3 ms·

How much of a nuclear war? We already had a tiny one, a few surface tests, and significant underground tests. I know the surfaces tests put enough stuff into th

How much of a nuclear war? We already had a tiny one, a few surface tests, and significant underground tests. I know the surfaces tests put enough stuff into the atmosphere that radio-nucleotide changes were found in boomer infant's teeth which led to Kennedy's interest in banning the practice. But I wonder how detectable that period will be in future.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> How much of a nuclear war? We need to exceed the AMS measurement error of 370 atoms of 244Pu per gram of the rare-earth mineral bastnäsite [1]. Let’s assume this works for 0.2 cubic centimeters of anything [2]. We have about 20 grams of the stuff straight up [3]. Sprinkling those 4.9 x 10^23 atoms around at 18.5mm atoms / m3 we get 26 quadrillion cubic meters of irradiated surface material. Spread over Earths surface of 510mm square kilometers [4] and we get a 51 meter-thick slab of detectably-irradiated soil. Yay! (Let’s double to give us 80 million years of signal at 371 atoms per square centimeter: 26 meters.) Unfortunately—perhaps unsurprisingly—I’m having trouble finding the 244Pu yield from a thermonuclear blast. [1] https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.0158 https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.01... [2] https://www.mindat.org/min-560.html https://www.mindat.org/min-560.html [3] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1024694 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1024694 [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
- sumsome 2y ago
  [1] Not Found. Which motivated me to let leGPT write a bash script to increment the URL and send requests in batch until it reaches 10k and returns all non 404 URLs if it finds any. still running, internets and hardware are slow or the curl command is. EDIT: huh, should have known what was going to happen -.-'
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    [1] should be https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.015801 https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.01...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> How much of a nuclear war? We need to exceed the AMS measurement error of 370 atoms of 244Pu per gram of the rare-earth mineral bastnäsite [1]. Let’s assume this works for 0.2 cubic centimeters of anything [2]. We have about 20 grams of the stuff straight up [3]. Sprinkling those 4.9 x 10^23 atoms around at 18.5mm atoms / m3 we get 26 quadrillion cubic meters of irradiated surface material. Spread over Earths surface of 510mm square kilometers [4] and we get a 51 meter-thick slab of detectably-irradiated soil. Yay! (Let’s double to give us 80 million years of signal at 371 atoms per square centimeter: 26 meters.) Unfortunately—perhaps unsurprisingly—I’m having trouble finding the 244Pu yield from a thermonuclear blast. [1] https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.0158 https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.01... [2] https://www.mindat.org/min-560.html https://www.mindat.org/min-560.html [3] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1024694 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1024694 [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

sumsome 2y ago
[1] Not Found. Which motivated me to let leGPT write a bash script to increment the URL and send requests in batch until it reaches 10k and returns all non 404 URLs if it finds any. still running, internets and hardware are slow or the curl command is. EDIT: huh, should have known what was going to happen -.-'
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  [1] should be https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.015801 https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.85.01...