Sent: Sunday, June 06, 1999 10:47 PM Subject: Re: Important Y2K Info As a former Federal Nuclear Safety Inspector turned whistle-blower and blacklisted you should be aware that most of my former peers were more politician rather than scientist. These political animals would rather let the house burn down than to yell fire. It is in the nature of bureaucrats to tell their bosses what they want to hear. Even though my experience was at a shipyard, I would hear of things from all other areas of the nuclear industry. I had pointed out many shortcomings which were longstanding, including the failure of the air sampling devices we used to actually register the particulate airborne radiation/contamination and that no real attempt was made to sample gaseous activity at all. The simple solution was to modify the paper filter holders screens so that the filters would not be torn and become invalid due to blow-by. The fix required to go from a flat screen to a deep cup of screen made by shaping a larger piece of screen pressed between two pieces of concentric pipes of one inch in length each with a 1/4 inch gap between the inner and outer pipes and then trimming off the excess to form a cup of screen which would not be pushed back into the body of the screen holder. The nuclear engineers fought me over this because they would have to admit that since the beginning of the nuclear program they had a problem and was easy to fix. Their solution was to leave the sampler filter inserts loose so that the vacuum pumps would not suck down the filters into the pumps. This caused the sampled air to leak around the filters rather than thru them. I also invented nuclear waste collection devices that were used by the Navy only on a limited basis ,but if properly used could eliminate most of the cross contamination of support equipment and anti-contamination clothing etc. greatly reducing the amount and cost of nuclear and asbestos waste disposal. There are simple and effective ways of protecting yourselves and your families. 1./ Purchase radiation detectors that work just like smoke alarms with a threshold of about 5 milli- roentgens per hour trigger level. NOTE: some radon can trigger these . I believe this can be purchased for about $100 from Direct Safety Co. 2./ Eliminate Radon sources from your homes by air to air heat exchangers and/or by using a mix /blend of central heating furnace filters with both polyester and dacron fibers which have opposite charge attraction and will electrostatically hold radon daughters until they turn into lead dust. Use this mix of fibers in your crawl spaces as well. 3./ Most particulate matter or gaseous matter due to a reactor accident will be radioactive iodine and strontium and cesium. If the human body has sufficient amounts of these or chemically similar elements you will be protected by the fact that the body only absorbs the things it is short on, so 1-A-Day vitamins with minerals on a normal dosage will protect you.Old timers used to paint a 6" diameter circle on their legs by their crotches/ sweaty area of tincture of iodine if they had to go into a damaged reactor area such as the SL-1 accident in Idaho at the Combustion Engineering Facility run by them for the US Army. Strontium and cesium are chemically exchangeable with calcium, so drink your milk or take calcium supplements. These are called bone seekers, but they will not be absorbed if you have ample calcium in your diet. Most radiation/contamination cancers first show up in soft tissue such as the breasts or prostate and especially children where rapid cell division and growth occur. Purple salt blocks are a form of !-A-Day vitamins with minerals put out for cattle where fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear devices, most recent atmospheric testing has been done by the Chinese as well as stuff released by the Russian accident etc. The purple is due to the non-radioactive isotopes of iodine in the salt blocks. 4./ The most important thing not to do is panic but to educate yourself and to take simple yet effective steps to protect yourselves. paper will block Alpha Particles he have an atomic mass of 4 due to the presence of two protons and two neutrons with an electrical charge of +2 these are like bowling balls to soft tissue, but they penetrate only about 1/4 inch into skin. gamma particles will be reduced by a factor of ten by 2 inches of lead, 10 inches of concrete or two feet of water. The behave like light particles with an atomic mass less than that of a single electron, no electrical charge and can go right thru you depending on how thick your are in relative inches of water. They come in various energy ranges just like colors of light beta particles are like free electrons with an electrical charge of (-1) and can be blocked by thin aluminium foil effectively grounding them and they do not penetrate much further than alpha particles. Neutrons come in various speeds fast, prompt and thermal/slow. To thermalize neutrons or slow them down they must impart some of their energy to equally sized atomic particles like a hydrogen nucleus or boron imprgnated plastic. when they are slowed down they then can chain react. neutron are usually only present when nuclear reactions/explosions are in progress and from the neutron emitters such as uranium and plutonium in large, non critical mass. It takes 22 kilograms to make a primitive nuclear device and the mass is about the size of a baseball. Most engineering in nuclear devices in the last 40 years is to make clean bombs that produce blast effects rathe than long duration radioactive contamination. M y personal belief is that the chemical nature of the heavy metals used by the nuclear industry are more immediately physically harmful than any radioactive aspect that most of us will ever see. THis is passed upon personal experience and having been poisoned to near death twice while in government service. The greatest danger from terrorist devices is that they will probably be designed to produce the most long lasting radioactive contamination by what is known as dirty bombs. The reason no on has made one yet is that it only takes one ore two dirty bombs to poison one entire hemisphere of this small planet and no one wants to destroy themselves?????????