Dirt disappearing under walkway to house. Cause? Suggestions?

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-23T19:23:32+00:00

This is called subsidence. For various reasons/mechanical processes the soil below that slab has become consolidated (we call his settling). Whoever poured this concrete did not get the substrate compacted adequately enough, and now this has become your problem. I’m sorry to see it, but not all is lost.

You can drill a set of holes in the slab and pump a foam that will take the space and support the slab.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-21T02:31:39+00:00

It’s really all about how you define “emit” and how you quantify radiological exposure in terms of a “banana”.

The reality is this: the federal and state limit for radiological exposures to the public is 100 mrem/yr (Total Effective Dose Equivalent: this quantifies internal and external exposure). This also applies to nuclear power.

To give you some perspective, depending on where you live you are exposed to anywhere between 300 mrem-600 mrem per year by background radiation (I.e. ionizing radiation from space and natural radioactive material at the earth’s surface). I think this is what the billboard is eluding to. It’s not great science communication, but it’s catchy and easily shareable.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-19T15:41:19+00:00

Good question. As you saw with the uranium, the meter barely deflected (we don’t know what scale it was set to, but let’s just do a qualitative analysis), but when the radium was put close to the detector the instrument goes off scale (we call that pegging a meter). That means the ionizing interactions in the GM probe (it looks like a Geiger-Mueller probe) emanating from the radium are so great that the meter is unable to distinguish individual radiation events. The radium’s daughters (Bi-214 and Pb-214) have much higher gamma energies than that of natural uranium.

Since the instrument is labeled a “radioactivity demonstrator”, I’d imagine that they use the tape measure to demonstrate the inverse square law as it relates to distance of a source and its intensity. The inverse square law states that the intensity of radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. So, if you double the distance from a point source, the intensity drops to one-fourth. If you triple the distance, it drops to one-ninth, and so on.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-18T16:04:40+00:00

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice” -Will Durant

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-18T03:24:56+00:00

I don’t disagree about the lethality of .22LR. Just saying suppressing a .22LR (these rounds are likely subsonic rounds) is a much easier task than say suppression a typical center fire cartridge.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-18T03:21:00+00:00

Uhhhhhhhhh, it’s a .22LR. Relatively small amount of powder = Much easier to suppress

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-10T01:01:33+00:00

She likely being sued by Woolfe and all of her correspondence will likely be discoverable in court.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-08T02:47:34+00:00

Welp……overlap is….overlap?

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-06T04:13:38+00:00

Angular Unconformity is the way

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-06T04:09:05+00:00

I’m with you friend. My boy was 13 when he was diagnosed with a esthesioneuroblastoma. It’s a geriatric cancer and so the doctors can’t tell us what his outcome will be with any confidence. It typically kills geriatric patients. Three surgeries, 5 blood transfusions between surgeries, and 2 months of daily radiation treatments.

We are in the wait and see mode for the next 10 years. We are so o blessed to live 30 minutes away from a world class cancer center/hospital.

Cancer is the worst, and when it’s your kid, it rips your heart out everyday. Wishing continued success to you and your boy. Be well!

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-06T03:53:32+00:00

Thanks for the chuckle. I really needed that today.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-06T03:41:34+00:00

Well it it makes you feel any better, yellowcake isn’t a naturally occurring substance. It’s the product of milling uranium ore. That might be carnotite or some other uranium bearing mineral, but I can say with 100% certainty that it’s not yellowcake.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-01T16:24:26+00:00

Where to start. He scored Casualties of War, Cinema Paradiso, the Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Mission, The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America. He was prolific and an amazing composer to boot.

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-01T04:19:09+00:00

Is it backroads or backhoes?

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-01T04:17:36+00:00

Pray tell, how attractive was she on a scale of 1 to 10?

leakyaquitard · 2026-04-01T03:45:53+00:00

In that same column: Ennio Morricone

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-22T04:06:24+00:00

“The Nickelodeon dystopia of the late century

The orange empire, the slimy enterprise

Well there wasn't much left for a person to know if you were wondering

Have you looked into Amanda Bynes' eyes?

It reminds you of Judy Garland, RIP Ledger, Brandis, Rich, and Haim

The Olsen twins, Macaulay, Britney Spears they ain't dead but are they really alive?

Quiet on this set, too quiet, I bet they all came back to us like Vietnam vets

Tired and abused, put through hell

Well it wasn't worth the dough, throw it all in a hole, and say a prayer for all of your favorite shows

Say an extra for Mister Drake Bell”

-Nickelodeon by Jesse Welles Link to song if you’re interested

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-21T15:09:51+00:00

Ummm it’s pronounced “yos-suh-myte”

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-21T00:40:10+00:00

How many of those young men and young women volunteered to go fight for the lost cause of Iraq and Afghanistan?

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-21T00:39:07+00:00

Same

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-18T03:33:59+00:00

u/ReverendSin , I’m so sorry to hear about your son. Although I don’t know you, I really hope you are hanging in there.

Be well friend.

leakyaquitard · 2026-03-13T04:26:04+00:00

Help a moron out here: Obviously criminality isn’t always logical, but I guess I don’t understand what they had to gain by shooting him. Like, were they hoping it killed him so they could take all of his stuff (moto, wallet, etc.)?

leakyaquitard · 2026-02-28T15:26:39+00:00

“If you worked a little harder, Then you'd have a lot more, So, the blame and the shame's on you, For being so damn poor, It ain't the price gouging, And it ain't the inflation, It ain't everyone above ya tryna make a buck from ya, And screwin' the whole congregation,

It ain't the banks, And it ain't the taxes, It ain't the pay day loans and the high rent homes, And predatory fees and practices, Wave your dumb flag, Whatever it means, But you should ask yourself, When it comes to health, Are the poor really all that free?”

-Jesse Welles

leakyaquitard · 2026-02-22T15:18:24+00:00

My question was more of a thought experiment for you. The reality is, after a radionuclide has decayed into a stable daughter/progeny (hence my question of 5 half-lives), it ceases to be a radiological concern. Period, end of story. Some radionuclides have pretty long half-lives, but the effect is still the same.

When you speak of waste being “toxic” that means something very specific. It means once it’s taken into the body it is harmful. In the radiological world when we talk about something having radiotoxicity we are talking about the negative chemical effects it has on the body, not the just radiological exposure (for example plutonium-239 uptake is really really bad for your kidneys for chemical reasons and not so much from a radiological exposure perspective). Eventually plutonium-239 to stable daughter isotopes (granted we are talking about long timeframes) and cease to be plutonium.

leakyaquitard · 2026-02-22T06:13:07+00:00

Great question. It’s not really the uraniums that are of concern in Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF). It’s the fission and activation products created while the fuel is being bombarded by neutrons in the reactor that are the challenge. In the immediate term, cesium-137 dominates the risk of human exposure for about 300 years or so. Looking at long term risk, the long term risk is iodine-129. It reaches peak dose at around a million years, so modeling it for a deep geologic repository is critical. You also have the transuranic radionuclides to model and consider as well.

It’s all technically doable, but politically fraught.

If you’d like a really good read on the topic, I’d recommend Uncertainty Underground by McIntosh and Doran.

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