I have had this article for about three years now and it is now available on the www in several locations and in several iterations, re-incarnations and modifications. I supply the location of the full article in its original form.
The article "The Radioactive Boy Scout" originated in Harpers Magazine in Nov 1998 and was condensed in Readers Digest shortly thereafter.
As a long time experimenter and nuclear buff, (a disease picked up as a youth during the height of the cold war), I identified immediately with this kid. I roared with laughter as the story unfolded, as Silverstien's story telling skills are well honed.
I noted that some of his facts regarding nuclear materials and processes were askew or dealt with in a fast and loose manner, but the story was still captivating, none the less.
The knee jerk reaction of the authorities and neighbors is especially telling and frightening.
Regardless of what the real facts are regarding this lad's concentration of Rad materials, this is a tale of fear for most readers who at the end of the article come away frightened and agast that such a thing could happen.
I would recommend this article be read by all here. Take note of the results and consequences of the public knowledge of experiments being done by a kid in this area.
Pick carefully who you talk with regarding your fusor work for molehills cry out to become mountains in this study. The average person subconciously loves fear and hype for it adds pique to their otherwise drab day to day mechanistic existence. Bad news is always the BEST news provided it involves others, and the worse it can be expanded to become, the more newsworthy it is.
I'll be curious as to the various comments from our group regarding this article which can be found at:
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/ ... rint.jhtml
NOTE* a www search on the title will often pull up other versions of the article, some with images of the moon suited clean up crews.
Richard Hull
A must read article!!
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Richard Hull
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A must read article!!
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
-
guest
Re: A must read article!!
I have read the article.
It gives a black eye to serious people in the nuclear field.
Why didn't they set the record straight?
The honest ones that is.
It has inflamed the masses into hysteria and a wave of regulation that will choke our republic.
A bunch of points:
1. The neutron sources were a joke!
The most you can squeeze out of a gram of Radium is 10^14 alphas the gammas do no good. The beryllium
maybe can honk out 10^10 neutrons/sec. But how much is that being generous to a fault not counting alpha loses to impurities ect. ? Not very much. It takes ten to the twenty sixth power to get a gram. It takes a kilogram before usefull power happens. So thats 10 to the twenty nineth power atoms! Thats how many neutrons it will take. If you divide the number of neutrons required by the source rate you get how many seconds it would take in the ideal case. In this case 10 ^ 19 seconds or 10^13 years.
Not a big worry!
A hundred years is 10^2.
a billion years is 10^9. it would take another 10,000
years to finish the job.
2. The alpha particles almost never come from the same dirrection twice.. so your chances go down father still.
3. It takes tons of ore to get enough mass together to breed signifigant quantities of anything. Chemical whiz or not he didn't have near enough stuff.
4. You could get up to a kilogram of any unenriched fuel stuff through railfreight.... Thanks to Jimmy Carter. But after that its alarm bells... but after 911 forget it!
5. Like most reporters he flunked science.
I liken investigative reporters to chia pets.... more they grow the greener they get. I wince when I think of the money that hack got paid to scare the pea
out of little old ladies and the dullards that pass for the public. The tree hugging mafia now touts this crap as fact.... An I told you so.
6. If the kid had really done what the article said he did he would have his hair falling out and low leucosite counts.
7. The rad suits were all political theater for the benefit of the rubes who needed to be reasured that their sperm count was ok.
8. The evacuation that would have been mandatory did not happen... Hence false alarm.
9. A truck load of enriched (10%) uranium fuel pellets were spilled all over the road in Maryland a few years ago...
remeady? A shovel! The fuel was pretty valuable but hazardous not hardly. A crew had scooped it up off the road without moonsuits. It was much more radioactive than the kid's stuff but harmless unless the requisite
10 tons for assembly was reached. It was only a ton or two in the truck wreck.
So Much for the Nuclear Kid!
But Seriously folks.....
