What If? Read Free

dose from the core would be less than the normal background dose you get walking around. In fact, as long as you were underwater, you would be shielded frommost of that normal background dose. You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on the street.

    Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
    Th at’s if everything goes as planned. If there’s corrosion in the spent fuel rod casings, there may be some fission products in the water. Th ey do a pretty good job of keeping the water clean, and it wouldn’t hurt you to swim in it, but it’sradioactive enough that it wouldn’t be legal to sell it as bottled water. 1
    We know spent fuel pools can be safe to swim in because they’re routinely serviced by human divers.
    However, these divers have to be careful.
    On August 31, 2010, a diver was servicing the spent fuel pool at the Leibstadt nuclear reactor in Switzerland. He spotted an unidentified length of tubing on the bottomof the pool and radioed his supervisor to ask what to do. He was told to put it in his tool basket, which he did. Due to bubble noise in the pool, he didn’t hear his radiation alarm.
    When the tool basket was lifted from the water, the room’s radiation alarms went off. Th e basket was dropped back in the water and the diver left the pool. Th e diver’s dosimeter badges showed that he’d receiveda higher-than-normal whole-body dose, and the dose in his right hand was extremely high.
    Th e object turned out to be protective tubing from a radiation monitor in the reactor core, made highly radioactive by neutron flux. It had been accidentally sheared off while a capsule was being closed in 2006. It sank to a remote corner of the pool, where it sat unnoticed for four years.
    Th e tubingwas so radioactive that if he’d tucked it into a tool belt or shoulder bag, where it sat close to his body, he could’ve been killed. As it was, the water protected him, and only his hand — a body part more resistant to radiation than the delicate internal organs — received a heavy dose.

    So, as far as swimming safety goes, the bottom line is that you’d probably be OK, as long as you didn’t dive to the bottom or pick up anything strange.
    But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
    “In our reactor?” Hethought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
    1 Which is too bad — it’d make a hell of an energy drink.

weird (and worrying) questions from the what if? INBOX, #1

    Q. Would it be possible to get your teeth to such a cold temperature that they would shatter upon drinking a hot cup of coffee? —Shelby Hebert

    Q. How many houses are burned down in the United States every year? What would be the easiest way to increase that number by a significant amount (say, at least 15%)? —Anonymous

Soul Mates
    Q. What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?
—Benjamin Staffin
    A. What a nightmare that would be.
    Th ere are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. As Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”:
    Your love is one in a million;
    You couldn’t buy it at any price.
    But of the9.999 hundred thousand other loves,
    Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
    But what if we did have one randomly assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn’t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?
    We’ll assume your soul mate is chosen at birth. You don’t know anything about who or where they are, but — as in the romantic cliché — you recognize each other the momentyour eyes meet.
    Right away, this would raise a few questions. For