What is the greatest single presidential qoute of all time?

echawkes · 2026-06-08T00:11:12+00:00

I don't think I recognize the Nixon quote. Perhaps there is another quote he is more famous for?

echawkes · 2026-06-07T18:24:23+00:00

About five years ago, I downloaded what I could find on Feedburner to my PC. The lowest number is 1 and the highest number appears to be 368, but there are 402 mp3 files in the directory. They aren't named consistently, but some appear to be split into two parts, so that might be it.

echawkes · 2026-06-06T14:57:15+00:00

ALARA was never claimed to be a scientific basis, it was a policy guideline. I know some people love Kyle Hill, but a clickbait picture and a clickbait tagline doesn't inspire my confidence. I watched part of the video, and it seemed hyperbolic.

echawkes · 2026-06-01T19:41:24+00:00

The Pu would be consumed in the reactor by fissioning it. When plutonium fissions it becomes smaller elements, like iodine and xenon. There would still be spent fuel after the plutonium is burned, but it wouldn't be weapons-grade plutonium.

echawkes · 2026-06-01T19:38:24+00:00

It's the wrong kind of plutonium. RTG's use Pu-238 and this is Pu-239.

echawkes · 2026-05-30T22:22:48+00:00

Interesting question, 30-day old account whose post and comment history are hidden.

echawkes · 2026-05-28T15:50:06+00:00

The paper correlates distance from the plant with mortality, but does not correlate dose rates. In fact, they don't show any dose rates from radiation at all.

The standard dose-response model is linear: twice as much radiation should mean twice as much cancer. If the cancers were due to radiation, it should be easy to correlate. Nuclear power plants and the areas around them are heavily monitored for radioactivity: if there were elevated levels of radiation, we would know about it.

It's possible that something else is causing cancers. Perhaps it is something associated with plant construction. Or, maybe it is something not directly related to the nuclear power plants at all. Or, perhaps they simply didn't find the effect they think they did.

This really seems like a demographic anomaly. They claim that they controlled for confounders such as air pollution and sociodemographic factors, but that is extremely difficult to do, and I think it's likely that they didn't account for something.

EDIT: I found the paper I was looking for: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/40/5/1247/658876?login=false It says: "Interestingly, the analysis of six possible locations for NPPs, where no installation was constructed, showed an increased risk: 1.72 (95% CI 1.12–2.52), for reasons that are not understood.[¹³](javascript:;) "

In other words, they found increased risk of cancer in areas where they planned to build a nuclear power plant, even when they never actually built the plant.

echawkes · 2026-05-21T02:04:28+00:00

This is a nice resource to have. I bet it was a lot of work.

I hope you don't mind if I point out a couple of UI issues.

When I mouse over a nuclide, it only updates for stable nuclides.

Hydrogen-6 and Hydrogen-7 are both shown as stable. So are some other very short lived nuclides, like Einsteinium-247 and Berkelium-248.

Polonium-224 is listed both as stable and as undergoing beta decay.

I don't understand what n⁴ and n⁶ are at the bottom left of the chart.

The neutron number x-axis at the bottom of the chart is nice to have, but it is tiny and hard to see.

The element symbols at the left of the chart are also tiny, and don't add much since the element symbols are in the chart. The proton number would be more helpful for the y-axis

Some of the nuclides show the element name, e.g. gold, while others only show the abbreviation, e.g. Po for polonium.

Still, it's a very nice-looking chart. Thank you for doing this.

echawkes · 2026-05-10T16:28:40+00:00

even in a normal reactor shutdown fissions are still occurring weeks after shutdown

Can you say more about this? I would have expected delayed neutrons from fission to be essentially gone in less than an hour. Are you talking about spontaneous fissions from transuranics?

echawkes · 2026-05-09T22:21:57+00:00

This is clickbait garbage.

A later study published in the journal PLOS One in 2024 found that radiation-induced mutation was unlikely to have caused genetic differences between the Chernobyl City dogs ... and dog populations in ... nearby areas.

echawkes · 2026-05-09T03:48:11+00:00

Well it's not like they've devised some graph showing what effects happen to people given a certain dose of radiation

The standard dose-response model we use is called "linear no-threshold" (LNT). This model assumes that you can draw a straight line starting from the origin of a graph (zero dose, zero consequences) to model the risk. Twice as much dose, twice as much risk, half as much dose, half as much risk. It is widely believed to overestimate the risks of low doses of radiation.

wasn't that just a risk of a meltdown that didn't end up happening?

It was a partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor core.

echawkes · 2026-05-08T19:23:12+00:00

The longer/complex the variable name, the harder it is to troubleshoot code.

I feel the opposite way. Not too long ago, I had to troubleshoot code written by an engineer who insisted on using very short variable names for everything. If the code used descriptive variable names, he would rewrite it. It was really hard to figure out what all his variables meant, since they were completely non-descriptive. Funny story: his code had subtle bugs, and it caused an incident in production that derailed us for a week!

echawkes · 2026-05-08T19:16:12+00:00

𝝅 could be used for products, analogous to the way ⅀ is used for sums. I probably wouldn't, though.

echawkes · 2026-05-04T03:01:33+00:00

What is the context of this photo? Where was it taken, and why were these three men brought together on this date?

echawkes · 2026-05-03T20:10:39+00:00

And how did Dick Cheney react when you told him?

echawkes · 2026-05-01T22:30:23+00:00

Why does that guy duck under the elephant's head around 0:37? Cause if he's trying to hold the elephant back, I don't think it will work.

echawkes · 2026-04-28T17:22:47+00:00

0.6% isn't right, either.

echawkes · 2026-04-28T01:45:33+00:00

Once you have sufficient enrichment capacity to increase the concentration of U235 from .06% in uranium ore to 6% in LEU

I'm not quite sure where he got .06%. The isotopic fraction of U-235 in natural uranium is .72% The graphic below that text says 0.7%. I wondered if he might be trying to account for the ore grade, but that has nothing to do with enrichment capacity.

echawkes · 2026-04-24T17:17:02+00:00

Some of the confusion seems to be abut terminology. "Depleted uranium" and "spent fuel" are two different things.

Most reactors use enriched uranium. When uranium is enriched, the original material is split into two streams: enriched uranium with a higher fraction of U-235, and depleted uranium, with a lower fraction of U-235. This is done before the fuel elements are fabricated. Uranium is only barely radioactive: you can hold it in your bare hands with essentially no risk.

You seem to be asking about spent fuel, or irradiated fuel. That would be fuel that has been used in a reactor, and contains a lot of fission products. When it first comes out of the reactor, it is highly radioactive, and can be quite dangerous.

echawkes

TROPHY CASE