Prof Wade Allison

Why radiation is safe & all nations should embrace nuclear technology - Professor Wade Allison

Radiation is Freightening

The possible proliferation of nuclear weapons is not really related to the fission nuclear power plants, except as a red herring employed by the fear mongering crowd. The same is true of the potential nuclear fallout from the detonation of nuclear weapons or "accidents" at fission nuclear power plants. The lack of danger from nuclear fallout has been demonstrated by the many above ground weapons tests half a century ago and the worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant already happened at Chernobyl - lots of very nasty fallout from inside the core of a running reactor spread of Europe, yet no related increase of cancers in 3 decades. It turns out that exposure to low level ionizing radiation is not a significant cause of cancer. We have learned that almost everything can contribute to causing cancer, but it requires several events.

The prolific estimates of thousands or more of cancer deaths have been proven false.

Radiation is scary because we know enough about it to know that some radiation is dangerous. For most of us, we first learn about radiation with the story of Madam Curie's discoveries and subsequent early demise. Her work was so dangerous because she was making discoveries. No one knew the danger. But, thanks to her and the many researchers that followed her, those same experiments and observations can be done safely. We now know how to prevent the damage. Some radiation is dangerous but with knowledge and respect we can (and do) work with radiation sources safely.

Recursion

Recursion is a fundamental property of reality. The laws of physics operate on the present instant to produce the next. Although the progress of time from one instant to the next for us seem seems to be continuous but is not. There is some minimum time interval, probably near the Planck time. 

The resolution of the Ultraviolet catastrophe was to assume that there is a finite minimum frequency. Without that assumption, the energy would become infinite as the wavelength decreases to zero. Length, time, and energy all had to have some minimum quantity, called quanta. The size of the minimums just had to be finite - not zero. The size turns out to be some 35 orders of magnitude smaller than our familiar world. 

Some very simple recursive systems display complicated, even unpredictable behavior. Conway's Game of Life is an example well worth the time to investigate. If you want a deep dive into the concepts, I recommend a book, A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.

Concept of the week for 2013 52 -- Hormesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Nuclear Proliferation

The US never had a monopoly on the knowledge of how to make nuclear bombs. At least two of the people who worked on the Manhattan project thought that it was too important for not only one nation to have this knowledge. They found ways to communicate it to Russia, which was an ally at the time. When FDR told Stalin that we had nuclear bombs Stalin did not ask any questions. I think that was because he was afraid he reveal that he already knew as much as FDR. Non-proliferation efforts were doomed even before the first test. Then with Ike's"Atoms for Peace" program and France's entry into the nuclear "club" the race was on. FDR's decision to not share the results from the Manhattan project with Russia or even England was a mistake that undermined the trust we could have had internationally. I agree that nuclear weapons, themselves, are not the problem. The attitudes of regimes are the problem. We need to face the fact that we are part of the problem. Now, how to fix this?

Richard Feynman on the 2-slit experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJfjRoxCbk

Defund the EPA