The AM Forum

Thiago Olson joined the extremely sparse ranks of teenage amateurs with the homebrew project in his basement.

For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store, including the high-voltage transformer.  “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November he finally got it to deliver output, even though the efficiency is still not up to snuff.


Kid built his own (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/radioactive-boy-scout)

Hi Don,

Interesting story. It's good to see that some U.S. teenagers take this level of interest in such a technically complicated and challenging subject. Although unrelated to this story, thank goodness we still have the Intel (previously Westinghouse) science scholarships for high school students!

I did not know that you could purchase deuterium (heavy water) so easily, if I interpreted this article correctly.

I personally think it's a national travesty and a shame that this country has not invested heavily in the R & D  in or seriously pursuing the harnessing of nuclear fusion. I think a project with the national will similar to the Manhattan Project, the Mercury/Gemini/ Apollo Projects to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, etc., is essential here.  It would preserve our global position in terms of basic physics research and engineering, and create an entirely new industry that we could conceivably monopolize on a global basis. Cheap, clean, essentially unlimited energy from water, and the elimination of our dependance on petroleum from most of the politically unfriendly sources of supply the U.S has come to rely upon, are some of the major benefits of this technology.

Not surprisingly, the amount of federal funding allocated to fusion basic research in the U.S. has actually decreased over the years.

Just my 2 cents worth. Thank you for sharing this article with us.

Best 73,

Bruce

This kid is my Hero!

Cool!  I wanted to do Fusion stuff in college, but they only allow Grad students to work with it.  Which was a bummer for me.  :( I've always been more interested in nuclear fusion, than nuclear fission.

Ellen - AF9J
B.S. - Nuclear Engineering, Univ. of Wisconsin, Class of 1987 

Its really sad that the country that developed nukler energy can't seem to use it for power.

Yes, I know we have nukler electrical generation, but when was the last new plant built? Mil power doesn't count.

Here in new york, actually long guyland,  The local power co built a plant. The then Govner, Como, had the state buy it and destroy it.. A few $Billion thrown away.... 

Maybe in the future, we can have nukler power, and get to buy the plants from France.....      klc

The scary thing is those of us who like to experiment may raise eye browse amongst the less inquisitive or mind numbed robots of society.

Try to by basic chemicals that used to be part of a real chemistry set of yesteryear.  They're tough to come by.

My wife and neighbors think I'm nuts when I'm running wire all over the place and that's only wire.

Radioactive BoyScout appeared in Reader Digest.  As far as I can tell this is a true story and an interesting one too.
http://www.wesjones.com/silverstein1.htm

our edumacational system needs to re-orient it's countersubersive educational priorities and set them back to what they were in the early 60's.

ha,
    a reasonable chem set, oh oh save us from ourselves. I had potassium nitrate, sulphur and others in mine. added a little charcoal
and yep, made gunpowder as a kid.

    the high school kid just may go on to solve a workable fusion
solution. its no trivial task to make one with a positive net energy gain.
esp with the high temp plasma schema. MIT announced around
6months ago a room temp, accelerator device that used an exotic
material which when cooled or heated (don't remember) created a
high voltage in a pair of concentric rings of deuterium. result, it
worked. same thing, low output though. the thing is, lithium 3 looks
like an easier target. you can do fusion burning all the way to IRON
on the atomic scale and net energy. I think the sun has enough
thermal energy to fuse up to oxygen? correct me if wrong, my
physics here are rusty. viva that HS student!

What does nuclear fusion and amateur radio have in common? More than you may think. Check out this presentation made by Robert Bussard who was quoted in the article Don posted.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

This is kind of long but well worth the view once you get past the Physics. Bussard points out some interesting things such as how the department of energy is blowing billions on fusion research that is going down the wrong road. His approach shows the possibilty of everybody having their own "Mister Fusion Home Reactor" within our lifetime if the proper resources are focused on his approach.

Unfortunately his research funding which came from a Navy "under the radar" grant has been cut. Does our government really want to get away from fosil fuel dependency? Perhaps not when the big picture is viewed, something revolutionary like cheap energy could lead to a global economic collapse. At the very least a lot of oil men are going to end up in the poor house unless they have diversified their portfolio, not that that's a bad thing.

