Reading the post on human shields, I got to thinking about screenwriters who assume any metal object will stop a bullet. It made me think about the old assumption that lead has some quality that stops radiation. Truth is, it's just really dense, allowing you to put more shielding between yourself and the radiation with less thickness than if you used, say, aluminum. It's also cheap and easy to work with (even if it is toxic). I know some types of radiation won't even go through clothes, but I'm talking about intense radiation - the stuff that makes bugs grow to enormous size.
Come to think of it, the whole atomic mutation thing is pretty funny too. No disease or random tumors here, just gigantic people and animals, or tiny ones, as the case may be. Better still, one random mutation can create a perfect predator, with claws, fangs, superior abilities. Or it can splice genes if you happen to get bitten by a radioactive spider, perfectly melding the attributes of two completely different creatures.
Anyway, what are your favourite misconceptions (or interesting fictional properties) of atomic radiation.
i would have to say the hulk. gettting hit by radiation would either kill u or make feeble and sick beyond belief. the hulk is the the total opposite of that. who knew it could turn u into a giant ass kicking monster.
"Dont be a fool for ur tool"
Weren't the Fantastic 4 given their powers through radiation when they travelled into space?
ASHTHECAT wrote:
> Weren't the Fantastic 4 given their powers through radiation
> when they travelled into space?
yup they fall into the same catergory as the hulk and spider man instead of agoinzing death of radiation poison or something like that they become superheroes!
"Dont be a fool for ur tool"
And Superman's x-ray vision. Hello, x-ray radiation emanating from someone's eyes? Does he have radium or some such thing lodged in his brain?
You know, "Day the World Ended" did pretty well in this respect. Some of the animals and humans became mutants, but most died (if memory serves). They skewed it a little with the animals mutated aboard the test ships that were sketched.
You know what is throwing me off here? Trying to remember if what my memory is telling me was from the original or from one of the knock-offs.
Also, what is often largely ignored, is that airborne particles are a huge culprit as far as radiation contamination goes.
The weird thing about x-ray vision is that superman would need a radiation source on the other side of the object he's viewing.
Andrew wrote:
> Also, what is often largely ignored, is that airborne particles
> are a huge culprit as far as radiation contamination goes.
One of the things that impressed me about The Day After was that it actually showed fallout as a radioactive dust that was settling back to the ground in the days after the blast. Nice scene with Steve Guttenberg and that chick running around outside, kicking up the dust. You can just imagine what it's doing to them.
I always get a kcik out of how nuclear reactors turn into nuclear bombs if you shove a few sticks of dynamite in there somewhere. You need to compress the radioactive material to a critical mass in order to get a nuclear explosion. Just destroying a nuclear reactor would create an explosion, probably when the cooling system blew apart, but there wouldn't be any critical mass achieved, there'd just be a huge amount of radiation released, like Chernobyl. But no 10 megaton blast.
My favorite example of this would be Ghosts of Mars, where they blow up a nuclear reactor which, of course, makes it into a nuclear bomb. Not only that, but the characters are only a few kilometers away from the reactor when it blows, and they switch to a view from orbit, and the explosion is the size of Texas.
Mr. Hockstatter wrote:
> You need to compress the radioactive material to a
> critical mass in order to get a nuclear explosion.
>
I think you are mixing physical properties, here. You cannot compress something to create mass. Compression is related to density, but cannot change mass itself.
The critical mass is there or it is not.
Also, IIRC, the idea of compressing something with an explosive to create a nuclear explosion is related to a fusion device (like the H-bomb), where as critical mass is a fission device concept.
In a fission device, a critical mass *WILL* explode - all it needs to start the process is neutron or two. Basically, the critical mass is the mass at which there are sufficient neutrons produced to sustain a chain fission reaction, which is initiated by neutron bombardment.
A fusion device, such as the H-bomb, has hydrogen as it's real explosive material, but uses the shock produced from a fission explosion to compress the H2 enough to fuse into helium. AFAIK, the fusion device has nothing directly to do with critical mass, since it is not neutron cascade that causes the chain reaction (though one would need a critical mass of active material to sustain the fission process).
