Navada

[Guest]

Small item: A workmate told me this. She was making breakfast for her kids and cracked open a few eggs to cook. One of them had a phospherescent green yolk. It freaked her out so, that she threw it down the garbage disposal. We figured a certain chicken got too much of some growth 'rays'. Does anyone have an answer or theory about this?

Perdita

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Small item: A workmate told me this. She was making breakfast for her kids and cracked open a few eggs to cook. One of them had a phospherescent green yolk. It freaked her out so, that she threw it down the garbage disposal. We figured a certain chicken got too much of some growth 'rays'. Does anyone have an answer or theory about this?

Perdita

Well, radiation doesn't make things glow unless there's a specific chemical phosphor around (like zinc oxide that they used to mix with radium to make glow-in-the-dark watch dials. Until the dial-painters started dying off {they would lick the ends of their brushes to put a tip on them and ended up ingesting all this radium}). Radiation is totally invisible and undetectable unless it's so strong that it fries you on the spot. That's what makes it so truly scary. You can be contaminated as hell and not know it all.

If this story is true, then I'd guess maybe the chicken got into some phosphorescent paint or maybe laundry detergent.

It was all the rage for a while to take genes from phosphorescent pigments from jelly fish and splice them into other organisms. I know they made glow-in-the-dark bacteria, and reportedly even a rabbit. Honest. Science marches on.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

Mab., I'm certain it's true, knowing the woman. I used the word 'phosphorescent' but am not certain that's correct. I just recall she said it was a very bright green and seemed to glow. How might that have been done without affecting the egg white? It was only the yolk that was glowing and green.

P.

 

[thenry]

Many of the later nuclear tests in Nevada were of fusion bombs and not fission bombs, starting in the 60s. It is fission nuclear bombs which produce the worst kind of fallout. Fusion bombs produce a bigger explosion and the byproducts break down magnitudes more quickly.

Any family living in Nevada or Utah, all with breast cancer, have a genetic problem. Hallmarks of familial genetic predispositions are that it happens young, it happens to both breasts, and it happens to the men in the family.

Also, there is much more danger of exposure to radiation from the ground and water in most of those states than any fallout, which would actually have been blown East across the US after hitching a ride of the gulfstream.

There's a native american tribe in northern utah who, after centuries of being displaced onto less and less desireable land, found themselves on the richest uranium deposits in the country. They parlayed these holdings into a minor utilities empire across the pacific northwest.

The US boasts seven uranium mills for refining uranium, only one of which is still active, and that mill only refines nuclear waste and sludge to extract viable fissionable materials. No new fuel is mined in the country.

It is both commonly known and untrue that the US has built no nuclear reactors since the mid-70s. The US has built many nuclear powerplants for submarines and aircraft carriers, and the science has advanced considerably. The reactors are selfcontained, very small, and with few moving parts. The US navy is currently bidding on contracts for installing these self-contained power plants in China, a country looking to expand nuclear power to meeting ~4% of its power requirements, and are looking at bending some rules to install them into small rural towns in Alaska currently relying upon diesal generators for power.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Dita,

Is your friend a farm girl by any chance? My mom told me a fertilezed egg, when broken open has a strange color to it. Is it possible your freind's chicken had a rooster friend & not a radiation bath? I mean would she recognize it if it were a fertilized egg?

-Colly

 

[Weird Harold]

Small item: A workmate told me this. She was making breakfast for her kids and cracked open a few eggs to cook. One of them had a phospherescent green yolk. It freaked her out so, that she threw it down the garbage disposal. We figured a certain chicken got too much of some growth 'rays'. Does anyone have an answer or theory about this?

Perdita

What a chicken eats has an effct on th eggs it lays -- My mother has a friend who lives ner Yosimite who has chickens that lay green eggs -- actually brown eggs with a noticeble green tint -- becuse they are "free range" chickens that eat a lot of things containing chlorophyl.

If the chicken picked up something copper for it's crop -- like BB or penny -- then the copper might have mixed with some of the sulphur that give a norml yolk it's yellow color to from copper sulfate, which is a bright, almost luminous blue. Blue and Yellow == Green.

Also, some bacteria produce luminescent phospors, so the egg may just have been rotten.