I mentioned Fusion power and ham radio having something in common. Bussard mentions how his reactor depends on extremely high voltages, high voltage insulators and coils and how the knowledge base for doing this stuff is all dieing off...who do you know that is still keeping this "Art" alive...strrraaapp. Bussard also states that Philo Farnsworth the inventor of the raster scan television system also invented and built a working fusion reactor and that there is still research going on today to perfect the Farnsworth reactor. The trick as mentioned in the article is to get more power out than you put in, I'm not sure if anybody can prove success on this yet, although Bussard seems to indicate that he has been successful.

As far as "The Radio Active Boy Scout" goes the original story was about a loaner high schooler who got so consumed by chemistry and his quest to own a sample of every substance on the periodic table that he built his own breeder reactor. The story originally appeared in Harpers as a short story, there was a book that came out subsequently that filled in more details, I read both the article and the book and will say that in a lot of ways the radio active boy scout did get as consumed by his hobby as some of us with ham radio. Ultimately this messed up his adult life. The author of the book was definitely anti nuke and anti boy scout so you know it wouldn't have a happy ending.

Who is going to be the first in the group to build their own fusion reactor, the challenge is on!

73s
Mark WA1QHQ

Hey Mark,
Don't worry about the oil men they are buying up all the water rights they can.

Past Iron, it takes more energy than the reaction gives off, so fusion goes from being exothermic, to endothermic.  To get plain old Protium (your normal hydrogen with just 1 proton in the nucleus, and no neutrons) to fuse, would take on the order of 100 billion degrees of temperature. So they've been using Deuterium, Tritium, and Lithium 3 for some time.  The only problems - Tritium and Lithium 3 are relatively rare, and Tritium is pretty radioactive (but at least it isn't as nasty as the Plutonium we used in college), and Lithium is very chemically reactive (hence the reason why it is used in the Lithium Deuteride compound/form in thermonuclear weapons).  Also the nuclear reactions with Tritium, Deuterium, and Lithium 3 do have some residual radiation in the form of Neutrons.  There are 2 ways you can extract energy from fusion: 1.) the heat from the reaction (which is the main way a Tokamak reactor would do it), or by stripping off the stray electrons that also occur as a part of the reaction (mainly would be done in Tandem Mirror designs [like Phaedrus at the University of Wisconsin - my alma mater]), for direct electrical generation.  Interesting stuff, albeit very expensive.

With regards to the sorry state of the Nuclear power industry in this country - yeah, I know first hand.  I never was able to get a job in the field, when I graduated college in 1987.  Ever since the mid 80s, it's been almost impossible to get a job in the field (so much so, that the University of Wisconsin, and some other schools, have quit offering the Nuclear Engineering degree).

73,
Ellen - AF9J

You don't get a job at a nuke plant unless you belong to the Navy nuke click. They are very tight and don't like outsiders.

Don't worry Al Gore will make it right today....He uses more power in a month than I do in a year and has the balls to cry global warming.

Ellen,

Bussard's initial experiments used duterium because of his lack of sufficient power to pull off a reaction with his fuel of choice boron-11 which is available in plentiful supply and does not produce any harmful radiation. I'm no expert on this topic but the following is a description of the reaction.

The fusion process recommended by Dr. Bussard takes boron-11 and fuses a proton to it, producing, in its excited state, a carbon-12 atom. This excited carbon-12 atom decays to beryllium-8 and helium-4. Beryllium-8 very quickly (in 10-13 s) decays into two more helium-4 atoms. This is the only nuclear-energy releasing process in the whole world that releases fusion energy and three helium atoms -- and no neutrons. This reaction is completely radiation free.

Bussard's claims his reactor confinement process to be 100,000 times more efficient than previous reactors.

But Mark,
if we turn all the boron into helium the whole world will sound like slop bucket. 
An idiot comment but I couldn't resist.......

Frank,

Believe it or not there is a global shortage of helium, probably from all the helium consumed in inert gas welding. This is what I was told when I recently took a MIG welding class, of course the folks providing the class also sold welding gas. So lets get those boron-11 fusion reactors going so we can replace all the depleted helium. Lots of Boron-11 in the Mohave desert Frank, your favorite stomping grounds, remeber Ronal Ragen hosting "Death Valley Days" with Borax as the sponsor.

