9 ms·
A Critical Problem (2017)
- AdamH12113 3y agoThe title needs a (2017) since it discusses then-recent history.
- defrost 3y agoThat history being the release of this report? Nuclear Negligence (June 26, 2017) https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/ https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/ In the summer of 2011, Los Alamos National Laboratory presented a happy self-portrait to the public. But that year something alarming happened at Los Alamos that the lab kept quiet. A pair of workers with cavalier attitudes nearly doomed a room full of colleagues by stuffing so much plutonium into a small space that they came close to triggering an accidental nuclear chain reaction, all to get some photos. https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/about-the-series/ https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/about-th...
- mock-possum 3y agoMy fun little factoid about criticality is: sometimes it just happens naturally, on earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... > The natural nuclear reactor formed when a uranium-rich mineral deposit became inundated with groundwater, which could act as a moderator for the neutrons produced by nuclear fission. A chain reaction took place, producing heat that caused the groundwater to boil away; without a moderator that could slow the neutrons, however, the reaction slowed or stopped. The reactor thus had a negative void coefficient of reactivity, something employed as a safety mechanism in human-made light water reactors. > After cooling of the mineral deposit, the water returned, and the reaction restarted, completing a full cycle every 3 hours. The fission reaction cycles continued for hundreds of thousands of years and ended when the ever-decreasing fissile materials, coupled with the build-up of neutron poisons, no longer could sustain a chain reaction. What a wild story!
- defrost 3y agoIt was a different time then approximately 1.7 billion years ago, during the Statherian period of the Paleoproterozoic, and continued for a few hundred thousand years, probably averaging less than 100 kW of thermal power during that time.
- danparsonson 3y agoAt least we now know how early life kept their devices charged.
- Terr_ 3y agoInterestingly, the -oid suffix usually refers to things that only resemble the thing, so an andr-oid is not really a man, a meteor-oid is not really a meteor, and fact-oid... might not really be a fact. However the really amusing bit is that that everybody can agree--for different reasons--that: > Here is a factoid: A factoid is a small fact.
- danielbln 3y agoThe correct word would be a factlet, but factoid has been defacto taken its place. The fluidity of language, I suppose.
- Terr_ 3y agoI wonder if anyone's done studies to measure and quantify the "distance" of slang (in years or generations) before an older person feels instinctive linguistic revulsion...
- marcosdumay 3y agoIt's a continuous value, that is visibly different from zero almost immediately; children will experience it in a few contexts.
- anyoneamous 3y ago
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- sriku 3y agoDeadly nightshade as in this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum Is there a specific variety the author knows that's toxic? ... Because this (manathakkali or "fragrant tomato") features in South Indian cuisine and is rather yummy.
- tleb_ 3y agoThis Wikipedia page mentions the following, with a link to the toxic plant that is probably described by the article author: > Sometimes S. nigrum is confused for the more toxic deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna)
- samwillis 3y agoNope, this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna > Atropa belladonna, commonly known as belladonna or deadly nightshade, is a toxic perennial herbaceous plant in the nightshade family Solanaceae > The foliage and berries are extremely toxic when ingested, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine, which cause delirium and hallucinations When I was a kid my Dad spotted it growing in my school grounds...
- meibo 3y agoI get this same feeling when looking at some of the code people commit the day before a release.
- belter 3y agoProbably pushed by some recently rotated manager or new CEO dropped out of a recent acquisition...sometimes the code pushes the system over critically, sometimes it's just a code broken arrow event. Something to tell in the privacy of your next off the record interview or in your biography...
- The_Colonel 3y agoThe solution to that problem is to release every day. I'm not even kidding.
- makapuf 3y agoCritical staging code amount. Like that.
- quickthrower2 3y agoAnd release branches. Commit away to main all you like!
- fouc 3y agoGuess that doesn't apply to places with peer code reviews & continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD).
- avgcorrection 3y agoIt doesn't for release but it does for merging things to the main branch and seeing if it fails or not (cf. “not rocket science”[1]). [1] https://graydon.livejournal.com/186550.html https://graydon.livejournal.com/186550.html
- perryizgr8 3y agoWhy does one of the cylinders have childish scribbling over it?
- Titan2189 3y agoIt's quite hard to write on / engrave into a cylinder
- mjd 3y agoAnd the scribbling would have been done by someone wearing heavy gloves, probably while the rod was in a glovebox.
