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Comment by cmckn | Hacker News Reader

The cavalier dumping of waste into lakes and rivers is wild to think about. I was recently reading about various mid-century plans to dam or widen the Bering strait in order to intentionally melt the Arctic. It’s astonishing how humanity viewed and treated our ecosystem so recently in our history.

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I lived near Los Alamos, NM which was the site of the Manhattan Project. I was looking to rent a building for an art studio and one of the places I looked at was across the street from a large empty lot with a chain link fence, wrapped in green canvas. I looked into this and it had been a primary dump for nuclear weapons development in the 40s - barrels in unlined trenches, buried about 20-40 feet deep. They recently cleaned it up at the cost of a couple billion, if I recall.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/03/f61/TA-21...

Then I looked into what was on the end of that road - a radioactive metal milling facility which discharged waste water containing various toxic radioactive metals directly off a cliff into the desert (it's also a very beautiful area). They recently cleaned that up and the metal plume went down over 500 feet. In fact, all wastewater from the labs went to a central area in town (now an ecological park) and was simply dumped into the stream. The old metal mill area is now being redeveloped for housing. I asked a nuclear scientist I knew if he'd feel comfortable living there, and he said "Sure! I mean, you might want to get a geiger counter".

Then, I realized I was living 3/4 of a mile from the large material disposal area which is currently the lab's main waste dump - TA 54 I believe?

https://n3b-la.com/mda/

Reading about all the areas there and what is public about what they've stored was somewhat disturbing. Most of it was stored with very little documentation. But, the scientists and employees don't have any problem with living in town. From what I gather they stopped dumping waste carelessly in the 60s. I think they have it under control at this point, but there continues to be debate about long-term storage.

> The old metal mill area is now being redeveloped for housing. I asked a nuclear scientist I knew if he'd feel comfortable living there, and he said "Sure! I mean, you might want to get a geiger counter".

Radioactivity is, funnily, one of the easier human health hazards to manage for precisely this reason - by definition, it's (generally) detectable. Not as easily as, say, a bear, but easier than a virion or most regular chemical contaminants.

Plus, radionuclides don't actively evolve.

I have been fantasizing about a Covid-19 dosimeter - something that would indicate whether an indoor space is safe. It's fun to think about what kind of technology would be completely transformative for our pandemic response, if only it were cheap enough to be widespread.

A first pass at that would be a CO2 dosimeter.

Because humans breathe out CO2, and if the ventilation in the area is poor relative to the number of humans inside of it, then you will get a higher concentration of CO2, and thus you would also be more likely to have a higher concentration of viruses and other substances that can be airborne.

Just because you have high CO2 doesn’t necessarily mean that you have high concentrations of the virus particles that could cause a COVID infection, but there is a high correlation, and high CO2 is bad for you in plenty of other ways as well.

So, yes please — give me a cheap, portable, badge-like way of measuring my exposure to high levels of CO2!

not seen wearable ones, but CO2 indicators for classrooms, offices, ... have been a widely promoted thing for this reason, with plenty commercial and DIY options.

> It's fun to think about what kind of technology would be completely transformative for our pandemic response, if only it were cheap enough to be widespread.

If people stayed home and followed some basic precautions it would be pretty effective.

I say this from New Zealand, with covid finally having a foothold and community spread escalating, seemingly from non-compliance.

If there’s one thing we learned with this entire pandemic, it is that expecting humans to take precautions and comply indefinitely is just not reasonable policy, in particular when the threat is invisible and evolves “slowly” (months instead of minutes). Same applies to other kinds of threats: everyone knows they should eat healthy, avoid sugar, etc. everyone knows people die to diabetes every day. People systemically still don’t care. (I’m not comparing the morality of spreading a virus vs dying if a disease that only affects you, just using the example as more evidence on how humans deal with threats and how self-compliance-based policies tend to always fail)

There might be a colony of the virus on a surface, or in a few air-born droplets hanging out in the room. If your device didn't happen to sample those particular droplets or surfaces, you'd never know they were there.

True, there are multiple methods for transmitting the viral particles in question, but contact transmission would require that you actually come into contact with the surface in question. I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but I believe that contact transmission is considered fairly rare for COVID.

Moreover, having a partial solution to the problem is better than no solution at all.

What's truly wild to think about is how eagerly and relatively easily humans completely shaped nature to our desires until recently, and now an uncomfortably large number of people today think any obvious harm being done to the planet is completely natural and humans are too small and insignificant to be a factor.

We went from being a few steps away from actively melting the Arctic, to people saying humans couldn't possibly melt ice.

And they segue straight from "humans couldn't possibly influence climate" to "and if there's a problem we can fix it with technology" with a straight face.

Some Russian statesmen propose that Russia stands to gain from global warming. The radiation from the most polluted lake in the world dried up and blew away. I wager that happens again.

Where did it blow away to? What you're describing sounds to me like a plume of radioactive dust drifting across and mostly settling on a huge area down wind of the lake. Who lives there, or eats agricultural produce from there?

According to Wikipedia, half a million people irradiated from caesium and strontium isotopes in 1968. Sounds like it happened just as you describe. The headwaters of the Kama, Tobol and Ural rivers run through this part of Russia. We know that caesium from Fukushima was detectable in Canada. That was a #7, this was a #6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

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