Mark QHQ

Oh, man, that just brought back some memories:

"Death Valley Days, Brought to You by 20 Mule Team Borax"
(I guess I'l just dating myself)

Interesting about the welding industry causing a shortage of helium.
I am also a welder (although I dont do it for a living anymore) It seems to me that much more Argon is used than helium these days.
Shield gasses are predomanently Argon with small percentages of
Helium and/or CO2 added. In many cases if a slightly lesser quality weld is acceptable, straight CO2 can be used for MIG welding steel.
(I have used a beer tapper / soda fountain CO2 bottle with my MIG machine many times and gotten excellent results)

                                                The Slab Bacon

Hey Mark,
Remember remember the day we drove east for a couple hours to set off M100s and almost got busted for fireworks.
Good thing that CHP chick was so tall and the shopping bag on the seat was against the roof of the firebird.
That cloud of dust drifting across the desert as we told her it was an emergency pee stop.
I still laugh thinking about the poor little animal who lived in the hole we blasted.

Hmmmm, Interesting.  I wonder why nobody uses it.  Typically the heavier you go elementally, the less energy you get out of the fusion process.  I know that boron has a high reaction cross section with regards to neutrons (which is one of the reasons why it's often used as a part of scramming a fission reactor).  I just took a look online, and found some info on it.  It's considered pretty controversial at the present time (although some people think the controversy is political in nature).  Very interesting.  Well, break over, I'd better get back to work.

73,
Ellen - AF9J

Yes, I believe that boron was or is used as a moderator in fission reactors, or perhaps it was graphite. I think that water may be used for this as well. Ellen/AF9J would know the answer to this. Please correct here me if I'm wrong!

I recall reading the history of the first controlled chain reaction at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago; this was supervised by the superb physicist Enrico Fermi. To a large extent the results at Stagg Field formed the very basis for deciding whether to proceed with the Manhattan Project, as many of the unknowns with regard to fission were answered as a result of these findings.

73,

Bruce

OK,  Here goes - Nuclear Engineering 101:  Basically, in fission reactor, Neutrons that are moving at thermal energies (In other words their "speed is purely from the heat in the environment they are in (most neutrons that are emitted in nuclear processes, are typically going much faster than the speed  they'd have from just the heat of their surrounding environment) , have a greater chance of causing fission, than neutons that are moving at higher speeds.  Sooooo, to slow down the neutrons to thermal (kinetic) energy levels a moderator is used. Now a moderator basically has enough of a target area for a Neutron to "bounce: off of it, and lose energy (that's in pretty simple terms, the target cross section is also a function of other things like isotope of the moderator, the relative velocity a moderator is moving towards the neutron, etc.) 

Basically there are 3 main moderators that are used nowadays for fission reactors:  1.)  Light water (the water molecules are made up of ordinary Hydrogen), Heavy water (the water molecules have one or both of the atoms as Deuterium [BTW, Dueterium makes up .01% of all Hydrogen, so we drink it everyday, whenever we have a glass of water]).  And Graphite.  All US nuke plants (including the two near my hometown of Manitowoc, WI), use light water for moderators.  The Canadian nuke reactors (called Candu reactors  for Canadian - Deuterium) use heavy water as a moderator (which allows them to run with less enriched fuel, than US reactors, but has the unfortunate side effect, of generating a fair amount of Tritium as radioactive waste).  The Russians, and some former Eastern Bloc countries, use graphite moderated reactors (ala Chernobyl), and yes Fermi's reactor also used graphite.

Boron (along with Cadmium), is basically a Neutron "poison".  In other words, it just soaks up Neutrons, eventually killing the fission reactions. 

73,
Slaving away at work,
Ellen - AF9J

Hi Ellen,

Thanks for the detailed and informative reply!

BTW, if after 10 years you were never able to find work in your chosen profession of nuclear engineering, what line of work are you involved with currently?

I think it's unfortunate that in this country, such a highly skilled technical person cannot find work in the engineering field for which they were trained.

Just curious!

73,

Bruce

Sounds like Ellen would be right at home hanging out at Sandia

Hi Bruce & Frank,

I went back to school part time at nights in the mid 90s, through a local 4 year college, and basically got a 2nd degree, in Manufacturing Engineering.  By that time, I was working in Quality Control.  Soooo, degree Number 2 worked out great for my job.  I work as a supervisor in a QA department, and I do Quality Engineering.  BTW, there were a lot of us in the mid to late 80s, who couldn't buy a job in Engineering.  I got my first degree from the Univ. of WI in 1987.  I knew the year before I graduated, that the job situation was bad in Nuclear Engineering.  When I tried transferring to Mechanical Engineering, I was told by the assistant Dean of the College of Engineering that I couldn't (my grades were only so-so), and that frankly it was a waste of time, because everybody in Engineering was having a hard time finding jobs.  Tech jobs in general, didn't pick up until the economic boom in the 90s. 

