Is radon still a thing?

Vaguely recall a batch of hot cinder block that were made of tailings from mines on the Rez gassed off radon. Too be fair, the Nav miners wound up with the short end of that stick.

 

what you said is:

so, just because i'm a wanna be nuclear scientist, can you explain the link you're making between glacial deposits/organic material breakdown and the amount of radon in the Iowa soil?

 

This should be good. Make Hans Jenny proud, Garf.

 

plants fart radon...duh.

Like cows make methane.

Its science bro...I could tell you but then Id have to drop you in a vat of HF.

 

Yeah the glacier till left deposits and organic material. The organic material became soil. Some of the other deposits decayed and became/ created radon.

 

Someone change Garth's name to Sammy Davis Jr...cause he is tapping dancing his ass off right now.

 

I wasn't aware we had this many nerds on here.

 

Radon is a daughter product of Thorium. The good news is Radon's half life is only about 3 days so wait about a month and it's all gone. The bad news is Thorium has a half life of many billions of years so it just keeps making more of the stuff. Radon is an alpha emitter, usually a no-never-mind, but Radon is gaseous so just don't eat or breath the stuff. Wear a scuba tank in the house and you should be OK.

 

I’m waiting for @auminer to start a new thread asking if hydrogen or methane are still a thing. Or possibly the sun.

Hey Wera bbs, is the sun still a thing? Asking for a friend.

 

Lol

 

next up... silent but deadly "dad" jokes...lol
Or one of my favorite real estate agent claims... I dont see or smell it!!!

 

Just hand him a buck full of it, tell him it’s dry ice and then leave, quickly.

Have you ever used N2(l) to clean your floors? It’s amazing!

 

Nah... But perhaps one on the uselessness of ethanol is in order.

 

Damn thats just mean....you wanna give him a nice slow death.

Never tried cleaning floors but we played with it a ton back in the day. We froze all kinda shit with it.

I always wanted to try some LOX at one of the department BBQ's but I couldnt get them on board. You know to help speed up the charcoal....

 

I don’t know if I’d equate that with “nice” but, slow is certainly on the menu.

 

Point of View. Its all in the point of view....

 

i still have a magnesium valve cover that i'm planning on tossing into the fire pit one day...

 

It's a Guy Thing: Lighting A Charcoal Grill

by Dave Barry (The Miami Herald)

Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. One of our favorite charcoal grill lighters is a guy named George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook hamburgers on a big grill.

Being engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.


"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me in telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."


If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you know what happened: the purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.


From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then an acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen with a reducing agent (the charcoal).

We discovered that a long time ago, somewhere in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (or something along those lines). By this point, Goble was
getting pretty good times. But in the world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the mustard.


Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as oxygen at room temperature. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers.


On Gobel's World Wide Web page (no longer available), you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the
most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds.


There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it.


"Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."


Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site.


Will the 3-second barrier ever by broken? Will engineers come up with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom
cloud.

 

I understand that high school chemistry departments just have gallon jugs of the stuff lying around.

 

You rang?