Fwd: RE: [ RadSafe ] The HortonSphere Niagara Falls New York Area

[Douglas Minnema]

Fascinating story! 
 
However, what was really fascinating was when I googled the phrase "ball and pile reactor."  (After all my years working with research reactors, I had never heard of one.)  The only hit on the entire internet was this same article.  Then I googled the words ball and pile reactor (no quotations), and found out about a German design for a reactor where the fuel is fabricated as small spheres and they are piled up in the reactor.  In other words, it was a pile of balls, not a pile in a ball.
 
One look at the photo with the ball in clear view, and you'll recognize the same chemical storage tank design as what you will find at any of a thousand industrial sites.
 
Oh well, enough fun - time to get back to work.
 
Doug Minnema, PhD, CHP


>>> "Brennan, Mike  (DOH)" <Mike.Brennan at DOH.WA.GOV> 9/25/2008 7:42 PM >>>
>From the article:  

"The existence on the LOOW of particularly exotic transuranics (that is,
above uranium on the periodic table) and fission materials-isotopes of
plutonium, uranium, cesium, polonium, and other elements that are
produced only inside nuclear reactors and by nuclear explosions-has
begged an explanation for decades."

Uranium and polonium are naturally occurring; not very hard to explain.
I would want to see the raw data that they base the conclusion that they
found plutonium, as I have caught activists lying to reporters about
this before.  Cesium is a fallout constituent; if you take a soil sample
and you don't find some Cs-137, check to make sure your MCA is working.


"There is also polonium-210 on site. According to Bob Nichols, a San
Francisco-based researcher and writer who reviewed the same documents as
Weyman, polonium was used as a trigger in nuclear weapons. Its presence
in quantities sufficient to detect all these years and half-lives later
is not easily explained by the KAPL wastes."

Depending on the concentration, the most likely source of Po-210 is
ongoing production from the radon decay chain.  The article repeatedly
invokes Occam's razor, but the authors (and the people feeding them the
"information") decline to use it if it doesn't support the most exciting
answer.  Similarly, as they didn't give any actual data, it is
impossible to conclude if they actually found transuranic isotopes and
fission fragments in quantities that can't be explained by fallout, or
indeed if they found them at all, rather than mis-identify spectra lines
(things I personally have seen activists do on more than one occasion).

"Bob Nichols, the San Francisco-based writer who came to the same
conclusion as Weyman about the ball buried on the NFSS, specializes in
the history of this second track of research. He draws a straight line
that connects the radiological warfare program to American research into
poison gases, such as mustard gas and chlorine gas (both of which were
produced in Niagara County), during the First World War; that line
passes through the Manhattan Project along the way, and continues to the
present-day use of depleted uranium munitions, which release a cloud of
poisonous ceramicized uranium particles as a form of gas when they
vaporize on impact."

Sigh.  It is sad that the authors don't know that connecting the dots
looses its significance if the only criteria for the dots placement is
that they connect to form the picture that springs from the connecter's
imagination. 

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On
Behalf Of roger helbig
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 1:55 PM
To: radsafe at radlab.nl 
Subject: [ RadSafe ] The HortonSphere Niagara Falls New York Area

http://artvoice.com/issues/v7n39/the_sphere 

Article is quite interesting until it gets to Ted Weymann (a Physicist?)
and the UMRC -- they probably need a lot of correction from that point
on.

Roger Helbig

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