The Chaotic-Neutron

Being a nuclear engineer by profession, it takes a lot to get through my hard skull that people are afraid of the word ‘radiation’ or anything ‘nuclear’. But when members of my family expressed a similar discomfort, I believe, the point hit home.

All of this started when I was talking home yesterday and apparently there had been a recent furore in the local newspapers there about the problems of radiation, that got my family all riled up. True that large doses can be disastrously damaging to the human tissue but we as humans are exposed to radiation every day. Take for example when you are talking on a cell phone or when you are cooking your vegetables in a microwave or when you go to a hospital and undertake a X-ray, PET or a MRI scan. They all involve some form of radiation that are bombarded on your body without you getting all paranoid about it. And of course, the ever ubiquitous cosmic rays that bombard us from space incessantly remains constant in the background. But we are still afraid of these concepts. Why ?

I now understand that if I was not scientifically oriented, I would be scared too. Ignorance translates to fear. My reasoning. May be there is a much bigger need for evangelizing the positive effects of nuclear power and make people understand what could be problems in scenarios where there is a leak from a reactor. Even the whole idea of burying nuclear waste underground, simply put, scares the living daylights out of people I know. May be more knowledge about these issues and topics should be made public.

There are always dangers. Everything has a probability for failure. But is it large enough that you in your everyday life need to care about ? Hard question but essential for removing this paranoia from the minds of the general public. Thoughts anyone ?

PS: As a piece of trivia, they actually commonly refer “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging” (NMRI) as “Magnetic Resonance Imaging” (MRI) since dropping the word Nuclear actually put people at ease. And that’s where we stand.

I am a big fan of Mike Rowe, from the “Dirty Jobs” fame and have a fascination to really weird jobs that people have to do, every day, while I sit here in front of my computer, complaining about the compiler spewing out unrecognizable error messages, in a nice air-conditioned room, with a cup of hot coffee by my side. Of course, people do these jobs, not because they entirely like it but most times, these jobs are so specialized that the bang for the buck is usually high. This might particularly true for the weird jobs you encounter in scientific fields.

And yes, all that rant does lead to something sensible. I stumbled on to this video with a description by the assistant editor of Popular Science Magazine. He lists a few of these kooky professions and what it takes in a honest day’s work. Watch it below.

And I remembered, during one of my tours of a nuclear power plant, someone mentioned how they had a problem in one of their spent nuclear pools and a nuclear pool diver came to the rescue to set things straight. I was of course, baffled by this whole idea of a human being submerged in such a hostile environment but later realized, this was another one of those “on a need to do” professional occupations. Here’s are couple of sites that gives more information about the the nuclear divers.

1) Life of a Nuclear Diver.
2) Nuclear Divers, A Definite Breed
3) And to end this post, another great video of a dive walk through inside the Phenix nuclear plant, in France. The audio is in French but the video is worth a thousand words.

Very interesting and that is just way too cool for words !