More fun with nuclear: radioactivity numbers

[Starving Steve]

Re: Radon Found in my home! Ban Granite!

Under this topic of, "More fun with nuclear", I looked at the latest Periodic Table to-night. And I see physicists and chemists on the frontiers of science have been discovering some more elements, even beyond #106:

#107 Bohrium, #108 Hassium, #109 Meitnerium, #110 Damstadium, #111 Roentgerium, #112 Copernicium, #113 Ununtrium, #114 Flerovium, #115 Ununpentium, #116 Livermorium, #117 Ununseptium, #118 Ununoctium.

Part of the lower ( coming up from #106 down ) transition metal series, now to include #107 thru #112, inclusive.
Other (plain good old-fashioned) metals, include #113 thru #116, inclusive.
#117 is a halogen, and #118 is a noble gas. Thus, #117 Ununseptium is the highly reactive halogen, and #118 Ununoctium is the inert noble gas.

It's a safe bet to assume everything up here is radioactive (unstable). Everything up here fits the latest row across the Periodic Table. Everything down on this row ( up here in these atomic numbers ) would be excessively rare in the world. But who knows what exists on the Sun or elsewhere in this universe?

The important point, the take-home point, is that those isotopes of elements with the longest half-lives would be those elements that survive the longest in this world. Anything like Plutonium-242 with a 376,000 year half-life would last almost forever in this world because it is just about stable (and non-radioactive ). Plutonium-244 is even more stable with a half-life of 80 million years, so Pu-244 is not radioactive, no matter what the eco-frauds might say.... And the converse is also true: elements with extremely short half-lives, and some have half-lives of less than one-second, some even in micro-seconds, disappear almost instantly. So, virtually they don't exist in our world, except maybe in the Sun or in the stars.

Even I find a trip through the Periodic Table to be really cool, and I am just a lay-person on the street.

[lektrode]

Re: More fun with nuclear: radioactivity numbers

Some bad news for California residents ahead, and soon: Electric rates are going to rise and to new record highs.
....
.......
...
The public hysteria cultivated by the environmental lobby about trivial amounts of emission and negligible environmental impact from power plants, be they conventional, atomic or hydro-electric, means a shortage of electric power in California in future. That shortage can only be met by rolling black-outs, total system brown-outs, or by higher electric power rates for everyone to pay. And that means more stress on the budgets of Californians lies ahead, and maybe even a darker future as well.

count on it.
the envirofacists wont be satisfied until we're 'all on the bus' (so there's less traffic for them to get stuck in as they drive to their .gov jobs downtown) - live in cramped urban warehouses (so there's more room for them in the inner-beltway suburbs that we'll all be priced out of) - and all power resides within the buracracy with them calling all the shots.

that way "we can be freed from the baaaaad ole oil co's" and enslaved by the banks who hold the loans required to buy all the ridiculously overpriced and subsidized enviro-mentally-mandated politcally correkt "alternative" to a SANE ENERGY POLICY that utilizes the ONLY PROVEN non-carbon-emitting energy source (that we've possessed/owned ALL the technology and resources nec for the past 50years) - but we wont use because.... it... its... scary?

see?
dont ya feel better already mr steve?

O&BTW -you can thank the dems (esp in CA) for all of the above.

[ASH]

Re: More fun with nuclear: radioactivity numbers

Be interested to hear your views on why you were skeptical of the LTRO.

