This was the greatest Christmas ever. Unlike last Christmas, the Old Country Girl was out of the hospital and went nuts putting up enough decorations to be a landing beacon. All the kids and grand kids and near future step grand kids came over (over the Eve and Day) and all were happy and grateful for what they received. Their laughter and happiness was good for my soul. At least for my children and grand children and new grandchildren, all are smart, happy, and doing well. They will be part of the solution for this country, not part of the problem.

I hope it doesn't snow, because I will be spending the next week putting away all those decorations! Of course, when you are in your 70's, anything you survive is a plus.

Winter Solstice

The Old Country Girs is going all out this year. She even has wreaths for the milk cans. She and the rest of us missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years because she was in hospital with an antibiotic IV drip 24/7. We weren't sure she would ever get out, but she hardheaded enough to do it. As a warning to anyone who peruses this blog, Be vary careful about putting metal appliances into your body. If you have had lypmhs removed, discuss the situation with an infectious disease doctor, along with your orthopedic surgon.

Anyway, we won't be painting ourselves blue and doing our winter solstice dance this year, because we can't get around very well anymore and I don't want the neighbors to die laughing.

Fall on the Ranch

It' Halloween time and the Mexican hay wagon has been over-decorated by the Old Country Girl.

The Trees are starting to turn and the leaves are floating to the ground like a snow storm with giant flakes. The ground is carpeted with leaves.

Wartime Nuclear Radiation Wrap Up Part 4

Parts 1, 2, and 3 are just information the average person should know and simple precautions to take in the event of a nuclear terrorist incident that involves normal fall-out. Becase, in the event of a mass evacuation, many will probably be stranded on crowded and blocked exit highways, these were instructions for protecting yourself in place. It may be safer to hunker down in a place you know, like your home or lake cabin.

These instructions generally do not apply to radiation incidents caused by reactor leaks and "dirty" bombs. The half-life of that radiation is considerably longer than that of fall-out. Before anythng happens, as part of your disaster preparadness, it would be a good idea to look up your local radiation emergency center personnel and find out how to get information from them during an emergency.

Wartime Nuclear Radiation (Part 3) Calculating Your Exposure

The wartime military nuclear occupation types use a rule of thumb for calculating personnel radiation exposure called the FIT forever rule. This rule essentially states:

The total radiation exposure, if you stayed in the radiation area forever equals five times the intensity of the radiation at the time of entering the radiation area times the time since the nuclear detonation.

I have a quibble with this with the definition of time since detonation. In reality, all that stuff that goes up (people, bridges, grocery stores, etc) takes a while to come back down. In fact, a significant level of injure and death is caused by people staring up at the mushroom crowd, only to be hit be rocks, cars, and other hard objects. Think Tornados. We will talk about this in Part 4. The definition of time you should use is H+1 or H+2, depending on the size of the bomb. The real definition will be based on the disaster broadcasters that will give you the time of maximum radiation in your area. That would be H-max. If you dont have H-max then use one of the other Hs.

The FIT forever calculation is used as follows:

Given example -- H occurs at 9:00 am 0n 9/11/12.

Hmax occurs at 10:30am on 9/11/12

The intensity at Hmax is about 3000 rads/hour

If you can stay under good cover, essentially radiati0n free until

T = 5:30pm 9/11/12

After 7 hours, or at 5:30, the radiation level will be about 300Rads/hour

You would recieve: 5 x 300 Rads/hour x 7 Hours

or 10,500 Rads if you stayed forever, enough to bring you to room temperature.

If you re-entered the shielded area at 12:30 am on 9/12/12,

and stayed forever, you would avoid 5 x 30 Rads/hour x 14 hours or 2,100 Rads

To continue, if you had stayed shielded until 6:30 on 9/12/12, you would accumulate a radiation dose of 5 x 3 Rads/hour x 21 hours or 315 Rads for the rest of your life. This is quite survivable, assuming you limit radiation input later in your life. As further example: If you stayed under cover for a day and a half, you would have a lifetime exposure in that area of less than 5 Rads, which brings you into the peace time radiation worker exposure ranges. Calculate it yourself. If you can, you pass.