The early history of the H-bomb engineering was a fascinating and frightening footnote in 20th Century History. One of the first bombs made produced an explosion that was many, many times larger than the designed thought it would be, which is really scary if you think about it.
Actually, fission devices do use compression, but what compression does is reduce the critical mass to less than the amount of fissile material. Critical mass, as I understand it, is determined by a ratio of mass to surface area. A small ball of plutonium has a higher ratio of surface area (opportunity for neutrons to escape) to mass (neutrons released). As the ball gets bigger, the ratio changes, and a lower percentage of neutrons escape, with more colliding and causing additional reactions until kaboom. No added neutrons are needed, since the natural radioactive decay of the material is already giving them off. Basically, a big enough piece of plutonium or enriched uranium will blow up all by itself, without any help.
The simple way to reach critical mass is to slam two smaller pieces of fissile material together. The Hiroshima bomb was of this type.
Compression (using shaped charges) works not by increasing mass but by reducing surface area (the ball gets smaller while retaining the same mass), accomplishing the same result. I think it might actually be more efficient though. This was the type used for the Trinity test, and on Nagasaki.
Post Edited (04-28-04 08:50)
Whew...You guys are giving me a headache...
Of course - if Bruce Banner/Spider-Man/The Fantastic Four all died horrible deaths instead of gaining super powers, it goes without saying they wouldn't have made as big an impact...
It's the kind of sad inevitability, like main characters never dying...
10
Fair enough. I knew they used explosives to slam two smaller pieces together in fission devices, but I was thinking that was to keep the masses apart for 'safer' handling, then jam them together quickly.
"The Fourth Protocol" with Pierce Brosnan and Michael Caine I think gives about as good an overview of building a fission device as in any movie I've seen.
A couple of years ago, I saw a pretty cool Outer Limits episode where a kid discovered, while taking a Physics or Engineering test, a way to make a fusion device more efficient of powerful or something. He went a little nuts and took the class hostage.
****SPOILER BELOW****
He ended up getting killed by the 'authorities.' The show ended with another kid taking a test and discovering the same thing.
I see what you mean. Not sure how this thread degenerated into intelligent scientific discussion. I was kind of hoping for everybody's favourite crazy fictional properties of radiation, and maybe some examples.
Post Edited (04-28-04 10:04)
Yes, my thoughts exactly. Andy C and ulthar...there is to be no more intelligent discussion in this forum...now go sit in the corner!
I used to work as a foundry estimator were we made 1000 to 65,000 lbs steel castings. Some specs not call for "X-Ray" of the casting (It really uses a Gamma source since X-rays don't really get through metal, but for simplification the term X-ray or RT, radiographic inspection, was used)
Anyway, our source was inside a lead sheilded concrete bunker in a saparate building into which we would place the castings, close the door and expose the area needed to be inspected for however long it took to get the shot. (Depended on the thickness of the metal)
Our source was so powerful that a 5 minute exposure would be fatal to a human, BUT NOT TO THE YELLOWJACKET THAT GOT CAUGHT IN A 15 MINUTE SHOT!!!
HE WAS MAD!!! or to say the least a little aggrivated.
Our X-Ray tech got stung by that yellowjacket when he went in to remove the RT film. We joked with him for months that he should now be able to lift cars, sting people with his butt or sprout wings or something.
He just said it was painful. ( It also didn't help that the yellowjacket flew up his pants leg and stung just a few inches from... you get the picture.)
A common problem we have around here is the boards ability to discuss almost anything with insight and reason. I imagine it causes the random troll who stops by to pull their hair out in frustration.
Ok, for crazy radiation, how about "The Hideous Sun Demon?" Having been exposed to deadly radiation, the protagonist only turns into a monster when he gets too much sunlight. SPF 1000 rems please!
Or you could talk about "The Incredible Melting Man." There you have the exposure turning a man into an oozing vampire monster.
