CBS Detroit:

As the rhetoric ramps up over North Korea and nuclear weapons, the cash registers have been ringing at a local Army Supply store, where some are apparently prepping for a third World War.

Ben Orr, the manager of Joe’s Army Navy in Royal Oak, says he’s been selling a lot of “prepper items” over the past week or so.

“We’ve been very busy. Unusually busy, I’d say,” Orr told WWJ’s Sandra McNeill. “It’s definitely an increase, just in selling all the normal prepper stuff, end of the world stuff. A lot of water prep stuff, food, MREs — the military meals.”

And there’s been a substantial increase in the sale of a particular item they don’t sell much of — a so-called radiation antidote called potassium iodide.

“It actually stops your thyroid from absorbing any radiation. So, it fills your thyroid with iodine, which it normally does anyways,” said Orr. “Your body can’t tell the difference between bad, radioactive iodine and acceptable iodine, so it actually will stop you from getting thyroid cancer.”

Oh good Lord!  Stop it.  Just stop it.  Your ignorance is dangerous and you could hurt yourself and perhaps hurt your family too.  Stop the hysterics.

Let’s discuss a few things concerning radiation, radioactivity and nuclear events.  If you’re a layman, most articles you will read on these subjects will either be written way above your head, or by people who only pretend to know what they’re talking about because they lack the proper education and experience to speak intelligently.  Even the man who wrote this article on surviving a nuclear attack is in that category.

I could wax haughty and throw words around showing what I know about photon, electron and neutron shielding, the theoretical and mathematical difference between a Rad, Roentgen and a Rem, committed dose equivalent to organs, total effective dose equivalent, albedos, Keff (criticality) calculations, the Boltzmann transport equation and reactor kinetics.  But it would do you precisely no good.  None.  You wouldn’t be one bit better off after having read an article like that than you are right now.  You would have to take an advanced engineering degree or train in the radiological sciences in order to stay with me in such a discussion, and you can’t right now, so that’s that.  Something else needs to be done because the conversation the “journalist” had with that prepper above is off the charts stupid.

Potassium Iodine, or KI, doesn’t stop the thyroid from “absorbing radiation.”  It isn’t a magic radiation pill, regardless of how pepper and survivalist web sites market it.  There is nothing magic about it.  There is a little bit it can do under the right circumstances, and it can’t do anything else.  If you take it – and be aware that taking KI when you don’t need it can lead to severe health problems, especially in the young and old – it will load your thyroid with iodine and prevent the absorption of any more iodine, radioactive or not.  The intent behind this is to prevent radioactive iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid and thus the absorbed radiation dose from such a localized source.

What it doesn’t do is prevent the thyroid from “absorbing radiation.”  The entire whole body, including every organ in your body and the skin (which is treated as an organ by the ICRP) will still attenuate and absorb radiation from external sources, such as immersion in a cloud of radioactive material.  Charged particles (such as betas, or in other words, electrons) can be essentially stopped by clothing, skin and just a little tissue overlying the organs.

You cannot wear enough shielding to stop gammas or neutrons, although being inside a structure deep in the ground could help.  But you cannot stay in such structures unless you have millions of dollars worth of engineered safety features, like leak tight doors, HEPA and charcoal filtration for breathing air, food stores, water purification systems, and so on.  That’s because part of the problem isn’t just penetrating particles from radioactive material, but the transport of that radioactive material into your living space, food and on to and into your person through breathing or ingestion.

Radioactive iodine isn’t nearly the biggest problem.  Cesium is a thyroid-seeker as well, and the half lives for Cs-134 and Cs-137 are significant compared to the longest-lived iodine isotope, I-131 at 8.01 days.  The heavy elements such as the actinides are bone seekers and can cause cancer from ingestion and inhalation.  You name an organ, and I can name you an isotope (produced in nuclear fission) or list of isotopes that seek that organ.  For your own study, you can reference Federal Guidance Report No. 11.

Furthermore, immersion in airborne radioactivity causes dose to your whole body and all of your organs from exposure to externally generated particles.  Federal Guidance Report No. 12 outlines dose coefficients from each of the relevant radionuclides (immersed in a semi-infinite cloud, or an infinite hemispherical cloud).  Dr. Keith Eckerman and his group (before he retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory) created these wonderful documents using ICRP models.  I know Keith, and I know they did a great job on these documents.  If you have any doubts about the potential dose from airborne radioactivity, you can refer to these documents (available on the web).

So what are you to do to prepare for nuclear disasters?  I would like to divide my simple and practical counsel into three categories: commercial nuclear power plants, so-called “dirty” nuclear weapons, and nuclear warfare.