I will say this though, as a part of Engineering Degree Number 1, I had to take 6 credits worth of electronics classes.  They basically gave me all of the electronics I used to pass my General in 1986, my Advanced in 1993, and my Extra in 1994.  All had to do was just bone up a bit to refresh my memory.  Well, I'd better get going, I'm done for the day.

73,
Ellen - AF9J

Ellen,
You are welcome here.....we like smart people.

Most of us stick to electronics because we get in enough trouble with high voltage and lots of RF.

Hi Ellen,

Glad to hear that you landed on your feet in a technical role other than your chosen goal of nuclear engineering.

I second Frank's/GFZ comment; you are always welcome at this forum!!! Too few really intelligent and interesting people in this world, and this forum is fortunately a great place for smart people to congregate and exchange views and information pertaining (mostly) to amateur radio and AM-related topics.

Nice to see that you are not an Extra Lite; that you passed your 20 WPM Amateur Extra back in 1994.

We all also hope to work you on the air, hopefully on 75M AM!

Thanks for joining up with us!

With Best 73,

Bruce

I would have loved to have something to do with the nuclear power,
fusion/fission industry. Loved physics in earlier years. there are so
many questions, and clues out there how things work. as a kid, I wondered if there was nothing else in
the universe, why is there inertia? Earnest Mach put forth that is
the the total gravity Guv field rather than a property of space itself. Mr Einsteins General  Relativity
shows matter piled up does increase inertia, though small but
showed mr machs idea is on track. what causes the casimer effect? why is the universe expanding?
if the universe is open (not curved in on itself) then we have
a inertial vacuum outside of the univers Guv current mass and its easier to just move-away then respond to a weak gravity trying pull us
all back in. why diamagnetics, ie  why to some materials repulse both
magnetic poles? look at me go fun subject.. anyway hats off to the
young HS  scientist! and be thankfull for novas and super novas, as we
are made of the guts of dead stars - that is all elements over Iron

Good morning everybody,

Thanks for all of the kind words.  I will say this, from what I've seen so far this forum is pretty much free of trolls, unlike a certain other forum.  I'd love to work you all on AM, BUT, I'm having technical issues.  I live in an apartment (on the 2nd floor,  grounding sucks, but I can take advantage of the height for antennas).  I have a high noise floor, partially from those nice mini flourescents used around my building to save energy (and no they aren't the coily ones you can buy at the store, they are like small trombone slides), and partially from those nice 250 kV lines about 100 yards east of my building.  I use the rain gutter (with a 50 foot counterpoise, and MFJ artificial ground), on my side of the building, which is made of aluminum (it may be only one or 2 pieces from what I've seen), is up 3 stories (the roof in other words), and is 125-150 feet long. So, in my case running even 100 watts of carrier may be asking for trouble (I'd probably get into the phones and the speakers of my neighbors).  So, I'm stuck with an FT-897D at 20 to 25W of carrier that's a hassle to set up. I do have another choice.  I have a Swan 270B Cygnet, that I sort of got stuck with 8 months ago.  It will do SSB with carrier (in other words AME). It will do maybe 30 to 40W of carrier (although from what Swan nut Bob, KI0KN tells me, it's easier on the sweep tube final, to keep the carrier down to say 25-30W). As it is, I'm looking into another rig to replace my 897D (I'm tired of the receiver shortcomings, I'm sick of going into umpteen menus to do anything, and DSP is lame, but I'll miss the VHF & UHF weak signal capabilities).  But that's going to have to wait. I went through some hard times a few years ago, that left me with bills I'm still paying off.  So, I'll have to scrape together some money before I can get rid of the 897D.

Another thought I had last year (due to a lack of space, which makes a Transceiver more attractive to me), was an old Gonset G-76 (but  it lacks 160m capability, and I like 160).

As for the nuke stuff - yeah, there's some fascinating stuff in that field.  BTW Dean, the latest cosmology, basically states that the universe won't have a big crunch, but will basically decay in 10 to the 1000 power years, into just a black, cold place.  You want weird, get into Quantum Mechanics.  I had to take a college course in it.  What some mind burning math! Well, I'd better get going, work beckons.

73,
Ellen - AF9J

A nuke a very deadly thing is also a beautiful machine.....like a very large fire cracker

I too have always been very interested in nuclear energy and physics, even as a young JN.

If you want to read a really interesting book on the history of the U.S. thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb, read "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhoades. Rhoades also wrote a fascinating book on the history of the Manhattan Project that I read as well. Although both books are essentially non-technical, they provide a great overview as to the subject matter.