- fouc 3y agoPlutonium is 2.5X as dense as steel. Also it's normally kept in a glove box so the workers are probably wearing thick gloves when doing the engraving.
- fmajid 3y agoScribing the rods probably releases plutonium particles, a vicious carcinogen, as would more professional looking laser engraving. A Sharpie would be safer.
- doingtheiroming 3y agoIt’s worth reading about refineries and chemical plants. We’ve all heard of Bhopal and other disasters but it’s worth bearing in mind just how few disasters happen in these fearsomely complex and dangerous plants. Almost all are managed successfully by the private sector. There was an interview with Jim Radcliffe recently in which he described Ineos’ approach to safety. It’s a variation on what’s described my Steven J. Spears in his case study of Alcoa. The truth is that the private sector has innovated much of what’s best in modern safety practice in a way that has made monumentally dangerous industrial processes routine. There are perhaps good reasons to keep nuclear weapons management in the public sector. Canards about the safety record of the private sector are not though.
- Loic 3y agoFor the chemical plants and refineries, I really recommend looking at the videos of the CSB[0]. They are doing postmortem analysis of all the majors incidents in the US. They are extremely well done. [0]: https://www.csb.gov/ https://www.csb.gov/ U.S. Chemical Safety Board
- Titan2189 3y agoAgreed, I've been subscribed for years https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB
- dmbche 3y agoYou made me realise that Canada does not seem to have something similar - we just have a transportation safety bureau that handles trains, pipelines and the likes. And the Titan thing that happened a few weeks back. I'm a little worried.
- superchroma 3y agoSeeing as we still see tiktoks of mud-covered men manually assembling or dissembling drilling equipment with no PPE, (intended to goad women about how the genders are unequal), I think additional government scrutiny can't hurt in this space.
- 3y ago
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's a nice example of the prevention paradox at work. You do your work well. Nothing happens for a while. You get laid off. Then eventually something happens...
- 2rsf 3y agoA senior software tester here, welcome to my life
- el_oni 3y agoWe hate you when the bug reports roll in, but appreciate you when the product ships in a much cleaner state
- jacquesm 3y ago> We hate you when the bug reports roll in Nothing has changed since the times of Plutarch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
- tetufiion 3y agoAnd that's why you shouldn't just be testing manually but you should be writing automated tests that run again and again, even long after you have moved on.
- mnw21cam 3y agoIf ever there was the need for Chesterton's Fence, this is it.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt looks like amount wise they got lucky. I wonder how they were transported for that photograph. And whether or not the person that made it knew how far away from something really bad they were. That gives me the creeps.
- casey2 3y agoTo put this in perspective 22.54 per 100,000 would die due to motor vehicles in the same year that Slotin died. The average car (especially on US roads) is much more deadly and can become deadly in a blink, much faster than plutonium. How many people died of not just plutonium, but all criticality events? Less than 22, total (most of those Soviet). There is little reason to believe that even if these were household materials that they would be more dangerous than cars in the USA.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoWhilst I agree with your conclusion that cars are involved in more loss of life, I don't think it's fair to only look at criticality events and ignore other radiation based deaths. Also, it's the drivers, not the cars that cause the danger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...
- denton-scratch 3y ago> it's the drivers, not the cars that cause the danger "People kill people, not guns". You can kill me by throwing a person at me at 30mph; but it's easier to kill me by throwing a ton of iron at me at 30mph. If you're right, then there are no driving accidents, and all injuries result from negligence or incompetence. In fact, the driving environment is so complex and chaotic that accidents are inevitable, even for the competent and attentive.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoIt's recommended to not call them "accidents" anymore as that implies a completely unpreventable incident which carries no blame. Road Traffic Incidents or Road Traffic Collisions are the preferred neutral terms. The vast majority of RTCs are indeed due to the inattention of a driver or not looking sufficiently (e.g. not taking care to move your head so that the A-pillar does not obstruct your view of pedestrians/cyclists etc). I would consider accidental RTCs to be mainly due to either mechanical failures (which could be argued is due to lack of maintenance) or previously unknown medical issues. It's interesting the difference in use of language between RTCs and shooting incidents. News reports will often make no mention of the driver and will make statements such as "car hits a building", but to use the same style with shootings would be risible e.g. "multiple bullets hit man resisting arrest". Of course, the car industry has been exerting control over media reporting of RTCs for about a century now, so it's very ingrained.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacklin123 3y ago[flagged]
- fastneutron 3y agoNuclear criticality safety was one of my favorite courses back during my nuclear engineering degree. The failure modes, like the article mentions, can be incredibly non-intuitive. Swirling vortices, firefighting foam, and even the mere presence of a human body can lead to a fatal power excursion. A lot of complex computational modeling and simulation goes into determining safety limits for fissile systems, as well as a lot of sheer imagination. The most important thing I took away from that experience is the concept of engineered compliance. People will break administrative rules and regulations all the time if they get int the way of work, so you need to engineer the physical system to account for that (e.g. flat or skinny geometry, or lots of neutron absorbers). This can apply to any compliance activity related to safety and security, so the lessons are universal. Los Alamos published a good survey on various worldwide criticality accidents (PDF): https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003731912.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003731912.pdf. Worth a read for all the various ways things can go wrong.
