Everyone reading this has likely heard "the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long" or something to that effect. This applies to radioactive decay. The shorter the half life the more radiation it produces.

This means the worst of the radioactive materials will decay away in a matter of seconds to maybe a few months. The radioactive waste at SRS is years to decades old, which means the worst of the radiation risk is long gone. Uranium, plutonium, and many other long lived isotopes pose little to no radiation hazard, but they can still cause heavy metal poisoning so don't lick them.

The strontium and cesium are the largest concerns for human life as strontium is a "bone seeker" for having chemistry similar to calcium and cesium tends to accumulate in plants as it is chemically similar to potassium. With a half life of about 30 years, and having a tendency for bio-accumulation, these pose problems if not properly contained. Their tendency for bio-accumulation though can be utilized for removing them from the environment.

If wasps are accumulating radioactive materials into their nests then maybe this that be made to work for us in removing the materials from the environment.

The containment zone is a 310 square mile facility, and the wasps were found inside this facility.

It appears the leaks were known about but without proper funds there was only so much that could be done.

I'm sure people will find ways to blame Trump for this even though the Democrats held the filibuster in the Senate for 100 years, and Democrats held both houses in Congress and the White House many times since SRS opened in 1951. At best this is a bipartisan failure but there's been Republicans trying many times to get funds for SRS, Yucca Mountain, and other sites for radioactive waste processing and disposal. Any progress made while Republicans held both houses in Congress and the White House would still end up hitting the Democrat filibuster in the Senate and/or be reverse by Democrats once they held the purse strings again.

The biggest issue on this was likely during the Carter administration when the ban on reprocessing nuclear fuel went into effect. I can hear the replies being typed now on how that was reversed under Reagan. The problem is that once the sites are closed, and all the people that worked there retired or found new jobs, it takes a lot of time and money to get the sites reopened and staffed.

Only now are we starting to see a potential maybe on reopening the sites that did the waste disposal, nuclear fuel reprocessing, and demilitarization of radioactive materials. This can mean SRS gets cleaned up finally. What has been a roadblock in funding these efforts have been Democrat senators, senators that have had either a majority or enough votes for a filibuster on any funds for cleaning up SRS and other sites since nuclear power became a thing in the 1950s.

One change has been the flip on nuclear power from the Democrat party in 2020. The Democrat party platform from 1972 to 2020 has had open opposition to nuclear power, or they simply pretended nuclear power didn't exist. That changed in 2020. Another change has been a number of Democrat senators-for-life are starting to die off. I believe these two changes are related.

You want this "big deal" cleaned up? Then find candidates for the US Senate that will fund the clean up, and appoint people to Cabinet level positions to make that happen. It appears the Democrats are less likely to be the roadblock they were before but I''d still be wary on their conviction to clean up SRS and other sites.

Didn't they track this to hairline cracks found in tanks used to store waste from nuclear weapons? It appears to me that they know where the radioactive material is coming from, the issue is largely a lack of funds to effect proper repairs and waste disposal.

The radioactive wasps were found at the Savannah River Site, a federal facility for the production and disposal of radioactive materials for nuclear weapons. This is a Department of Energy site, and because of some odd series of events the nuclear weapons program is run by the Department of Energy.

One thing thing that was supposed to happen at SRS was the conversion of plutonium from the nuclear weapons program into fuel for nuclear power plants. This never got the funds it needed. Because the USA failed to dispose of this stockpiled of plutonium as agreed to under a treaty with Russia that means Russia felt no obligation to reciprocate in their own program to dispose of plutonium as fuel for their civil nuclear power program. I recall the deadline passed during the Obama administration. So much of this mess at SRS can be laid at the feet of the Democrats, and part of the evidence is in this chart:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Democrats held the filibuster in the US Senate since World War Part One. The Democrats never did like nuclear power much, believing it had too much to do with producing nuclear weapons. That's clearly nonsense because the plan under the treaty with Russia was to use the civil nuclear power plants to dispose of nuclear weapons. Democrats would not allow any funds for civil nuclear power through the Senate so this pile of plutonium and nuclear waste sits at SRS.