The first H-bomb, code-named "Mike", was detonated in the South Pacific on the island of Elugalab in late 1952. The actual yield far exceeded the projected yield, and absolutely terrified the physicists and engineers responsible for monitoring the test when the reaction literally ran away with itself. The actual yield was measured at about 50 megatons, whereas the projected yield was estimated to be in the range of 10-15 megatons. To date, the biggest thermonuclear device ever detonated was 100 megatons.

Mike was not a deliverable weapon; rather it was an engineering demonstration and feasibility test of the physics and technology. It was a massive cryogenically-cooled, multi-story device with enormous Dewar flasks, compressors, etc.

As Ellen/AF9J correctly pointed out earlier, lithium deuteride is used in thermonuclear weapons, and it is lithium deuteride that made possible the orders of magnitude reduction in the size,weight, and complexity  of the Mike device to ultimately, a deliverable weapon.

73,

Bruce

Hi Bruce,

Ummm, actually that's only partially true.  The first real thermonuke was the Ivy Mike in 1952.  This used cryogenics to contain the dueterium in a liquid form, and mainly served to prove the fusion weapon concept.  It was not usable as a weapon system.  It yield was 10 Megatons. The first really usable system (which was similar to what Andrei Sakaharov developed independantly for the Soviet nuke program) was Castle Bravo.  It was tested in 1954, and was the first sytem to use lithium deuteride.  Its yield (which is the largest to date for a US nuke) was 15 megatons.  Castle Bravo was a bit of an unpleasant surpise for the testers.  Its yield was only predicted to be about 4 to 8 megatons.  It wasn't until after the test, that physicists realized that the Lithium-3 they used in the Lithium Deuteride, played an important role.  Because it was so much more powerful than expected, and because the weather patterns were not understood as well as they are today, there were some people who were exposed to much higher than expected levels of fallout radiation.

The largest nuke ever tested was the Tsar (Emperor in English) bomb by the Soviets in October 1961.  It's yield was 50 megatons, and the design was capable of 100 megtons (due to concerns about excess fallout, some of the fueling was exchanged with lead, which halved its yield).  As it was, it went off at 13,000 feet.  The fireball not only reached all the way down to the ground, but up to the height of the Bear bomber that dropped it (about 40,000 feet - the plane was out of the way by that time, so it was undamaged).  The flash could be seen over 600 miles away, and some houses were wrecked a few hundred miles away.  The ground below the bomb blast (it was tested over Novaya Zemlya, in the Artic) looked like a skating rink of fused glass, and the atmospheric disturbance caused by the blast circled the earth 3 times.  When Andrei Sakharov was asked in the 90s, why on earth he ever made such a huge bomb (due to the damage it caused it was not even practical for military use), he stated that it was built, because Khruschev wanted to prove that the Soviets could do it.

Here's the website I got the info off of if you're interested in the history of it all.  Just click on the flag for each country, to read the history of their nuke program:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

In all honesty, I couldn't live with myself, if I built something that was a weapon capable of killing millions of people. :(

Ellen - AF9J

Man my Dad was lucky. After Korea they wanted him to stay in the Navy and go to the South Pacific. I wonder how many of those guys died early when the yield was higher than expected.
Search the web on effects of nuclear weapons good reading. I remember the last underground test in '82. I was in the air a few hours after LV shook.

Here ya go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_fallout_exposure.png

Gives an entirely new meaning to the 'red state/blue state' expression. ;)

http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/effects/effects.shtml

Hi Ellen,

Thanks for the clarification regarding the Mike test!

I just accessed the link you were kind enough to provide; lots of good archival stuff on the history of fission and fusion weapons.

Further to Frank/GFZs comment about servicemen stationed in the South Pacific; I recall reading a number of years ago that there was a western filmed in the Nevada/Utah desert area back in the early to mid-1950s during the time when the US was still conducting above-ground nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. Over time, a very high percentage of the cast and supporting crew for the film died from leukemia and other cancers at a rate that far exceeded what was considered to be normal. It has been assumed that they died from the results of exposure to the fallout from the testing. A number of famous actors & actresses were in this film, although I can't remember their names or the name of the film.