Wartime Nuclear Survival (Part 2) Fallout radiation

In Part 1, covered the two levels of radiation safety - the current industrial/medical/peacetime levels and the wartime level (after the bomb). Don't let any radiation guru try to con you into following the peacetime numbers. If the balloon goes up or an islamist blows up Manhatten, the radiation levels will be off the peacetime scales. We aren't talking about a nuclear generating station leak, we are talking about the radiactive remains of buildings, people, cars, dogs, grass, dirt etc. blowing in the wind. I can guarantee you that nothing blowing in the wind is going to be less than 2mr in any one hour.

The trick is to get yourself in the less than 25R group at best or 100R group at the worst. Since all care units will be massively overloaded, you don't want a broken arm, the sniffles, or radiation sickness much more than the barf stage. There won't be anybody there to take care of you. At this point, I don't think you will be vary concerned with cancer or two-headed babies. Your one aim in life is to survive. And survive you can!

Fallout radiation is not quite like the industrial or powerplant radiation you are "used" to. Fallout radiation IS made up of vaporized people, dogs, cats, cars, buildings, trees, lakes sidewalks, and schools. The average tenth-life for fallout is about 7 hours. In plain English, it will DECADE every seven hours after the radiation peak. e.g. If the radiation has peaked by midnight, by 7:00am it is one tenth what it was. By 2:00pm it will be 1/100th what it was at midnight. By 9:00 that night it will be 1/1000 what it was at midnight. Further, if the radiation was 1000R at midnight, it will be about 1R at nine the following evening. You can last a lot longer at 1R than at 1000R. This is where TIME, DISTANCE AND SHIELDING come in. Can you dig a hole six feet deep. Can you cover it with a board and lay in it for one or two days? You can if you want to live. It isn't that hard.

Even if you can't dig a hole, you can at least get to the center most point of your house.That should be at least 12' - 16' beneath the roof and probably a minimum of 10' from any outside wall. Tape up all your windows and doors and place your most massive flueniture between yourself and the outside. One radiation safety trick is to use distance to reduce the radiation intensity. The radiation intensity varies inversely with the square of the distande from the source. That means if you can move 10 feet from a radiation wall or ceiling, you can reduce the intensity by 100. If I had a wooden floor house, I would cut a hole in the center and start digging. You can always repair the hole in the floor (unless you are dead).

Continued

Wartime Nuclear Survival (Part 1) Basics

Nuclear Basics

Radiation safety and personal survival depend on three concepts:

1. Time -- The length of time you are exposed to the radiation

2. Distance -- How far you can get from the radiation source

3. Shielding -- any solid object you can put between you and the source of radiation.

Because I am an old phart and do not see the use of the new units (SI) used to describe radiation when they are harder to remember and don't add anything to your safety, I will use the unit Radiation Absorbed Dose (RAD). All those other sieverts, greys, etc were established to entice all the countries of the "civilized" world to participate in the new SI system, designed to restrain trade from the US.

The international entities and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have established radiation exposure limits for PEACETIME radiation exposure. They are based on the genetic pool background exposure concentrated and divided amoung radiation workers. Those limits are (but not limited to):

2mr in any one hour

100 mr in any one week

1250 mr in any one quarter

5000 mr (5R) per year

total of 5R for each year over the age of 18

Because this was once based on the gene pool, womyn and minors were restricted to 1/10 of the allowed dose. However, since womyn's lib, they takes the same chance as the rest of us.

NOW FORGET ALL THAT STUFF -- THIS IS WAR. OR SOME

HAS DECIDED TO DO IN THE GREAT SATAN

Here is what you gotta know:

25R An experienced blood chemist can begin to detect changes in blood.

100R Some folks are going to start to get sick.

200R Half of those exposed will get sick.

400R Everyone gets sick, half die.

600R Almost every one dies.

1000R Believe it or not, there are a small number still around.

Don't count on any of them being you.