leaving roughly $3.50 to build the experiment itself. Ever watch Junkyard Wars? They treated the entire campus this way. The copper was eventually identified as stripped from a now defunct experiment that needed a full room Faraday Cage. The steel was heavy plate stock of a particularly nice alloy which they slipped into framing so they didn’t have to drill any holes. This way it wouldn’t be noticed when they slipped the plates back into the machine shop storage area that they had purloined them from, but with every intention of returning.

For lead, yeah, they had to go with Chemistry lead. Which is where it all went wrong.

Some of the bricks they got didn’t just predate the Manhattan Project; they’d been used as part of the Manhattan Project. Not so long ago, the approach to lead use was along the lines of “Grab some old beat up bricks from the pile, go down to the shop and cast some new ones. Or don’t you know how to do that, scrub?” Or even better, why settle for bricks when you cast the exact shapes you want in lead. Which means there was active recycling of lead throughout the Manhattan Project, by the researchers, while they were working on it. And, as I said, chemistry is messy. 

Now decades later, the researcher’s group surveyed the free Chemistry bricks. They tried to gouge out hot spots. Then they got a plane from the carpentry shop to try to shave the bricks when it seemed like the entire surface was contaminated. This didn’t work because it was bulk contamination of ENTIRE brick.

And so, in trying to work cheap with enthusiasm and creativeness, they managed to make a simultaneous lead and radiological contamination incident. As you might guess, that cost a lot more to clean up than $3.50. Even more than the detector itself.

~fin~

Medical Emergency vs. Rad is the natural follow up to Fire vs. Rad because the responder priorities are exactly the same: Life, Property, and Environment. Though in some jurisdictions they swap the order of those last two.

Life saving efforts are always top priority though.

[The eighth 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.]

Which is why it is such a dick move at the level of war crime to drop/set off a second bomb 10-20min after the first to make sure you nail all the responders doing life saving efforts. But I digress. 

But the Responder’s First Rule always applies: don’t become a victim yourself. If there is a chance for serious radiation exposure or material uptake by the responders, this matters and this is also why you have health physicists to tell you how long you can be in there. Acute external radiation exposure tends to not be an issue in these cases, but then there’s situations like the criticality accidents. Victims are most certainly dead if you don’t get them out immediately. The traditional advice of NEVER MOVE INJURED PEOPLE no longer applies. 

First responders do have dose thresholds where we can ask them to do their jobs with higher than normal exposures, but we don’t ask them to jump into the heart of a reactor. No “biological robots” here. In the US, we have the following limits:

• .05Sv normal annual dose limit
• .1Sv work to save property
• .25Sv for life-saving/disaster mitigation 

But in this scenario you have a living (for the moment), contaminated accident victim riddled with glass. The scenario asked you which choice would “best minimize the spread of contamination & help save the patient.” Because while life saving is a priority, we aren’t dumb. The less we have to move the victim, the less likely we are to injure them further AND the less likely we are to spread contamination. Potential contamination does matter, so someone responding to this accident also needs to be taking note of who has gone where. Probably several someones. Why does it matter? Because those are areas you’re going to have to go back and decon later after the medical part of the response is over. You have more time but man oh man is it easier when you have some notes about where to look. 

The nice/horrible thing about the shards is that they constitute an internal uptake of radioactive material by injection. Your victim is politely containing that material in themselves and not spreading it as contamination for the time being. But since shards though clothes into the victim are gonna make the clothes hard to remove, you gently put them in Tyvek suit and load them off for transport to hopefully contaminate the ambulance as little as possible.

But if time is of the essence, you transport without delay. This is where you probably lose an ambulance for a while afterward. They’ve got impermeable surfaces and are meant to be cleaned because they transport malfunctioning meat colonies that may be very messy indeed. But, wow, there are so many nooks and crannies in those things. There is a point where you throw your hands up and write it off because the time & cost of labor to decon exceeds the cost of the ambulance itself. If you’re gonna be throwing an ambulance away, chose an old one. But sometimes you NEED that ambulance. During a mass casualty incident, contaminated victims can seriously wipe out your transport capability when you need it most. Plastic down that you replace every run, a quick meter survey for anything serious, and then you’re off again. 

Which brings us to the hospital itself. In a perfect world, you’ve already got arrangements with the hospital for how to deal with contaminated patients, they’re trained for it, and you’ve all run drills together to make sure everyone knows what to do.