73,

Bruce

J. Wayne was one i think.... I THINK the movies was "the Searchers", but I dont know fer sur....

I have also been told that the USAF pulled out of some of the nuke tests in the 40's 'caus the lack of safety precautions. One of the stories was the controll for the bomb was in the 80 m band.....  FWIW,          klc

The underground tests were set off by fiber optics driven by a lasar. No radio stuff there. These guys were all about safety I have never seen a more professional gang. These guys were smarter than using RF.
I see no reason to use RF since it was a sequenced shape charge.
Ensien Bickford made the fiber optics box. I was there for a meeting once and they brought it in and showed it off.
The underground tests were done in caves so they could test the effects of radiation. They would blow the physics package let the radiation go down the cave then blow doors shut to limit the blast.
Imagine the poor sap who had to go in and get the test article. Hopefully it was a robot.

This stuff all intrigues me. I only wish I knew more about it. Not just the historical stuff, but the nuts and bolts mechanics of it as well.
It is kind of like "the forbidden fruit". Evil, deadly, but totally high tech and fascinating as well. This is one of the few topics of discussion here that I know little about except for the historical / political facetts. I have great respect for those who actually know "how it works".

I took a quick lookie over some of the links mentioned in this thread and was fascinated. I only wish I had more time here at work to thoroughly read them.

I can talk intelligently (and in most cases with much experience) about just about anything from airplanes to cars to engines to building radio stuff to cooking, but youse guys got me with this one.
Anything involving nuclear technology is beyond my realm of education, but this just "sucked me in". Keep up the good work!!

                                              The Slab Bacon

Frank/GFZ & Frank/AHE,

Wow, there's a name I have'nt heard of in years; Ensign-Bickford. Yup, they make a lot of fiber optic interface equipment for EP (explosion-proof/hazardous environments) using 200u and up multimode fiber, for this and similar applications, such as the mining industry, refineries, etc.

When there is no possibility of a second chance, use fiber for truly mission-critical applications.

The company I work for still provides similar type fiberoptic transmission equipment to the Nevada Test Site, but ours is all singlemode, and it represents a tiny portion of our overall business.

Frank/AHE: Yup, this is indeed fascinating stuff, and really does appeal to any of us with an interest in science and technology. I really know very little about this field myself, but the technology, physics, history, social and political impact of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons has always been of considerable interest to me as well.

I'm glad that we have a true expert in this field with us now in the form of Ellen/AF9J!

73,

Bruce

Yes, inside the atom is a cool place that few of us understand
since all of us are kids at heart and some remember duck and cover
a very cool subject.

oh I do remember the duck and cover exercises as a kid. its
worth getting to trinity site, open twice a year. I still have
my handful of trinitite in a bottle, still hot to my cd geiger counter
I have. Also see the titan missle museum here in tucson. los alamos
has a a good museum. I think there was a show, atomic cafe ??
with bomb pix.  I almost put in for vms engineer work there, they
were looking for 60 engineers there a cpl years ago, some new
weapon. anyway, plutonium is like 40000 times the energy density
of tnt, which is thousands of time more dense than gun powder.
yes, I read we are going to drift into cold lifeless mass in the eons
ahead. some how, like einsteins removal of a prefered regions
of space with relativity, I think theres always been something, and always will be. They keep making bigger telescopes and the universe
keeps getting bigger, who knows.

Yep, lots of safety involved as they dropped fallout on most of the country. :P

"Yep, lots of safety involved as they dropped fallout on most of the country. :P"


Well, the Gov DID make it safe for Kodak film....    klc

Someone supposedly produced a glowing report (heh heh) about how there were no readings of radioactive fallout east of the Mississippi.  But it turned out that this was because there were no sensors east of the Mississippi.  Ah, politics.

I still remember my Mother telling us to not eat snow during the above ground tests. I remember asking my Dad if we could build a fall out shelter....he just laughed.

I remember my mom telling me not to eat yellow snow,, is
that yellow cake?,,

Boy Frank,
              You bring back some memories with this one!! I still remember "civil defense" drills in school back in the 60s. Go to the lowest part of the building,get down on the floor, "put your head between your legs and kiss your a$$ goodby"!!

                                              The Slab Bacon
     

I remember that as well!! Wow!! I also remember many people back in the 50s and 60s had "bomb shelters" in their basements!

During grade school in the early 50's, we had regular atomic bomb attack drills.  Get this, each student received a personal asbestos pad to sit on to keep our butts warm when we sat on the cold floors of the school hallway.

Gee, you mean like the old Frank Zappa song? LOL (sorry, it's the musician in me [used to play lead guitar semi-pro, in heavy rock bands])!!!