From 1972 to 2020 the Democrats either openly opposed civil nuclear power or tried to pretend it didn't exist. The Democrats tried to kill the US Navy nuclear propulsion program but were only partially successful. They killed the "nuclear navy" that gave us nuclear powered destroyers, cruisers, and frigates but failed to kill the nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines. While the Democrats put on paper in their party platform document that they support civil nuclear power there's not been much in actions to show this. We can restart the "swords to plowshares" or "megatons to megawatts" or whatever programs that would turn nuclear weapons into clean, safe, and reliable power but it's not happened yet.

If SRS was the site where we were getting our electricity then should we not expect some funds for cleaning up the place and disposing of the waste there? I'd think so.

But Democrats have been holding up such programs for at least 50 years now. Republicans have been supportive of civil nuclear power since it started to be a thing in the Eisenhower administration. Nixon however did a dick move on effectively killing thorium for energy out of some political favoritism with his Left Coast buddies. Most every attempt since Carter to get nuclear power in the USA has been sunk by Democrats, and the few exceptions were also out of political favors, usually to labor unions that wanted the construction jobs in large nuclear power projects.

If people die from this radioactive waste spill then I'll blame Democrats for that too.

This was supposed to be cleaned up decades ago. Democrat senators would not fund it so it didn't happen. On top of that we had a pile of plutonium that was supposed to be disposed of that is still sitting around (or so I last heard) which meant the Russians didn't dispose of their plutonium. Democrats did that too, because "nukular bad" or something. The Yucca Mountain disposal site should have been open by now but Democrats held that up.

Not that Republicans are perfect on nuclear power and nuclear waste, I could say more about Nixon as an example, but if only a small number of Democrats broke from their party bullshit we'd not be talking about this problem today.

There's radiation limits on a lot of things, and it appears to me that most of them are nonsense.

The Grand Central Terminal in New York City is more radioactive than any nuclear power plant is allowed to be. I suggest everyone reading this look it up, it appears to make the news every year or so. I'd post a link but that would only attract accusations of me cherry picking a source.

The source of the radiation in Grand Central Terminal is the large mass of granite blocks used in the construction. Or rather the radiation is from the uranium and thorium in the stone as well as their decay products, the one of most concern is likely radon as that is a gas which can decay inside the lungs of people that breathe inside the building. Radioactive decay in the body is considered the most dangerous and most difficult to treat.

So, if by chance you find yourself redecorating a nuclear power plant then leave out the granite. Maybe try wood, concrete, or most anything that's not granite as the radon being released from the stone is likely to trip the radiation sensors.

The radiation allowed under federal law is based on the "linear no threshold", or LNT, model, a model that's been considered nonsense for a long time. The "linear" part is that there is a linear relationship between radiation dose and harm to the body. "No threshold" means there is an assumption that there is no safe level of radiation. That is nonsense as there are studies that show if humans lived without any radiation exposure there can be health problems. People have speculated why, and it could be something like how people not exposed to certain irritants as a child are more likely to develop allergies later in life, as in without some radiation to "train" the immune system it goes a bit wild trying to fix what isn't broken.

Whenever there's a news report of "radiation detected" I suspect click bait. We can detect the radiation coming off the Voyager probes and they are in interstellar space, so the fact we detected radiation is hardly news. How much was found? What kind of radiation is it? Unless the radioactive material is biologically active then it's likely just dust that can be washed off and therefore likely quite harmless.

I hate news stories like this, rarely is anything actually new learned as the sources of radiation are often Cold War era stuff that we still can't talk about. If people want to see this stuff destroyed then we need a nuclear power industry to have a "free" place to dispose of this material. There's one of two ways to be rid of radioactive materials, time and neutron bombardment. We get "free" neutrons from the nuclear power industry since the reactor is made to produce power there's an income to fund the construction and operation of the reactors. The nuclear power industry will buy these radioactive materials for operating the plant, and that should clear up many funding problems on the disposal of this waste. Nuclear power produces it's own waste but that's also being funded by the electricity and radioactive isotopes they sell. We need nuclear reactors for all kinds of useful radioactive isotopes, the electricity is kind of just a side benefit.

"Modern understanding" implies quantitative statements.

What kinds of masks. Where. On whom. To what kind of fit.

How much ventilation. Where. From what source and to what outlet.

What kind of disinfect. At what concentration. At what frequency of application.

