Funny, at La. Tech they had an actual "pile" within bricks of lead, carbon and cadnium and stuff with real uranium inside it. It wasn't large enough to be self-sustaining. It was what they call "sub-critical mass". The nuclear nerds that spent most of their free on-campus time there, loved to demonstrate with a Geiger Counter - "Nuclear Reactor: -tick - -tick.
Now, Cinder Block wall: - tick tick -tick tick tick -tick tick -tick tick" Granted, the Geiger Counter could have been seriously sensitive... The Nuclear Science building was probably constructed in the late 50s or early 60s. Cinder origin unknown but all interior walls were all painted cinderblock. Ooooo! As I reminisce - let me lay on to you cats a really cool blue light these egg haids had in their lab..... At the bottom of a 20 foot deep pool of pure clear water, cobalt ingots rested at the bottom. With the lights off you could see the cool blue light of the radiation striking water molecules. Now here's something really twisted - you could take a glass object like a beer pitcher and lower it down on a string near the cobalt - and after a couple of days, your clear beer pitcher would have the wierdest yellow/brown color. Neato. Like, gamma rays actually striking atoms - corrupting the elements somehow to make amber pigmentation withing the silica. -WaV On Dec 19, 2007 12:08 PM, Gill Ediger <gi...@worldnet.att.net> wrote: > At 11:21 AM 12/19/2007, Mixon Bill wrote: > >Let's not get carried away, here. > > We haul a lot of "ash" produced in coal-fired power plants on our > trains; it goes as a minor hazardous material to some landfill > somewhere. The main solid by-products of coal-fired power plants are > >