It would have called into question how secure is our so called
limited access fields such as fission technology and high tech weaponry in general. Radiation is a real issue. It accumilates in your body and like taxes never goes away. All the primary early atomic researchers have died of radiation induced cancers. The Curies had over a hundred grams of radium at their institute. It took a long time for radiation poisoning to be evident .. 10 years in fact. The lower the dose the longer it takes. The best well known example is Richard Feinmen, he got dosage from cyclotron work at MIT when he was 20 but it didn't become evident until he turned into his sixties. I'll bet you people thought I'm a bit Paranoid about sheilding but I got a grave yard full of aquaintences Who Didn't Get It.
I have to be carefull .. I've had large dosages in the past. But I'll tell you the most devastating dosage I received was by overcautious doctors who prescribed cat scan after cat scan when I had my stroke. I've had 25 cat scans and one brain scan. I'm almost at my lifetime dose. In a space less than a year I received as much radiation as I received in 20 years of Tech work for the Government. I had Technecium pumped in my veins straight into my brain. I got the the full gamma treatment. I don't even allow my dentist to x-ray me anymore. Yes ...I glow pretty well.
But all that aside... I will still work with this stuff.
As to the unwashed masses of people heres how I feel:
I did not share with anyone less advanced than engineering seniors at Ole Miss and some professors.
Most of the so called college educated people can't seperate fusion from fission. I stopped trying to educate the non specialist. I had to shield my work from the prying eyes of jocks and faculty dependant kids at school. Even the Artificial Intelligence Geeks I worked beside lacked the ED to follow along. Physics instructors thought all fusion advances came out of a box labelled DOE ect. The most forward looking thinkers were in Philosophy!
PT Barnum once said you can never go broke underestimating the public.
Larry Leins
Physics Teacher
It gives a black eye to serious people in the nuclear field.
Why didn't they set the record straight?
The honest ones that is.
It has inflamed the masses into hysteria and a wave of regulation that will choke our republic.
A bunch of points:
1. The neutron sources were a joke!
The most you can squeeze out of a gram of Radium is 10^14 alphas the gammas do no good. The beryllium
maybe can honk out 10^10 neutrons/sec. But how much is that being generous to a fault not counting alpha loses to impurities ect. ? Not very much. It takes ten to the twenty sixth power to get a gram. It takes a kilogram before usefull power happens. So thats 10 to the twenty nineth power atoms! Thats how many neutrons it will take. If you divide the number of neutrons required by the source rate you get how many seconds it would take in the ideal case. In this case 10 ^ 19 seconds or 10^13 years.
Not a big worry!
A hundred years is 10^2.
a billion years is 10^9. it would take another 10,000
years to finish the job.
2. The alpha particles almost never come from the same dirrection twice.. so your chances go down father still.
3. It takes tons of ore to get enough mass together to breed signifigant quantities of anything. Chemical whiz or not he didn't have near enough stuff.
4. You could get up to a kilogram of any unenriched fuel stuff through railfreight.... Thanks to Jimmy Carter. But after that its alarm bells... but after 911 forget it!
5. Like most reporters he flunked science.
I liken investigative reporters to chia pets.... more they grow the greener they get. I wince when I think of the money that hack got paid to scare the pea
out of little old ladies and the dullards that pass for the public. The tree hugging mafia now touts this crap as fact.... An I told you so.
6. If the kid had really done what the article said he did he would have his hair falling out and low leucosite counts.
7. The rad suits were all political theater for the benefit of the rubes who needed to be reasured that their sperm count was ok.
8. The evacuation that would have been mandatory did not happen... Hence false alarm.
9. A truck load of enriched (10%) uranium fuel pellets were spilled all over the road in Maryland a few years ago...
remeady? A shovel! The fuel was pretty valuable but hazardous not hardly. A crew had scooped it up off the road without moonsuits. It was much more radioactive than the kid's stuff but harmless unless the requisite
10 tons for assembly was reached. It was only a ton or two in the truck wreck.
