The Ethics of Space Travel

You'd think somebody with as much nuclear paranoia as mine would have considered the amount of radiation a person would be exposed to on a trip to Mars. But I didn't. I think to some degree, I assumed ships were shielded and left it at that. It's how it works in the movies, right?

Picture of Space Shuttle Atlantis, from NASA web site

Selections from my bookmarks

I've been bookmarking links for years. You know how it goes; you see something you want to read, but maybe you're not in the mood for it right that second. Or maybe you don't have time. So it goes.

My bookmarks are fairly..er.."organized". I have many folders, have had good intentions for all of the headings. Some of them pertain directly to particular writing projects (so I've got ones called "Rebel yell" and "Detroit"), at least three are for recipes I've almost certainly never cooked, and many are just things I thought might be interesting. One folder is called "inspiration", because of the piles of information in it, there's sure to be story fodder.

So, while looking at those bookmarks instead of editing The Last Song, I found a few I figured I'd share. In a way, they're loosely connected in my mind.

I thought these pictures were eye-catching, and would eventually lead me to some story or another. They're all from the 40's, if memory serves, though they're in color (!).

This one is from XKCD, and is a Radiation Dose Chart, using Sieverts, which is the unit for an absorbed dose, named after Rolf Maximilian Sievert, who studied the biological effects of radiation.

Here's A-E on The Observatory ~ The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. Links on the bottom take you to the rest of the definitions on the site. I'm glad I re-found this one, as I've been trying to build the vernacular for my science fiction space culture. The writer also has the blog Rocketpunk Manifesto, which looks to have even more great information on it.

And I forgot about this charming Forbes article, Why I Named my Dog After Neil Armstrong, published in 2012 not long after Neil Armstrong himself passed away.

Nuclear Accidents (I can't be the only one interested)

A few years back, in the nascent stages of my nuclear paranoia and layman's research into the topic of the history of both bombs and reactors, I read Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Arsenal, by Michal D'Antonio. Hanford is one of the nuclear sites that enriched plutonium for the Trinity test, Fat Man and Little Boy, back in World War II.

Imagine my surprise to see in the news an article about six containment vessels leaking at a site in Washington state. At Hanford, of course, which is (I believe) known as America's most contaminated nuclear site. "Surprise" being subjective, of course. Considering some of the things in Atomic Harvest, I'd known that employees became pretty lax when it came to safety standards, even when personal safety was the issue. I'd known that they used little red Goddamn wagons to transport plutonium discs around the site. I'd known that when people are around dangerous things, they acclimate, and they become reckless in the outsider's eyes. Familiarity breeds contempt, so the saying goes, though I'm sure that's not what whoever said that meant. It makes good enough sense in my context here. So, for the Department of Energy to  “not adequately analyze data it had that would have shown the other tanks that are leaking.” (per the above linked New York Times article) at the Hanford site....well, that doesn't surprise me. Our nuclear history is riddled with such casual Goddamn negligence. That, and why is the DOE looking at that at all? Why isn't the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Would it have made the difference?