SNP,
The atmospheric testing in Nevada means that the state of Nevada has been "attacked" with more nuclear bombs than any place in the world, with the possibl exception of the UUSR's primary nuclear test site. Not only that, but Yucca Mountain is a part of the Nucler Test Range and is being designated the nuclear waste disposal repository.

The infamous Area 51 is not part of the test site, but its a close neighbor of the test site.

Despite all of the radiation and possible alien technology that area has been exposed to and National Enquirer stories to the contrary, there are no herds of two-headed calves or schools of four-eyed fishes in Nevada -- or in western Utah where the prevailing winds took most of the fallout.

The one point that needs to be made about the atmospheric tests is that they were conducted because even the scientists who built the bombs didn't understand what the hazards of nuclear bombs were, let alone the generals who had new toys that made a really big boom. Without those atmospheric tests (and the later underground tests) we wouldn't know enough now to know just how stupid atmospheric testing was!

Likewise, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed becaue the only thing the President and Military knew about atomic bombs was that they made one hellacious boom and destorying two Japanese Cities was preferable to the estimated ONE MILLION US CASUALTIES predicted for the planned invasion of the Japanese Home Islands.

Japan was prepared to fight to the last man woman and child as long as they could take American attackers with them. Hiroshima and NAgasaki proved that we could kill every last man woman and child in Japan without them being able to kill one American to escort them to Hell. THAT is why the atomic bombs were dropped -- to deprive the Japanese of an "honorable death in battle," without which there was no point in not surrendering.

 

[gauchecritic]

I'm sure someone will correct me but my understanding of nuclear power is twofold at it's thousandfold stupidity.

One. Actual electricity is not generated by nuclear fusion or fission, or certainly not enough to produce thousands of gigawatts 24/7.

Two. Burning fuel in a nuclear power plant has two main by-products. One is plutonium and the other is flash vapoured water from the cooling process.

The steam engendered is used to turn good old-fashioned electro-magnetic turbines.

The plutonium is used for... Well you know what that's used for.

So what are nuclear power-stations really]/i] about?

Gauche

 

[thenry]

"Correction"

So what are nuclear power-stations really]/i] about?

The goal of any power station, nuclear, coal, wind, or hydroelectric, is to spin a turbine. Spinning turbines makes electricity, at least until better technology really comes along, like photovoltaic cells (solar panels) or thermocouplers (heat directly to electricity). Thermocoupling is really the least wasteful of the technologies, but is currently only works in very weak applications. For instance, the thermocoupled plutonium "batteries" powering the voyager spacecraft do not generate enough power for a coffee machine. Nuclear power was considered the best and most efficient way of turning a turbine because it uses the least amount of fuel. Nuclear reactors need to be "refueled" about once every five years if run into the ground with refined uranium. A coal plant uses hundreds of thousands of times as much fuel. In addition, there is evidence that the usage of coal for power actually releases more radiation into the atmosphere, mostly radium, than nuclear power.

And plutonium is good only for putting into a hole in the ground. Uranium is used for bombs and nuclear reactors preferentially because it is found in nature and is the highest weighing stable element, at least in one isotope. Both fusion and fission reactions are favored energetically toward creating more "stable" elements, and the most stable of the elements is lead. In a nuclear reactor, the situation is more chaotic and minute amounts of less "stable" substances are created, like plutonium.

Plutonium is not used in bombs for its own explosive potential, but rather for its triggering effects. It ejects more particles than uranium would. Plutonium has been used as a trigger in fusion bombs (the "H" bomb), but in those bombs it is the fusion of hydrogen isotopes into helium (a heavier and more "stable" element) which creates the energy.

And while anything that went into a nuclear bomb went first through a nuclear reactor, it was never the ones used to generate power. Instead, specially callibrated and monitored reactors are used to generate the conditions where ordinary uranium is built up and purified to more energetically unstable elements, but usually still a form of uranium. These are weapons grade reactors and the product is weapons grade uranium.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Any family living in Nevada or Utah, all with breast cancer, have a genetic problem. Hallmarks of familial genetic predispositions are that it happens young, it happens to both breasts, and it happens to the men in the family.

It effected the women, and only one breast. I think the men may have had other health problems, I can't remember.

She had very early memories of seing the flash, but didn't know that was what they were until she mentioned it to her dad. He was suprised that she remembered it, she had been very young.

