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Saddam's Innocence
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by bdgee: [QB] "bdgee, times have changed since you worked with Sam in the 1950s." The name was Norman, not Sam, and is was the 1960s. "Not true, it all comes down to critical mass. I can take a blob of uranium, in the form of a sphere it's radioactive. If I spread it out like a string, it's not radioactive." Were that a correct statement, then neither of the Curies would have died from radiation poisoning. The material doesn't suddenly become radioactive when it reaches critical mass. It must first be radioactive in order to form a critical mass. It is possible to receive lethal doses of radiation from materials that can never form a critical mass. Radiation (and heavy, lethal amounts of it) would emanate from the amount of material necessary to reach critical mass (otherwise there is nothing to cause a nuclear reaction) and enough shielding to be safe from it won't fit in a suitcase. "Critical mass eventually killed her. Like the story of the Mexican family that found the "warm rock" and they all died due to various form of cancer. The rock had enough critical mass. Spread it out and there are not enough nearby atoms to cause it to sustain a chain reaction." I very seriously doubt that the Curies were ever were withing miles of enough fissionable material to form a critical mass or ever had enough to reah the point of fission. There were no man-mad elements then. The things that can become fissionable and can occur naturally are so very rare it requires a Manhatten Project to collect and purify enough to get a critical mass. I think you have confused the terms "critical Mass", fission, and "radioactive"...I don't just think you are wrong, I know you are wrong....minute amounts of radioactive uranium-235 (micrograms), which, along with uranium-238 is what they were working with, with enough time (i.e., exposure) will kill you.....larger amounts, yet still far far short of a critical mass amount will kill you FAST. (Me and old Norman were involved with experiments on that too.....I killed a many a rat that way, in order to determine the shielding effects of some strange things. And we NEVER had anywhere close to a critical mass.) "It depends on the radiation. Alpha radiation can be stopped by the dead skin on your body. Beta needs something a bit thicker, like clothing, wood, something like that. Gammas need steel, concrete, poly or water. And I'll add to that, most neutrons speeding from the sun will pass all the way through the Earth. Gamma rays, which are effectively "by-products" of the radioactivity necessary to for fission, will travel through several inches of lead and way more inches of water. The shielding needed to just be close to an amount of material that can create a critical mass for even a couple of minutes, assuming you are going to be live and functioning a few minutes later is a bunch. A single lead brick (shaped and about the size of a normal brick) weighs 55 pounds and isn't thick enough to protect you from the kinds of material used in nuclear bombs. I have now run into the second ex-navy submariner who has told me, "I am a former nuclear engineer" and couldn't distinguish between radiation, fission, fusion, and critiacl mass....that has told me that the materials used to form a critical mass was entirely safe up to the point of critical mass, with NO shielding. Allow me to point out that the reaction going on in an atomic pile, fission, creates enormous amounts of radiation and is never (hopefully) allowed to reach a critical mass.....even in quantities smaller than is required for critical mass, of any configuration, it emits huge amounts of very deadly radiation and can kill within seconds. How did the Navy allow their supposed "nuclear engineers" to be so lacking in this vital concern? Radiation can exists absent fission and fission can exists without critical mass, but neither implication can be reversed! In order to achieve fission, you first must have radiation and in order to reach a critical mass, you first have to have fission. A critical mass results in a nuclear explosion (Note that even in the accident at Chernoble, critical mass never happened and many of the workers that went in to cleaan it up died withing minutes from radiation sickness.) I offer my appreciation for your participation in debate. Interesting! But I also want to point out the post that you responded to was not meant to object to the possible existance of a thing called a "suitcase nuclear bomb", which can exists, but not in a size or configuration that would fit into a hand held suitcase (they could be fit into the bed of a pickup, but you aren't going to "pick it up", not by a long shot). [b]The post was there to demonstrate that the conjecture that Saddam could have stuffed atomic bombs down an oil well isn't possible, even were it possible to build the devise pictured in NR's link. [/b] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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