radiation
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Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant 8/11/24
In the news today, there is a fire at the Zaporizhzhia NPP in Ukraine. https://kyivindependent.com/russian-forces-start-fire-at-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine-says/ From the looks of it, the fire is located in one of the cooling towers. Let me start by saying that the cooling towers are NOT part of the radioactive loop of the nuclear power plants. The water that is…
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Chornobyl, or How to Blow Up a Nuclear Reactor
Nuclear reactors aren’t supposed to explode. The engineers who design them go to great lengths to make sure they can’t. So, how exactly did the people at the Vladimir Lenin Power Station mange to do so? First off, I want to get some pedantry out of the way. The explosion at Chornobyl was NOT technically…
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How Much Radiation is Too Much?
Thanks to @nuclearanthro.bsky.social (check out his blog https://deusexatomica.wordpress.com/), we know that a contractor at Los Alamos National Lab accidentally exposed 4 colleagues to radiation while conducting an experiment with Cf-252. The dose ranged between 132 mrem and 195 mrem. As with so much of life, those numbers are meaningless without context. To start, the measure…
Sleepy Neutron's Nuclear Knowledge 