*Any family* is rather much of an overstatement. Environmental factors would certainly be able to effect a whole family. I'm sure genetics play some roll (ie, susepatablity). There will always be variations in how individuals react to toxins or risk factors. However, it doesnt' sound like genetics alone is to blame here.

 

[Guest]

Decided not to start another "kooky Brits" thread, this item fits here (humourously). Perdita
-----------

Brits Say Chicken-Equipped Nuke No Hoax - Michael McDonough, Associated Press
Thursday, April 1, 2004, ©2004 SF Gate

LONDON -- A claim that Britain considered using live chickens in a nuclear weapon aroused skepticism Thursday, but officials insisted it was not an April Fool's hoax.

"It's a genuine story," said Robert Smith, head of press and publicity at The National Archives.

The archives released a secret 1957 Ministry of Defense report showing that scientists contemplated putting chickens in the casing of a plutonium land mine.

The chickens' body heat was considered a possible means of preventing the mine's mechanism from freezing.

Listing ways of extending the armed life of the land mine, the declassified document proposed "incorporating some form of heating independent of power supplies under the weapon hull in the emplacement. Chickens, with a heat output of the order of 1,000 BTU (British Thermal Units) per bird per day are a possibility."

The seven-ton device, code named "Blue Peacock," would have been detonated from a distance or by timer in the event of a retreat from invading Soviet troops, to prevent them from occupying the area.

Andy Oppenheimer, co-editor of Jane's World Armies, said he found the idea of using chickens hard to believe.

"I have a feeling that it's an April Fool," he said in a phone interview. He said wrapping the device in fiberglass to keep it warm would have been a better option.

Some newspapers also expressed skepticism.

"Is today the day to reveal the chicken-powered nuke?" The Times of London wrote, referring to the April 1 date. Nonetheless, The Times put it on page one.

Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, said he had no doubt that the document was authentic.

"None whatsoever," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's not the kind of thing the civil service does, to set up an April Fool's joke."

O'Leary said the idea is mentioned briefly in a long document.

"It's purely a suggestion in an official document that that is a possibility that was proposed," he said, and there was no indication that the feasibility was ever tested.

The "Blue Peacock" project began in 1954 and was aimed at preventing enemy occupation of territory due to nuclear contamination. Designs were based on Britain's "Blue Danube" free-fall bomb, which consisted of a plutonium core surrounded by a sphere of high explosive with detonators spread across the surface.

Officials decided in 1957 to acquire 10 "Blue Peacock" land mines, each weighing 16,000 pounds (7,250 kilograms), and to station them with the British Army of the Rhine in Germany. However, in 1958 the Ministry of Defense Weapons Policy Committee decided that work on "Blue Peacock" should stop, after reservations emerged about the fallout hazard.

A prototype survives in the historical collection of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, a government agency which has its headquarters at Aldermaston west of London.

"The whole operational scenario appeared somewhat theatrical," said an article in the AWE's magazine in January. It did not mention chickens, but did deal with the problem of maintaining the right temperature.

"The nuclear warhead had to be kept within a specific temperature range, but environmental trials suggested it might not have survived the rigors of a mid-European winter," the article said.

Details of the chicken proposal feature in an April 2-Oct. 30 exhibition entitled "The Secret State" at the National Archives in Kew, west London.

 

[thenry]

*Any family* is rather much of an overstatement. Environmental factors would certainly be able to effect a whole family. I'm sure genetics play some roll (ie, susepatablity). There will always be variations in how individuals react to toxins or risk factors. However, it doesnt' sound like genetics alone is to blame here.

So, to get increasingly genetic to make an entirely different point:

The genetics of cancer are complex. In most cases there are five or six things that have to go wrong on a genetic basis to create a metastatic cancer. Radiation increases the likelihood that things will go wrong, and one of the ways cancer gets caused is when the genetic deficiency is in repair of such errors.

So, if a family had a genetic deficiency in four of the five points, and exposure to radiation or an environment factor affected the fifth, is the person responsible for the radiation responsible for the cancer?

I read a very interesting article in Atlantic Monthly about the ethic problem of genetic engineering basically being the creation of total personal responsibility. I can imagine a person suing the laboratory or parent responsible for their genetics if their life did not turn out as best as it could have. After all, can't we already blame the lack of success in life on not being in the right kindergarten?