Concerning commercial nuclear reactors, in America they are designed per the code of federal regulations with an overall negative power coefficient.  This means a number of complicated things as it pertains to Doppler broadening of resonance peaks for capture and fission of neutrons and the resultant power, and moderator temperature feedback in a nuclear reactor.  Let me simplify it for you, since we don’t have the time to convey an advanced engineering degree.

Commercial nuclear reactors, upon sustaining transients, shut down.  They do not explode like nuclear bombs.  Ever.  But what about Chernobyl?  Well, Russian nuclear reactor design is in fact designed with a potential overall positive power coefficient (the RMBK-1000 design), in part because they wanted the reactor to be neutronically loosely coupled, graphite moderated rather than water moderated, and capable of being refueled online where weapons grade Plutonium could be taken from the fuel.  It’s a complicated story, but the moderator (water) was a neutron poison rather than a positive reactivity feedback in the reactor.  Once a heatup occurred due to testing they were conducting, it fed the power excursion and led to an increase in power by a factor of 100 within one second, according to multi-dimensional analysis performed for this reactor accident.

This was still a steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion.  But what about Fukushima Daiichi?  For that Japanese reactor, it was designed safely.  They experienced a Tsunami of over 30 meters, leading to destruction of the plant equipment and transport of the resultant radioactive material off site.  And the death toll from radiation exposure?  Zero.  None.  The death toll from the Tsunami itself?  Over 15,000 souls.

If you are ever told by the authorities to evacuate due to a nuclear power plant accident, your best bet would be to stay put and watch the circus unfold around you in the safety of your own home.  The U.S. had our core melt – it is called TMI, or Three Mile Island.  Total radiation exposure offsite?  Zero.  Nothing.  American nuclear reactor designs, in addition to have negative overall power coefficients, have hard containment designs.  You are unsafe if you put your family on the road around all of the other panicked, foolish people who think nuclear reactors explode like bombs.  They don’t, so please end that myth and tell everyone you know who thinks their local nuclear reactor explodes to get educated about it.  Stop fearing what they don’t see.

As for so-called “dirty” nuclear weapons, those are mainly for instigating terror, not any tactical value.  In order to make such a weapon effective, one must be able to aerate radioactive material in order to cause dose from intake and uptake of that material.  That first requires radioactive material, and secondly requires that it be capable of aeration, and thirdly (and most importantly) that the space the terrorist intends to target be a confined space.

Confined spaces are dangerous.  Crowds are dangerous.  You can get trampled, you can run out of oxygen, you can be exposed to toxic gases, you can be shot, and you can be assaulted and unable to fight back.  I’ve seen the results of unintentional deployment of a Cardox system on humans, and it’s not pretty.  And … humans can breath radioactive material in confined spaces.  Dispersal is your friend, and there is no possibility of dispersal to the point of being at a safe concentration if you are in a confined space.  Stay out of confined spaces.  That means concerts by your favorite band, that means bars, that means fire trap buildings.  It means tunnels, it means tanks, ravines and caves.  Do not go spelunking.

Anyway, the value of dirty weapons is mitigated by the fact that they are like chlorine.  When AQI was deploying chlorine in Fallujah, I said they were stupid.  They could have exploded conventional ordnance and done far greater damage than deployment of chlorine.  The same is true of dirty weapons.  If a terrorist wants to deploy the greatest tactical advantage, he won’t choose dirty weapons or chlorine (or other chemical weapons).  He will explode conventional ordnance.

As for nuclear war, this is a very complicated topic, and one on which I am less of an expert than the above topics.  It’s certainly possible to survive a nuclear blast, witness some of the Japanese survivors of WWII.  Yet if nuclear war occurs with a real nuclear power such as Russia, it would be very bad.  Seats of power and government, military installations, ports and the littoral regions would be hardest hit, and many millions of people would perish.

Those left would be breathing aerated radioactive material (intake), and eating food that had radioactive material in it (uptake).  This subject requires a whole host of articles, including such topics as engineered safety features such a HEPA and charcoal filters, leak-tight doors, food stores, anti-contamination clothing and dress-out procedures, and bunkers and structures to help shield humans from external exposure from radioactive material.  We can wade through the details later on this in multiple posts if readers want that, but something tells me that you don’t.

The most useful thing I can tell you is that the cheapest, best way to protect your family in such an event is to scan your food.  I was in training once with a Russian engineer who lived in Kiev, and even years after the event at Chernobyl he was still scanning his food for beta and gamma radiation, as was everyone else in Kiev.  They had been given GM detectors and taught the simple procedures for doing that.