But I think one of my favorite ones is not radiation, but toxic waste. In "Mutant" the toxic waste contamination turns people into weird vampires. The become nocturnal and sores open up in their palms. The sores both ooze deadly toxic pus and also serve as leech-like mouths for siphoning off somebody's blood.
No one's mentioned "Hell Comes to Frogtown"?? Radiation turned half of the human race into mutant giant frogs and the remaining half is a mix of (non sterile) hot women and (mostly) sterile men.
>A couple of years ago, I saw a pretty cool Outer Limits episode where a kid
>discovered, while taking a Physics or Engineering test, a way to make a fusion
>device more efficient of powerful or something. He went a little nuts and took the
>class hostage.
I believe he discovered cold fusion.
Favorite scenes:
War of the Worlds - They drop an ataomic bomb on the martian ships, with the resulting explosion being watched by both the military and by a bunch of people on a hillside. Forgetting that half of them were probably blinded by the flash, they were almost certainly close enough to get hit with the fallout.
It - To try and destroy a golem, they drop an atomic bomb on it. In the last few seconds, the hero races in to rescue the girl and get her to safety on his motorcycle. Of course they're safe, they were a good half-mile away when the bomb went off...
Fiend Without a Face was an interesting movie, in that the hero dynamites a nuclear reactor, and it does not go up in a mushroom cloud. In fact, it doesn't seem to do much harm at all.
On the other hand, the same movie also uses atomic power to boost radar until it can see the entire USSR from Canada. To me, that's almost sillier than the invisible brain-sucking brain monsters it creates from people's thoughts.
I notice a lot of the older movies present atomic energy as something that can be broadcast or piped from one place to another, or fed directly into devices. It's seen as some magical technology of smashing atoms and harvesting the energy, rather than just boiling water over decaying uranium. Growing up on cheesy sci-fi movies, you can imagine how disappointed I was when I learned how a nuclear reactor really works.
Post Edited (04-29-04 05:41)
I think a lot of people have become disappointed by the way nuclear reactors actually work. Perhaps that is the reason why most of the mayhem nowadays is caused by chemical waste and/or genetic manipulation. Eight legged freaks/Arac Attack is a case in point. Those spiders clearly should have caused by radiation. Other examples are the recents versions of Daredevil and Spiderman.
People have become somewhat less naive where radiation is concerned. Most of us have a pretty good idea what it can and can't do.
Genetic manipulation, on the other hand, seems a plausible explanation for mutations. Besides that, it's about as new and misunderstood as atomic power was in the 50s - something akin to magic, full of untold promise and unspeakable peril. It really is this generation's atomic power. Can't wait to see what people make of the current crop of movies in 30 or 40 years.
Oh Andrew, I really hope you weren't referring to me as a troll. I like to joke around, that's all; seldom am I serious. I don't mean anything by it, just how I am.
Anyway, I came up with something. Anyone ever see those films from I guess the 50's or 60's that they would show school kids how to survive nukes? Hide under a desk or roll yourself up in a carpet...right. I also love seeing the old films of nuclear bomb testing where you'd have these idiots with their glasses on standing behind concrete walls with viewing slots in them. Bet those glasses helped.
Better still, the films where they're sitting a few miles away on deck chairs watching the blast with their goggles. It's almost like they were sunbathing. Wonder if they used suntan lotion.
I actually went through an air raid drill once in grade school, probably 1977 or there abouts. Now this school was way out in the country, about 70 miles or so from NYC, with nothing of any military significance around, even in town. It was just silly, I thought then. Later on in high school our science teacher asked us to demonstrate what we'd do if a nuke came down on the city (about 5-10 miles away) Most everybody hid under chairs or tables but my table mate & I looked at each other and just sat in our seats. Given the choice of living in a post nuclear apocalypse, I'd just as soon you take my right off the bat. I don't care for fighting frogpeople
>I actually went through an air raid drill once in grade school, probably 1977 or
>there abouts.
I went through a couple of those in grade school also. Everyone had to take their chairs into the hallway.