I know what you're talking about with regards to the actors who died of cancer because of fallout from nuke tests. I saw an "In Search Of" episode about it, when I was a kid in the 70s (remember that show?, Leonard Nimoy used to host it). The movie was filmed in Utah in 1955, and was called "The Conqueror" (a cheesy B-rate movie about Ghenghis Khan).  The filming took 13 weeks.  There were no nuke tests during the filming, but in 1953, there were 11 atomic bomb tests in Nevada, and a lot of the fallout from those tests funneled into one of the canyons where "The Conqueror" was filmed. So, the actors and film crew probably breathed in a fair amount of the still radioactive fallout. 

By the 80s, 91 of the 220 people who were involved with the film, got cancer.  46 of them died from it (including John Wayne, and actress Susan Hayward).  Under normal circumstances no more than 30 of the 220 people should have gotten cancer.  Also, 30 years after the filming, half the residents of the nearby town of St. George, had gotten cancer.  The funny thing is, at the time of the filming, everybody knew there was radioactive fallout at the filming location (there's even a photo of John Wayne using a Geiger counter during the filming), but thought it was no big deal!  Go figure! But then again, back then, nobody ever considered long-term health effects.

If you're interested, here's the link, to where I got the info from:

 http://dorseyland.blogsome.com/2005/12/25/nuking-john-wayne/

73,
Ellen - AF9J
Off from work today, yeah!

Ah, yes - good ol' Bert the Turtle and that little monkey in the tree. I was a wee one then, so memories are vague. They were probably using the asbestos pads as potholders in the kitchen by then.

I do recall the large air horn atop city hall was used to signal an attack with a long, steady tone. Now and then the system would spaz, resulting in a long blast until the repairman could get there to fix it. They finally started to announce the malfunctions on the local AM station so we wouldn't think the commies were coming. Little did we know...

A buddy up in the NW corner of the state has a bomb shelter in the basement of his home, built when the place was constructed back then. He converted it to a win cellar.  :D

IIRC, we got a LOT more fallout from that whole Chernobyl thing than any of the Nevada tests. Montpelier, VT was cited as one of the heaviest hit locations IIRC.

Somewhere in the vastness of my junk are messages I taped from a Met-Ed phone line they provided after that whole Pepsi Syndrome thing at TMI-2. They gave daily updates via this public line, as a high school senior it was interesting to listen to. I remember them talking about the bubble, noble gas, and other action-packed topics.

That SNL skit with Dan Aykroyd as Jimmy Carter and Gilda Radner as Baba Wawa is one of my favs.

Baba Wawa: Hewwo, this is Baba Wawa speaking to you wive fwom Two Miwe Iwand. I'm speaking to you wive fwom the Two Miwe Iwand Nucweaw Weactow site whewe wumows awe wunning wampant that the pwesident has been exthposed to wethaw wevews of wadiation. And he has gwown to an incwedibly widiculous pwopowtion. He's weawwy, weawwy, wawge.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ppepsi.phtml

I remember that SNL skit!  Dan Akroyd played Jimmy Carter, Gilda Radner played Rosalyn Carter, Garret Morris played the maid sent into the control room to mop up the radioactive water, and and Bill Murray played the reactor operator who spilled his Pepsi all over the control board.  To this day, the first generation SNL group was the best.

73,
Ellen - AF9J
Drinking a Pepsi One

Agreed, including Belushi's "no coke, pepsi" cafe skits and so many others. He deserves credit for making ninjas more fashionable as well. :)

What ever happened to Pepsi Light from the same timeframe? "We put a little lemony taste in and took out half the caloires" was their big seller. I bet the government was involved. Some kind of conspiracy to test evil substances on us.

Probably the one-armed man had a hand in it.

Hi Todd,

Actually, it wasn't Ninjas Belushi would play. It was Samurais. Remember them?  He always seemed to play them, whenever they had Buck Henry on the show.  Skits like: Samurai Optometrist (where Buck Henry asks if he could have the eyeglass frames in tortishell, and Belushi takes a tortise out of an aquarium, throws it up in the air, and swipes at it with his Katana sword saying "haiiiii", picks up a pair of tortishell framed glasses off of the ground, and gives them to Buck); and Samurai Tailor.

Also, remember the "What if?" skits, like the one, where Superman grows up in Germany instead of the US, and winds up being Uberman?  Garret Morris plays the US Air Force general, who confidently states that we would have developed a kryptonite bomb to stop him.

