[ RadSafe ] Re: Long-liverd radionuclides

[jjcohen at prodigy.net]

Perhaps someone can give a rational explanation for why the long-lived
radionuclides engender such great fears--- not just among the general
public, but also among those in the technical community who should know
better. If longevity, per se, were such a special danger, why then don't
people have commensurate fears toward the stable toxic elements which will
exist forever?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Dawson" <fd003f0606 at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: <srp-uk at yahoogroups.com>; <radsafe at radlab.nl>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 10:13 AM
Subject: [ RadSafe ] There's nothing you can do to hurry radioactive
decay,the textbooks will tell you,but New Scientist meets a physicist who
begs to differ


> There's nothing you can do to hurry radioactive decay, the textbooks will
> tell you, but New Scientist meets a physicist who begs to differ
>
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19225741.100-halflife-heresy-accelerating-radioactive-decay.html
>
> FOR ALL its eureka moments, science has taught us many unpalatable lessons
> about what we are powerless to do. We can't dim the sun to remedy droughts
> or global warming. We can't stave off the ravages of time to live for
> thousands of years. And there's little we can do about radioactive waste
> from nuclear reactors that will be a health hazard for generations to
come.
> Radioactivity cannot be tamed; all we can do is bundle the waste somewhere
> safe and wait for it to decay away. So it takes some nerve to say
otherwise,
> and suggest that there are, after all, ways to speed up radioactive decay.
>
> Yet that is exactly what Claus Rolfs, a physicist at the Ruhr University
in
> Bochum, Germany, is doing. His dramatic - and controversial - claim is
that
> by encasing certain radioisotopes in metal and chilling them close to
> absolute zero, it ought ...
>
> Fred Dawson
>
> fwp_dawson at hotmail.com
>
>
>
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