- jiggawatts 3y ago> People will break administrative rules and regulations all the time if they get in the way of work The example I like to use is that the more paperwork you require for something like "obtain an internal use certificate for API endpoints" then the direct consequence will be less encryption of internal API endpoints. Note that I didn't say "there may be", or "I predict that". No. It's a guaranteed consequence, like gradient descent making AIs better at meeting loss function. Except that it's gradient ascent, and you're making it steeper and expecting people to climb harder instead of just going around your pointless obstacle. "More paperwork" -> "Less security" "Less paperwork" -> "More security" Choose.
- formerly_proven 3y agoAnother typical example is charging internal applications for IDPs, guess what, people are just gonna use LDAP/AD directly, at a not-so-small detriment to application and user security. These are things where cost center accounting just plainly hurts the company. (There are many cases where it works well and aligns incentives).
- 3y ago
- rwmj 3y agoReminds me of this Japanese incident: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/tokaimura-criticality-accident.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
- hilbert42 3y agoIt should not have been possible for that photo to have been taken anytime or anywhere since 1946, even during Manhattan with war deadlines it should not have been possible. That it was and as late as 2011 is of grave concern. Frankly, I find it very difficult to fathom. Years ago when I approached my first reading of the full accounts of Slotin and Daghlian I did so as with any other info, since then I have forced myself to reread them several times as a reminder—as both the accounts and photos are grim. They ought to be part of compulsory safety training for anyone vaguely associated with the nuclear game. Perhaps, as part of that training there should be more acting out roles with dummy materials similar to military exercises where adjudicators tag one as dead for making a 'lethal' mistake and can play no further role in the exercise. This may seem trite but it's not, being forced to play dead on the battlefield whilst the exercise continues because of one's incompetence is both formative and embarrassing (I speak from experience). Moreover, like military training, the exercises should be practiced until one's actions are automatic. That said, such training ought to be a second-line defense—as fastneutron rightly points out—as such work environments ought to be engineered to force compliance.
- nerdponx 3y agoIs the problem that plutonium doesn't look particularly scary on its own? It's just a chunk of gray metal. It's not fuming, it's not warm (I assume), it's not glowing, it's not particularly ugly, it's not a bright color. Very few people have experienced radiation poisoning and have a visceral understanding of the horror involved. None of our self-preservation instincts understand the danger.
- hilbert42 3y agoYour question implies I've firsthand experience working with the stuff but that isn't so. It's true I've worked in the nuclear industry and keeping the stuff safe and out of harm's way was in my job description but I wasn't alone, many hundreds of us were (and are) involved in doing so. Luckily there were people between me and those who worked with the stuff and I'm very happy about that. Still, you're right it's a silvery gray metal much like many others that oxidizes quickly in air to give it that dullish look. If you were to pick it up you'd notice it's very dense. It's marginally heavier than gold by about 0.5g/cc^3 at about 19.8g/cc^3. That it looks so boring could easily generate complacency when handling it. Edit: the 238 isotope is much more radioactive than 239, so much so it'd be hot to touch. But you'd be mad to do so.
- wqqwdfsaadd 3y ago[dead]
- hiccuphippo 3y agoThe previous incidents the article mentions are about the aptly named Demon Core. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
- Ginger-Pickles 3y agoDetailed article on this and other criticality incidents: https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...