Good stuff,
Ellen - AF9J


Agreed, including Belushi's "no coke, pepsi" cafe skits and so many others. He deserves credit for making ninjas more fashionable as well. :)
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You know, this comes back to my "forbidden fruit" analogy. With all of the open air testing back in the 50s and 60s they seemed like they had no idea of the long term after effects the things they were "playing with". It was new, the highest high tech, and fascinating new ground to break. However I often wonder if they really knew back then what theywere messing with. Keeping in mind that back then this technology was in its infancy, I wonder how well it was really understood at the time. Some of the long term effects have been devastating.

I often wonder what new mutated species of sea life have been created by the underwater testing. I also often wonder what long lasting effects do we still have in our atmosphere.

As science and technology have taken great leaps in this technology field today, it is now pretty much understood as a somewhat exact science. I just wonder if "back in the day" they really knew and understood what they were experimenting with, or was it just the fascination for something that made bigger and bigger booms??
It just seems kinda scary from a laymans point of view. With the current polution issues, and fossil fuels being a somewhat finite resource, I see nuclear power as the definate way of the future, but the whole scenario is kinda scarey.

                                                    The Slab Bacon

This was true in the 40s for sure, Frank. I knew a fellow who was one of the first US troops into Hiroshima after the war ended, he was an old fishing buddy of my grandfather. Talking with him in the early 80s was always interesting, his eyes were as big as saucers and seemed to be spinning. He had sores on his legs and arms that never seemed to heal, and angina to boot. No idea how much of that was attributed to his exposure, but they went in with no protective gear at all. You'd think by the 50s/60s they'd have figured this out, which is no doubt why they located the test sites where they did. But I suspect you're right, they either didn't know or weren't assigning enough significance to wx patterns and so on. Nuclear energy is a true wonder to me, I hope it can be made more palitable to the public in the near future.


Ninjas...Samurais....they all look the same to me, Ellen. ;)

One of the more memorable skits I remember from SNL with Garret was the one about South African Krugerrands. Try to imagine a skit like that in today's politically-correct, warm-fuzzy world.

The most prophetic one has to be Belushi dancing around his own gravestone, explaining how everyone else was dead and they were all so sure he'd be gone at a young age.

We now return to your regularly-scheduled atom-splitting, already in progress...

Hmm, the postings appear to becoming a little bit alarmist.  We live in a sea of natural radiation, the long term effects of which guarantee evolution.  Without it we'd still be slime in mud cake : ) Does any of us really  know where natural background segues into accelerated evolution? Benignly? Harmfully?

I worked at NTS (Nevada Nuclear Test Site) in '66 for Birdwell Div. of SSC, Div. of Raytheon in downhole drilling paramater (shot holes, slant holes and vertical test holes) and post shot radiation surveys. I've personally witnessed some events, measured results radiometrically and physically, and know of procedures for adapting normal oil field technology to high intensity radiation surveying which I'll sure not post here.

 Some of our downhole tools (e.g. neutron/neutron density tools, cement top locator tools, etc. used built-in neutron sources such as Co60.) These sources were hot and called for safe usage procedures, let alone worrying about radiation in the external environment. Use of radiation sources in downhole tools is still current and safe in today's ho-hum drilling industry, - Schlumberger, et.al.  It all depends on knowing safe procedures. How many of us thought of RF fields not so long ago?  How many of us safely work with HV?  Yeah, just about all of us. We know the devil with which we sleep.  Comfort level is simply a function of knowledge.

Suffice to say I've still got all my hair : )  If any of you want to really discuss radiation levels, radiometric standards and effects biologically, long and short term, then we can start a new thread.   We should keep it radio related. : ) Yeah, radiometrics.  A lot of supposed cancers and stuff might be more related to genetics, personal evolutionary family trees, growth hormones in modern hot house raised beef...  who really knows yet? Lots of papers out there, no real consensus. We work toward cures on a long and torturous path. So I'm willing to learn.
Hope I go quick !
'3RSW, P.E.

"By the 80s, 91 of the 220 people who were involved with the film, got cancer.  46 of them died from it (including John Wayne, and actress Susan Hayward).  Under normal circumstances no more than 30 of the 220 people should have gotten cancer."


This, in an of itself, proves nothing. Are the numbers statistically significant? What sort of lifestyles did these people lead (smoking, diet, etc)? Too many other variables invovled, it seems to me, to draw any sort of conclusion.

Just the fact that they were hollywood people trashes the test.
My daughter knows a girl who's grand mother in Japan  was under the blast and still alive. I would think they were dirty bombs looking at their size and yield.
I'm kind of sorry we didn't do a little above ground over tora bora....would have saved a lot of money.