Reducing complex questions to simple binary statements is the opposite of cognition.

You are quite right I would have not been happy at all had the daycares been shut down. For the four months they were shut down in Massachusetts I was quite unhappy because I was unable to work a normal day and say with a straight face I was earning the paycheck that kept a roof over our heads. I was fortunate in having an accomodating employer. Other people less so. Had the situation gone on, either I or my wife would have had to quit work. Since at the time the wife was a resident making resident salary rather than a full doctor making doctor salary, it would have been her. In fact many women with small children did have to quit working.

So the question is...was it worth it? And were the masks worth it when the daycares reopened? To answer such a question, a control study of a suitable size that sampled a suitable diversity of geographies and masking policies would be necessary.

I am not aware of any such studies particular to daycares beyond the observational studies concluding that covid wasn't a problem for kids. If you have anything to add, please do. If you have nothing but generalizations to reiterate, please read the thread again.

Sounds like we will be fine.

When did I say nuclear only? Stating facts about solar and wind intermittency isn't a "nuclear only" position dumbfuck.

No. We are not talking about abstractions or generalities. We are talking about nominally serious people asserting with a straight face that a masked toddler in a daycare is in any way an improvement over an unmasked toddler in a daycare.

The same daycare where toddlers habitually slobber over toys, require hands-on diaper changes, take naps (sans mask for safety of course) and eat together.

Madness.

Least effort doesn't make sense if you want to restore it. Least effort would be to use it as is. The problem with any of these Airstream, Streamline, Elko et al airspace-grade aluminum trailers is that you have to drill out hundreds to thousands of rivets and then replace them again for any significant repair. Doing it correctly takes a truly painfully long amount of time. Also, while these might have been sealed with something more serious than butyl like most of these were, whatever it was has almost surely gone brittle by now. Therefore, if you do not want to be chasing leaks around for perpetuity, you will literally do a full down-to-the-bones restoration of any vintage aluminum travel trailer (or one of the rare motor homes like this.) Also, while you're at it, you're going to want to take the skeleton off of the frame and replace the plywood decking anyway.

Given all of that, instead of trying to remove paint from the original panels, you would replace it. These trailers are made out of war surplus Alclad. It's great because it's both strong and easy to polish, but it's essentially unrepairable. If you have dings in it, you can try heat/cold shrinking them, but even if it were practical to repair (which it ain't, too thin among other reasons) access is nonexistent. Since it's made out of really thin material, the material costs are a small part of the cost of the job.

I got five 5x20 rolled sheets of Alclad for a 1962 Streamline* "Duchess" TT for like five hundred bucks, maybe $550, shipped. No doubt it's gone up a bit since (this was over a decade ago) but you could probably get all of the skin material for around two grand if you shopped around. If you're going to do it, do it right. In the process you'd seal it with polyurethane sealant and it'd last longer than the buyer would live.

* Streamlines were a side project of Lockheed so they wouldn't have to lay everybody off after The War. This one had a little sticker inside above the doorway that said it was made by "Lockheed Missiles and Space Company". They were taller and straighter than Airstreams.

I just bought a PC with Windows 11, and even logged into it and poked around a little bit. I did not open a Microsoft account.

However, I also did not load Steam until I put Linux on it.

These days there are enough Linux users that you can be sure some of them would willfully install kernel anti-cheat software to get a game to run. But as you say, it would be of little use. Also, they would have to support a lot of kernels even if customizations weren't a problem, due to all the versions in concurrent use.

It needed many, and it keeps gaining them. It's inevitable that "all" software (some deliberately proprietary examples aside) that will eventually become or be replaced by Free Software if it's not prevented deliberately, because of the advantages. Linux is simply the most important example at the moment.

Sony has supported Linux before, it didn't go well.

What is 8bitdo doing anyway? They don't have to do anything special to make their programming software work on Linux. Just do it as a web container and it's easy to build it that way too. Electron, in Chrome, or what have you. And their controllers speak standard protocols as well, so there's no need for them to do drivers...

Came here to say this, found it at the bottom of the discussion, last visible comment. Sigh.

As a lighter comment: Do you want Cazadores? Because this is how you get Cazadores.

Again. We are talking about toddlers in daycares.

My town required them to wear a mask, citing CDC guidance. This was crazy.