Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT - July 11th to July 15th, 2022 (strips #4826 to #4830)
Storel:
Just from reading this one page of comments, I've learned far more about nuclear reactor accidents than I ever knew before. (The screwdriver one seems particularly insane.)
--- Quote from: ankhtahr on 14 Jul 2022, 05:57 ---Absolutely love the detail of yellow crumbs on Cosmo's nose.
--- End quote ---
Haha, I didn't even notice those until you pointed them out! :laugh:
cesium133:
Here’s another fun one: the Chalk River reactor outside Ottawa, Canada, had a meltdown in 1952, releasing 10 kiloCuries* (informally known as a shitload) of radioactive material. The United States Navy sent a team to assist with the cleanup. One of the members of the team was one James Earl Carter, Jr.
That’s right, Jimmy Carter helped rescue Ottawa.
* I tried finding a comparison of this to Chernobyl, but what I found reminded me of what a pain in the ass radioactivity units are. Suffice it to say that Chernobyl was significantly larger, though.
Okay, after realizing the mistake I made in unit conversion, Chalk River was actually much less than a shitload. One TBq is 27 kCi, so Chalk River was about 0.37 TBq. For comparison, the Goiânia incident (which is its own special…) was about 74 TBq. I can’t seem to find a reliable number for Chernobyl, but it seems to be a couple orders of magnitude higher.
Edit again: No, I screwed that up again. 1 PBq is 27 kCi. 1 PBq is 1000 TBq, so let me try this again:
Chalk River: 0.37 PBq
Goiânia: 0.074 PBq
Chornobyl: A lot of PBq, probably somewhere in the thousands.
Incidentally, a disclaimer: if you use any calculation on nuclear stuff by me for serious uses you’re an idiot.
Pseudowolf:
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 16 Jul 2022, 16:46 ---Here’s another fun one: the Chalk River reactor outside Ottawa, Canada, had a meltdown in 1952, releasing 10 kiloCuries* (informally known as a shitload) of radioactive material. The United States Navy sent a team to assist with the cleanup. One of the members of the team was one James Earl Carter, Jr.
That’s right, Jimmy Carter helped rescue Ottawa.
--- End quote ---
I think everyone should read up on it as it's more incredible. He and his team had to actually go into the reactor. From Military.com:
"Carter and his 22 other team members were separated into teams of three and lowered into the reactor for 90-second intervals to clean the site. It was estimated that a minute-and-a-half was the maximum time humans could be exposed to the levels of radiation present in the area."
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 16 Jul 2022, 02:02 ---
--- Quote from: hedgie on 15 Jul 2022, 10:13 ---In some circles, one’s last words might be things like “hold my beer”, or “check this shit out”. For scientists, it’s “I wonder what happens if…”
--- End quote ---
"Just hold the two parts apart with a screwdriver, it'll be fine."
--- End quote ---
Oh no~oh!
St.Clair:
To be... fair? maybe? while the "demon core" incident seems incredibly reckless in hindsight, I've heard it noted that there wasn't much in the way of alternatives - the state of the art in robotics and remote manipulators in the 40s was not what we'd call great. One had to do stuff like that up close, by hand or with simple tools, or not at all. (Yes, "not at all" might have been best, but see above.) Indeed, the need to handle such materials safely was a big driver in the development of those technologies.
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