At the time, I thought that market sentiment had turned decisively against long-term Italian and Spanish debt. On the fiscal side, European politics had only produced consensus on unworkable austerity, and there wasn't any hint that Germany would countenance the ECB pledging to do whatever it took to back the weaker sovereigns. With fiscal policy set on "contraction" in Italy and Spain, investment in their debt seemed (I thought) too risky to attract the normal (conservative) investors in sovereign bonds. Enter LTRO. Since LTRO was only going to lend directly to European banks, and European banks were (1) weakly capitalized and (2) already over-exposed to the debt of their sovereigns, I just didn't think they would use LTRO funds to buy up more of that debt, because that would expose them to even more risk from their sovereigns. Anyway, in order to get LTRO funds the banks would have to pledge collateral, and I thought the banks were already running low on good collateral (turns out collateral rules were relaxed somewhat concomitant with LTRO). But even if the European banks were feeling suicidal, how -- I wondered -- could purchases of Spanish and Italian debt be sustained by already weak, over-exposed banks? What could the possible end game be? I just didn't see how this would lure foreign capital back to buy Italian and Spanish bonds, given the no-growth fiscal policy and the whiff of fear already in the air. And with no plausible end game, why would European banks endanger themselves by being the only buyers, increasing their exposure to bonds that had a very high chance of rising in yield -- why start down this road to begin with, when there was so much risk of it being a dead end? But events proved me wrong. By all accounts, the European banks did buy up Spanish and Italian debt, hoping to earn the spread in yield between what they were paying the ECB and what Spain and Italy would pay them.

Now, four months later, here's what I read

It was perhaps reasonable to hope that the European Central Bank’s commitment to provide nearly a trillion dollars in cheap three-year funding to banks, would, if not resolve the crisis, contain it for a significant interval. Unfortunately, this has proved little more than a palliative. Weak banks, especially in Spain, have bought more of the debt of their weak sovereigns, while foreigners have sold down their holdings. Markets, seeing banks holding the dubious debt of the sovereigns that stand behind them, grow ever nervous. Again, Europe and the global economy approach the brink.

Now, Larry Summers is high on my list of people to blame for the financialization of the US economy, but I figure he has access to better information than I do, so I take this as corroboration that the rest of the world did try to decrease its exposure to Spanish and Italian debt (as I thought), but the European banks actually chose to concentrate their exposure against all (of my) logic. I just didn't think the banks would be that stupid.

[Starving Steve]

Re: More fun with nuclear: radioactivity numbers

count on it.
the envirofacists wont be satisfied until we're 'all on the bus' (so there's less traffic for them to get stuck in as they drive to their .gov jobs downtown) - live in cramped urban warehouses (so there's more room for them in the inner-beltway suburbs that we'll all be priced out of) - and all power resides within the buracracy with them calling all the shots.

that way "we can be freed from the baaaaad ole oil co's" and enslaved by the banks who hold the loans required to buy all the ridiculously overpriced and subsidized enviro-mentally-mandated politcally correkt "alternative" to a SANE ENERGY POLICY that utilizes the ONLY PROVEN non-carbon-emitting energy source (that we've possessed/owned ALL the technology and resources nec for the past 50years) - but we wont use because.... it... its... scary?

see?
dont ya feel better already mr steve?

O&BTW -you can thank the dems (esp in CA) for all of the above.

The one thing I don't like about the Democrats in America, especially in California, is their love-in or alliance with the eco-frauds and eco-fascists who have made living--- even just a simple survival--- impossible.

Sad to say, these eco-fascists are in Canada, too. At least, I found them in British Columbia. Some of my neigbours on Vancouver Island would not even talk with me; they didn't want newcomers in their forest, and they didn't like/do critical thinking
on such issues as, "global warming". For them, the issue was settled. ( I should write here some of the remarks I received. )

[Polish_Silver]

Almaden-- I miss it.

I used to hiking in the Almaden county park, and there were some signs about the mercury mine, and a
warning not to eat the fish.

The biggest risk of pure mercury seems to be inhalation, not skin contact or even swallowing the stuff.

It is more complex for the compounds.

Dental fillings were mercury amalgam for years. I've got some in my mouth.

Supposedly the amount in the vaccines is nowhere near a toxic dose.

Still, I don't want the stuff around me, if I can avoid it.

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

In humans, approximately 80% of inhaled mercury vapor is absorbed via the respiratory tract, where it enters the circulatory system and is distributed throughout the body.^[21] Chronic exposure by inhalation, even at low concentrations in the range 0.7–42 μg/m³, has been shown in case control studies to cause effects such as tremors, impaired cognitive skills, and sleep disturbance in workers.^[22][23]