I have an Eberline GM detector with a pancake probe.  That may be a little expensive for your tastes, but there are detectors on the market cheaper than that.  This reminds me of a science project where I used this to help my son with his High School project, but more on that in a moment.

Now let’s deal briefly with North Korea.  They aren’t going to go to war with the U.S. – at least, that’s my judgment.  They don’t want to perish.  They are starving to death and they want grain, other food stuffs and money.  They do this every so often, we make deals with them to sustain and support them for another decade, and they are happy to enslave their people unimpeded.

We created the problem of North Korea.  It’s like the welfare state.  If we would have left them alone and ignored them, and told South Korea to defend itself, we would not be where we are.  North Korea would be much more open and competitive – or they would have starved.  But we must provide that umbrella of protection for Japan, Taiwan and South Korea because we are imperialists.  It’s what imperialists do.

It reminds me of the Elk in the preserve near Jackson Hole.  I stayed right across from the National Elk preserve one week a couple of years ago.  It’s a vast, grassy plane where the Elk can feed in the winter after they come down out of Yellowstone.  They return to Yellowstone for much better eating and cooler temperatures in the spring.  The environmentalists got the bright idea to feed the Elk.  Now the Elk won’t go back to Yellowstone, and they have a new welfare state in Jackson Hole.

I have my doubts that NK has been able to miniaturize nuclear weapons.  I also have doubts in their solid fuel rocket program.  I also have doubts in their electronics and ability to design and construct nose cones that don’t burn up upon reentry.  In any case, this is the welfare state we’ve created, and we’re better off to cut the cord of dependence right now, ignoring them for good.

In summary, until I can put something better together that is more detailed and useful, here are a few tips.  When faced with a commercial nuclear reactor accident in America, stay home, watch the festivities, and have a cookout that night.  Concerning chemical and radiological (“dirty”) weapons, stay away from confined spaces (structures and buildings if and when you can, subways, trains, tanks with limited egress, corridors and hallways with limited egress, roadways and byways and any other situation where your means of escape, evasion and egress have been restricted or limited).  If you are really concerned about nuclear war, then purchase a GM detector and do a little research on how to scan your food before deciding to consume it.

Now a brief lesson in just how stupid the public school system is.  My oldest son Joshua had a science project due back when he was in High School.  I have a radioactive rock at home.  God made it.  It was given to me by someone who visited a Uranium ore mine.  It’s natural.  God made it.  It cannot hurt you unless I throw it at you.

I suggested that we experiment with it, and Josh liked that idea.  I suggested that we learn things concerning Gauss’s law, and so we used the rock as a point source (it loosely approximated a point source) and learned about 1/R^2.  Then we tested Gauss’s law on sound by borrowing a sound meter from the sound engineer at church, and then just for good measure tested Gauss’s law for light by using a light meter from one of the safety technicians where I worked.

Then I suggested that we test radiation attenuation.  First I covered the pancake probe with a credit card to block the betas, and then we tested gamma radiation at a certain distance.  Then we got an aluminum sheet that reduced the dose rate to half of that value.  I asked Josh what he thought would happen if I put another sheet of that same aluminum in front of the probe, and he speculated, but was surprised to see that instead of reducing it to zero, it reduced it to half again.  And half again, and so on.  First, the dose rate was 100% of its value, then 50%, then 25%, then 12.5%, and so on.  So I had him chart this all out, and then explained the exponential curve he’d just drawn.  He understood that you can never stop all radiation, you can only exponentially attenuate it.

When I sent him to school with the rock and story board, I figured that no one would believe it unless I sent the GM detector with him.  So I did some calculations on dose rate at one meter converting counts per minute to dose rate, compared it to ICRP limits, showed it was safe, and sealed it with my PE stamp.  I have since considered sleeping with it under my pillow at night just for good measure, but my wife wouldn’t like the décor.  Later that morning we got a call from the school.  We were told to come get the rock before they called the Charlotte Hazmat team to confiscate it.

I had plans for that rock.  I wanted to go in where they had it under lock and key, invite the school authorities to watch, remove it from the bag, and lick the rock.  Sadly, my wife got there before me and took possession of the rock.  Josh failed that science project because the teacher didn’t understand what he did.

This happened because public schools suck, do not teach the STEM courses, and staff their positions with idiots who have been trained in colleges of communism.  For many years I invested in Christian schools for my children, but stopped when I figured out that they were full of cliques that impede education.  I transitioned to public schools partly because of the expense of Christian schools (I spent as much every year as you would for a college education), and was turned off by virtually every experience I had with the communists in public education.  If I had it to do over, I would have home-schooled them all twelve years.

Don’t be like that dumbass teacher, always turning to the state, and never willing to learn.

UPDATE: As I was saying …