So Much for the Nuclear Kid!
But Seriously folks.....
It would have called into question how secure is our so called
limited access fields such as fission technology and high tech weaponry in general. Radiation is a real issue. It accumilates in your body and like taxes never goes away. All the primary early atomic researchers have died of radiation induced cancers. The Curies had over a hundred grams of radium at their institute. It took a long time for radiation poisoning to be evident .. 10 years in fact. The lower the dose the longer it takes. The best well known example is Richard Feinmen, he got dosage from cyclotron work at MIT when he was 20 but it didn't become evident until he turned into his sixties. I'll bet you people thought I'm a bit Paranoid about sheilding but I got a grave yard full of aquaintences Who Didn't Get It.
I have to be carefull .. I've had large dosages in the past. But I'll tell you the most devastating dosage I received was by overcautious doctors who prescribed cat scan after cat scan when I had my stroke. I've had 25 cat scans and one brain scan. I'm almost at my lifetime dose. In a space less than a year I received as much radiation as I received in 20 years of Tech work for the Government. I had Technecium pumped in my veins straight into my brain. I got the the full gamma treatment. I don't even allow my dentist to x-ray me anymore. Yes ...I glow pretty well.
But all that aside... I will still work with this stuff.
As to the unwashed masses of people heres how I feel:
I did not share with anyone less advanced than engineering seniors at Ole Miss and some professors.
Most of the so called college educated people can't seperate fusion from fission. I stopped trying to educate the non specialist. I had to shield my work from the prying eyes of jocks and faculty dependant kids at school. Even the Artificial Intelligence Geeks I worked beside lacked the ED to follow along. Physics instructors thought all fusion advances came out of a box labelled DOE ect. The most forward looking thinkers were in Philosophy!
PT Barnum once said you can never go broke underestimating the public.
Larry Leins
Physics Teacher
-
guest
Re: A must read article!!
I've read that article, too. It was great entertainment, and a good example of the hype that surrounds radiation of all kinds. A local example of this was a couple of years ago when a local rock hound was bragging about how 'hot' his carnotite samples were to an ignorant neighbor. Next thing you know, the local sheriff and EPA people are raiding his house, confiscating all of his (perfectly legal) rocks, and CHARGING him with the costs of the "decontamination". It didn't make the papers for some reason, possibly having to do with the fact that the uranium tailings cleanup around here was making some serious contributions to the local economy, and any bad news about radiation was treated with kid gloves. Nonetheless, I keep my hobbies to myself.
Jim
Jim
-
guest
Re: A must read article!!
This is all very true. About a years ago, I was shrinking quarters in my garage. Due to the "bang" of the spark-gap, my neighbors hit DEFCON 1 ! It took quite a bit of explaining. Some still dont understand the process, or why I was doing that.
For some reason, its more difficult to answer the "WHY" questions than the "HOW" questions.
God forbid I should EVER have to explain the fusor.......
Mark Rowley
Garage Scientist (unlicensed)
For some reason, its more difficult to answer the "WHY" questions than the "HOW" questions.
God forbid I should EVER have to explain the fusor.......
Mark Rowley
Garage Scientist (unlicensed)
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guest
Re: A must read article!!
Most people these days are technopeasents.
Radio is pure magic to them.
Anything that glows or is electronic in nature baffles the crap out of them.
Mark is absolutely right about explaining the fusor to people. Most people are on an eight grade science level or less... maybe.
People who can't figure out flourescent lights would tend to look at a fusor as hoodoo.
Larry Leins
Physics Teacher
Radio is pure magic to them.
Anything that glows or is electronic in nature baffles the crap out of them.
Mark is absolutely right about explaining the fusor to people. Most people are on an eight grade science level or less... maybe.
People who can't figure out flourescent lights would tend to look at a fusor as hoodoo.
Larry Leins
Physics Teacher