[waits patiently for the laughter to die down] 

Hospitals do not appreciate SURPRISE CONTAMINATION INCIDENTS. Everything I said about ambulance decon applies to operating rooms too, though they’re more precious and difficult to clean. Before transport, you should call ahead to let them know what’s coming so they can prepare. They will open different doors, slap plastic up, whatever they can do to make a controlled, easily decontaminated corridor to an operating room with the least possible disruption to the rest of hospital operations. And, if they can, they will do this in the parking lot as triage. Might not be as sterile as an operating room, but any equipment & supplies they need for the triage tent are conveniently right in the hospital. Rad safety people from the worksite tend to come with the victim and they’ll get handed all the contaminated shards. Hospital doesn’t want ’em. 

In the inspiring event for this scenario, the victim wasn’t working with a hot cell, though that certainly has happened in the past, but rather in a glovebox where the exhaust fan had a rather severe hiccup and causing the window to shatter. On a positive note, this means the victim didn’t get a face and torso full of shards but arms and hands instead. Through the gloves. Considering the actinides this glovebox was normally used for, that’s bad. It worth noting that the glovebox window going away immediately caused all the continuous air monitoring systems to go off, getting emergency responders headed that way immediately. Odds of a materials uptake by victim = VERY YES

GOOD NEWS: The gloves were thick enough that they caught most of the shards with only a few penetrating deeply.

BAD NEWS: The now exposed gloves were *very contaminated* from handling materials over the years and need to be kept from crapping everything up. 

Yes, there is a specialized piece of radiation detection equipment called a Wound Counter.

Patient was conscious and making jokes through all this. Their favorite was “I don’t look forward to explaining my new track marks to the clearance investigator.” 

The best part of it was that the punch biopsy they did just outright removed all the contamination in one wound. A bioassay which is actually decon is A+ work. The victim was scarred but fine, with quite the dose assigned to them over the next 40 years of their life.

~fin~

This scenario is much like when the Local Color brings you a dead radioactive seagull, except this time your surprisingly competent coworkers may have captured an actual live, radioactive, and displeased animal to bring to you.

It’s just another day in paradise.
[The seventh 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.]

When you’re working in a sampling lab, you get used to receiving some odd things but for all of them it means reducing that odd thing to a useful form for your analytical techniques. If presented a shitting, pissing, terrified, & angry feral cat YOU DON’T REDUCE THE CAT ITSELF.  Luckily, the cat is presenting you with plentiful samples for in vitro bioassay. Just see if you can collect it without contaminating it with your own blood. That’s just bad technique. If you wanted to do in vivo counting, that’s another matter. Much like dealing with an uncooperative cat for anything else, it’s CAT BURRITO TIME to stick them in the whole body counter, though for small animal veterinary applications this is more “sit still you sonofabitch while I set the NaI probe next to you GODDAMMIT DON’T PEE AGAIN!” 

This applies to all four animals in the poll, but some can be more displeased at you than others. And the questions of “Which derelict building?” & “Suspect why?” become more important. Particularly astute readers noted that all of these animals are primarily carnivores, which means they’re up a trophic level for bioaccumulation of materials. Each of these animals answer different questions because of how they sleep, how far they range and how/what they hunt. This, incidentally, is why large institutions tend to have an ecologist and/or veterinary on staff or on retainer. When what you know is how the detectors work, they can help you understand animal behavior and give context for the readings on your detectors so they make sense. 

Some of you were incredulous that such animals would get into derelict buildings. Folks, this is a sign from an accelerator facility when it was still active. Life finds a way. Especially if they’re assholes like raccoons or cockatoos.

Raccoons, on the other hand, wander anywhere they can fit for the sheer assholery of it and they do it in groups. On a positive note, they’ll help sample below grade pipes for you. Raccoons are nature’s true urban explorers. However, their range isn’t going to be limited to a single derelict building. Their range is ALL of your buildings. Your raccoon isn’t just sampling past operations, they’re likely sampling current ones as well. In short, respect trash pandas.

