[ RadSafe ] HEU in Chile

[JPreisig at aol.com]

Dear Radsafe:

       This is from:    jpreisig at aol.com   .


       Greetings to Radsafers,

            Hope you are well and that your jobs/careers are going well.

       HEU in Chile.  What's the problem????  Is the enrichment level high
       enough to worry about???  This highly enriched uranium is not being
       sent from Chile as one critical mass, is it???  I assume that the
       Uranium mass is being shipped in several sub-critical pieces.  There
       are no neutron triggering devices in the vicinity of the sub-critical
       masses, right???   A criticality expert is somehow involved in the
       sending of this HEU away from Chile,  No???  The sending of this mass
       is not just being done by some diplomat in Chile???  Otherwise, 
shame on
       you, Mr. Obama.  Criticality is somewhat described in Cember's HP 
text.

             Cember's book also has some information on radon in the ground,
       rain, freeze/thaw, etc.  I think the early reference there is 
attributed
       to Weiss.

             One of Feynmann's popular books <Surely your joking Mr. 
Feynmann
       or the other book> has some description of some criticality issues
       during the Manhattan Project.

             CERN/Large Hadron Collider is now making 3.5 TeV proton beams
       collide with 3.5 TeV proton beams ---- total energy is roughly 7.0 
TeV.
       LHC will apparently run at that energy for a while, before a move to
       higher energies is made.  Plenty of new physics to be found in the 
new
       energy range 2 TeV to 7 TeV.  Watch for news reports about all this.
       US physicists are at CERN/LHC also.  Too bad the Supercollider was
       cancelled before this.

             Welcome to the new list moderator --- I smell a solid state/
      synchrotron light source kind of guy!!!  IIT --- Jerome Morse <
Colorado
      School of Mines> was educated there.

            Pipe Scale --- surely you are joking now???
            That word Scale has so many meanings.  Scale has considerable 
       meaning in particle physics.  Also people in science scale variables
       and/or parameters.  If one has a matrix to be inverted which has 
numbers
       of considerable magnitude variations, then one can sometimes scale
       the matrix before inversion, and achieve a successful inversion.
       I'd give you the name of the woman who wrote a very nifty book on
       matrix mathematics, but you'll just have to dig around in the library
       yourself.  The algorthm works VERY WELL!!!!!

             Finally, in an HP context, SCALE is computer program for doing
       criticality calculations.  It may be available from the RSICC <
Radiation
       Shielding Information Center> at Oak Ridge <USA>.

             The 8.8 earthquake in Chile was quite a great one.  A well 
thought
       out and packaged shipment of HEU should have had no problem.

              Regards,    Joseph R. <Joe> Preisig, Ph.D.




      

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