> they could produce enough neutrinos to be dangerous
Dangerous in the sense of "ionizing radiation" or in the sense of "this will overturn careers"? Getting killed by neutrinos sounds like a freak accident from a sci-fi story.
Dangerous in the sense of "ionizing radiation" or in the sense of "this will overturn careers"? Getting killed by neutrinos sounds like a freak accident from a sci-fi story.
> Most of the ionization energy dose deposited in a person will come from interactions in the soil and other objects in the person’s vicinity rather than from the more direct process of neutrinos interacting inside a person. At TeV energy scales, much less than one percent of the energy flux from the daughters of such interactions will be absorbed in the relatively small amount of matter contained in a person, with the rest passing beyond the person.
If you're looking to get bit by a radioactive spider, spiders living down range of such a collider might be a decent place to start.
For instance if you are building a space colony there is an optimal thickness for the biological shield: most high energy particles blast right through you and if you have too much shielding there are too many opportunities for a particle to explode a nucleus in the shield and multiply the number of radioactive particles dramatically. Off the top of the head I'd say about six feet of soil is about right, but you don't do better with 60 feet or anything reasonable until you are talking multiple kilometers (maybe of vacuum or air space) that give shower muons time to decay.
Speaking of muons, it is an easy experiment often used in physics education to measure the the lifetime of cosmic ray muons produced in showers.
https://www.physlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Muon_cali...
If a muon gets slowed down by matter you see a pulse of radiation, then you see a pulse of radiation a few microseconds later when the particle decays. If you measure the time gap in two-pulse events you can get the half-life. It was a popular experiment in Cornell's 510 lab for grad students who weren't particularly interested in doing experiments because it was so easy.
It's dangerous to be near hydrogen sulfide. It's dangerous to be near a primed hand grenade. It's dangerous to be near an artillery shell impact. It's dangerous to be near a drunk driver. It's dangerous to be near an active battlefield or even near a war.
But they are all different nears.
When you say its dangerous to be near the plane of the collision, are we talking 1m, 10m, 100m, 1000m, etc? Are there dangerous byproducts created that might kill you even after the event itself? That's useful information. A general "don't be near" isn't really helpful.
As far as the danger, the paper estimates up to a few mSv/year if you hung out in the wrong place all the time. You definitely wouldn't want to have a town in the way of that, but it's not an immediate danger on an individual level. The danger would be greater/more concentrated if there were straight segments in the accelerator, or if it was closer to the surface (smaller circle of intersection).
What wad said was so vague as to be practically useless.
"...they give examples of accelerators buried at 300 meters which would create a radiation hazard at a radius of 62 kilometers"
Again, this is overly vague and unhelpful. As I replied to LegitShady, no specific mention is made about the type of radiation dangers or how long radiation would be expected to linger in soils etc.
More specific estimates of safe distances versus collider power would be helpful, same too about the nature and type of radioactive byproducts in soil (what elements would be expected to become radioactive along with their half-lifes, etc.).
Sometimes I think it ought to compulsory for scientists to study philosophy—at least its parts that deal with logic, language and semantics.
Philosophy defines near —like good— as a 'simple notion' that cannot be subdivided into simpler terms. The word needs qualifiers/quantifiers (figures, distances, amounts) for it to be useful—info that the paper was overly vague about or omitted to specify.
In theory hitting nukes with energetic neutrino ray would be enough to disarm them. By melting fissile material under normal circumstances.