But not everyone is lucky enough to have their lands blessed by raccoons (pours one out for the UK). In a pinch, foxes will behave much the same way but, generally speaking, the only thing the fox is going to do is sleep in your building. Compared to cats and raccoons, foxes have a much larger hunting range and their primary diet is burrowing animals. So, GOOD NEWS, the fox is a nice composite sample for any soil and groundwater contamination in the vicinity of your building. And while I like to focus on raccoons and cockatoos and the Apex Non-Human Assholes of the animal kingdom, I want to give honorable mention to foxes for things like destroying low voltage wires for monitoring equipment by chewing on them and burrowing under or jumping over ANY fence you erect. If you try to restrict a certain area to people and nature by fencing, by the time you finish putting it up there is already a fox already on the wrong side of it. They are amazing creatures in this respect. Truly remarkable. [flips off foxes, David Attenboroughly] 

Which brings us to the barn owl. If your coworkers are bringing you a live, radioactive, and angry raptor I assume you have done something to deserve this. They hate you and this is their very pointy and sharp revenge. I want to be very clear here. Unless you very, very much know what you are going DO NOT MESS WITH RAPTORS. Flappy dinosaurs will end you or, at the very least, try to take an eye. Owls are no exception to this. Speaking of flappy birds, some of you noted that owls fly. Good job! Your barn owl has similar hunting preferences to the fox but with a much larger range because flying. You can get a very current composite regional sample by waiting for the owl to hork up a fresh pellet for you. Patience, goggles and leather gloves are key. 

All of these animals become radioactive because of human activity. They either:

• Rolled around in a contaminated area.
• Drank contaminated water
• Ate contaminated food

The animals show not just what is in the ecosystem but how it’s moving and by what pathways. 

The two inspiring events for this scenario come from the same building separated by mere months. When you derelict a building, it’s polite to mark are all the things in the building that are energized so that future people know they need to de-energize things before demolition. So, someone with spray paint has to go tag all the panels, conduits and piping that are still live. Sometimes those conduits are overhead and you need a ladder to get at them. Sometimes they’re outside, there’s a barn owl sleeping on top of the conduits, and they don’t appreciate getting nailed with red spray paint 

Owl did not go far because it was sleepy and freshly painted. After making sure nothing was injured other than pride, I called for an animal rescue team to help clean up the poor owl. In return (revenge?), the ecology team asked me to collect all the pellets I could find. There were a lot. 

All was well until I hit the Turd of Unusual Size. It was possible there could’ve been a mountain lion that had made its lair in this building. Cats are cats after all…

We pretty quickly ruled out the other usual wildlife and came up with the hypothesis of a security guard taking a Sump Dump. This raised questions no one wanted to ask much less get answers to. This part of my poop sampling career came to an end.

~fin~

GOOD NEWS: when McMansions attack they bring some support networks with them.

BAD NEWS: not *enough* support network, because one of the reasons to move to the sticks is to avoid taxes which would pay for that support, so…bummer. 

But there was a good thing to really help under resourced jurisdictions that grew out of the catastrophe of the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire: the birth of the Mutual Aid System. READ: when you call for help, people will come, and everyone will use the same jargon, clear speech, and radio frequencies (except NYC). This was also the birth of Unified Incident Command. Everyone in America, except NYC, got the message that it’s nice when you can count on your neighboring agencies to help you in a pinch. Outside agencies trying to help NYC with 9/11 had a really hard time because NYC alone hadn’t got with the program, which was one of the many findings of the 9/11 Commission. NYPD could barely talk amongst themselves, much less coordinate with NYFD. Trying to undo NYC’s “The New York way is the best way and fuck you” attitude for just emergency response was one small part of creating the Department of Homeland Security. You know, so we can learn how NYC wants to do things and make sure the rest of the country does that too.

But I digress.

In the American West, one of the most deployed groups under Mutual Aid are the hotshot teams, AKA professional wildland firefighting crews that are usually the very first backup that arrives to a wildfire that’s exceeded the locals’ capacity to fight. What your hotshots can do is very dependent on how fast the wildfire is moving, terrain, and what they have time to set up before it’s too late. Your hotshots see that NFPA diamond and call because they want a little more guidance than “PROTECT BUILDING”. People did a close read of the NFPA diamond primer I shared, but missed some close reading of the listings where those are *examples* of behavior. A Yellow 2 (reactivity) does not guarantee water incompatibility. If that was the case, you’d get this down in the white section: W

And while these quizzes seem to prime and attract people who are frightened/intrigued by radiation hazards, let me assure you that there is nothing that a firefighter wants to see less than that W. They don’t like rad, but they HATE “no water”. To quote my old Santa Clara County Fire instructor, Cap’n Bubba, if you cannot put the wet stuff on the hot stuff until it is cold stuff and this does not compute to the firefighter mind. Cap’n Bubba was a very bright hazmat guy but liked to play dumb hosedragger.

