Bench Degree·NUCLEAR POWERchapter

Before You Start

One page. Appendix A at the back carries the full parts list, and Chapter 1 will tell you what it needs. This page is the part you should not find out later.

Nothing in this book asks you to obtain, handle, store or dispose of anything genuinely hazardous, which is the question a reader of a nuclear book reasonably asks first. There is no fissile material here, no reactor, no accelerator, no licensed source and no chain reaction. This book measures the radiation already in your house and around your body, and computes the rest.

The four things it calls sources are sold over the counter or already in the drawer. A thoriated lantern mantle: thorium is a hazard inhaled as dust and none at all left in one piece, so never shred, grind or burn one. Uranium glass, sold in antique shops by the shelf. The americium button from an old smoke detector, built to sit in a ceiling for a decade: do not prise it apart. And the radon already in your basement, gathered on a balloon, which you are not introducing but merely counting. Every one is legal, unlicensed, and less radioactive than a long-haul flight.

The real hazards here are all domestic.

Dry ice, minus 78 °C (minus 109 °F): gloves and tongs, never bare hands, and it sublimates to carbon dioxide, so a ventilated room and never a sealed car or closet. The isopropyl alcohol in the same box is flammable.

A hundred set mousetraps is the best chain-reaction demonstration there is, and a set trap will break skin: set them with a pencil, glasses on, children and animals out of the room.

Neodymium magnets snap together hard enough to pinch badly and to shatter and throw chips. One at a time, a card between them, away from pacemakers and hard drives, and away from children, because swallowing two is a surgical emergency.

Lead is a chemical toxin with nothing to do with radiation: wash your hands, never machine or melt it. Hot metal and boiling water reach 100 °C (212 °F). Mains: measure the bulb unplugged and out of its socket. A model steam boiler, if you buy one, is the only pressurised object here, and its safety valve is not decorative.

Bench Degree

Get the degree without the diploma.

Learn the material, not how to pass the exam.