Downwinders
 

:mad:Anybody heard of "Downwinders"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

Yes. I worked for DOE for twenty years.

Contractual downwinder? At least you got one of those cool dosimeters out of it!;)

An unfunny incident happened in the L.A. basin in 1958 when I was just a year old. They popped off one of those nuke weapons and the fallout swirled back into the L.A. basin instead of heading east and sat there for two weeks under one of our infamous inversion layers. Oldest brother had his thyroid removed and my older sister died from ovarian cancer. Is there a connection? Who knows? Thanks DOE...:(

No DOE back then. 'Twas the Atomic Energy Commission. They were far more irresponsible (though probably more effective in their mission) that today's DOE, created by Jimmy Carter in a fashion similar to Dubya's Dept of Homeland Security (both are loose amalgamations of previously unrelated sub-cabinet level agencies).

Anyone of you old guys and gals remember the x-ray machines at the shoe stores...to see if your shoes fit right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

fluoroscopy is serious since it is like turning on a continuous wave of radiation...think like turning on a shower and radiation pours out. An actual x-ray is just a snapshot of gamma radiation onto a silver coated piece of film (or digital plate today)...it is not like a shower but a small quick high energy dose that is quickly over. That is why you hear a beep when u get an x-ray the beep is the actual exposure.

There was much ignorance about radiation in those days. If you find a shoe fluoroscope at Goodwill do not try to restore it;)

I still live downwind and downriver from Hanford. Just one more thing I can blame some of my issues on. :)

The Science channel had a show on the use of crude "Tricho" x-ray machines in the 1890s-1920s to remove unwanted facial hair. Untrained and unliscenced beauty shop owners could buy these machines and use them on their customers. The machines were pretty much----unshielded. Thousands radiated themselves and their customers causing a wave of cancer and radiation burns.

http://www.museumofquackery.com/ephemera/tricho.htm

Regards,
Dave

The workeres at Miamisburg sued them over their irresponsible handling of adioactive materials. Funny thing is that it has been about 7 or 8 years since they last called Florence to see if she was still alive.

I remember in a nuclear chemistry course I had at UCSD, the Professor walking in with a scanner and easily finding all the students that had recently worked with radioactive isotopes in their biology courses. Interesting stuff.

Sadly, I just learned that that Professor, James Arnold, died January 2012. He was one of the people behind carbon dating in Libby's lab and also worked on The Manhatten Project. In the spirit of this new environmental sub-forum, here are a couple of links wrt the early foundations of the notion of global warming and atmospheric carbon.

An interview with James Arnold:
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/31207.html

Roger Revelle's Global Warming idea from AIP:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm

I was fortunate to have courses from both Roger Revelle and James Arnold.

Here's a quote from Arnold's interview regarding the Fermi Institute:

A couple of observations:

"Communicating with each other" may have been more common then than now despite today's ubiquity of communications channels.

I found that reading the Arnold interview and having at least a passing knowledge of the players and their academic work helps in understanding the concepts underlying global warming. The reinterpretation by the pop-scientists and the media have done much to harm both science and solutions to global warming.