But back to the NFPA diamond, of the 3-4-2-rad, the Yellow 2 is the least concerning. The rad trefoil down in Other Information will give most firefighters pause but it’s nowhere near as terrifying as the Blue 4. That tells the team there is either a prompt death or a fast cancer. This is where I get to share one of my favorite acronyms from the field of Industrial Hygiene to describe what a facility with a Blue 4 is when it’s on fire. IDLH: Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health.

via GIPHY

Remember, the NFPA diamond is telling you about the hazards of the contents this building *WHEN IT IS ON FIRE*. For example, the dumpster fires behind Silicon Valley chip fabs in the 1970s where you suddenly have an entire engine crew dead of interesting cancers within 6mo (yes, this happened). Funny enough, things we normally would be day-to-day very worried about working with for their carcinogenicity, like asbestos or beryllium, would hardly count on the NFPA diamond during a fire. For that matter, radioactive materials don’t get more radioactive because you light them on fire, but you might make a larger mess. This is why they’re down in “Other Information”. You need the other three to know how bad things are as you approach and the white diamond is just Challenge Score Multiplier.

No one likes to see rad on the sign but the thing we trainers continually drill into firefighters is that they remember the response hierarchy: Life, Property, Environment. We can’t unkill someone. We can’t unburn a building or a forest. But we can clean up afterward. And of course, the First Responder’s First Rule: look out for your safety, because you help no one if you become a victim too. Which brings us back to the hotshots. They are not hazmat responders but they do know all about defensive actions for protecting structures.

They aren’t gonna set up downwind monitoring because they have much more important things to do with chainsaws. Notify the EPA or local equivalent to get things started on that. For that matter, there may be no wet stuff to put on hot stuff here. Generally speaking, there’s gonna be hookups at somewhere on the site for them to run hoses to but if that’s not in a strategically safe space or the water supply is gone then the hotshots do what they do best: chainsaws, backburns, and trenching. If the circumstances are kind enough to make the protective lines to keep the fire from getting to the building, stay upwind and at good distance following the rule of thumb: stick your arm out, stick up your thumb, and if that covers the entire incident, you are far enough away.

If they aren’t the kind, you evacuate and you evacuate fast because the Blue 4 with a Red 3 tells you don’t want to be near that building when it goes up. Radioactive things hardly count in this scenario other than to give your hotshots a moment’s pause.

In the inspiring event for this scenario, unfortunately, rad concerns did give the fire crew pause. Mainly because I had *just* trained them how to use their new radiation detection instrumentation the previous week. New meters and the Very Nice Educational Man who answered any and all questions they had, which apparently previous trainers had not, meant they’d spent the intervening days thinking a lot about radiation hazards.

When the emergency alert went out, I happened to be nearby and went to go see what was up as the call was for a building I kinda took care of when other people went on vacation. Lo and behold, the fire crew I’d recently trained was at the end of the block from the building, standing around the truck in turnouts, as a small plume of smoke rose from the building.

Me: What the fuck are you standing here for?
Captain: The building has rad on the diamond.
Me: So?
Captain: We can’t hose that down.
Me: If you don’t there won’t be a building anymore. The latency of hard body radiogenic cancers are about 40 years. The latency on that fire is minutes.
Captain: But the contamination…
Me: I CAN CLEAN CONTAMINATION! THAT’S MY FUCKING JOB! It’s expensive, it takes a long time, but I can’t unburn a building. Use your fucking meters like I trained you and put the fucking fire out.
[firefighters scurry]

When I shared this story with Cap’n Bubba later, I thought he was gonna to wet his alligator skin cowboy boots from laughing so hard. He complimented me on my understanding of firefighter mindset and creative use of motivational swearing.

Incidentally, the building was fine.

~fin~

MORAL: The real lesson of this thread, and that my firefighters need to take to heart, is not getting fixated when assessing the Immediacy of Hazards. In the event of fire, FIRE is the most immediate concern. You can worry about radiation releases/exposures when you aren’t burning.

It’s clear that folks have some experience clearing out the homes & offices of deceased friends and relatives who were eccentric. From the previous Radioactive Seagull Adventure, perhaps they were the Local Color.

Inherit enough interesting things, you might get known as the Local Color too.

~fin~

P.S. – If you’ve ever wondered where the Coin Rants on the blog come from, that’s me using my coin collection for its real overarching purpose: to tell stories with. Here’s an example. I can tell a slice of history with pretty much every one of my coins. ;)