[Histonet] Re: Off topic-Radioactive jargon

[koellingr <@t> comcast.net]

All, just a bit of further explanation so people don't come up with misconceptions in trivial pursuit games about radioactive jargon or facts,  there cannot be "billions" of pounds of UF6 (uranium hexaflouride which is a gas) in the world much less in Oak Ridge.  I'm assuming Bob is using "billions" as a substitute word for large amounts.  Even so, that is a stretch.  UF6 is the gaseous uranium state used in a gaseous diffusion set-up to enrich for bomb grade uranium at Oak Ridge for WWII and (now in other places in the world????).  Depleted gas is reduced to metal state simply to reduce the volume of the gas.  There for sure is depleted U-238 around with the halting of the production of Pu-239 actually from feeder U-238.  Or so says a nuclear physicist/engineer who has made his way around Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos and many other nuclear sites over the last 40 years.

Raymond Koelling
PhenoPath Labs
Seattle, WA

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Robert Richmond" <RSRICHMOND <@t> aol.com> 

> Gitterfaser-Faerbung, reports Gudrun Lang in Linz, Austria - literally 
> trellis fiber coloring. (Is "Faerbung" the correct German word for 
> silver impregnation?) 
> 
> I too find the word "retic" easily confused between reticulocytes and 
> reticulum stains. 
> 
> I'm surprised to learn that there is a significant amount of uranium 
> in glass slides. Small amounts of uranyl ion give glass a fluorescent 
> yellow color - that's "vaseline glass", also called "canary glass". 
> Its manufacture was banned at the onset of WW II, and though it 
> eventually became legal to make it again, the old pieces became 
> eminently collectible - I have a few of them in fact - eBay usually 
> provides a fine selection. 
> 
> I suppose that present day uranium salts are made from U235-depleted 
> uranium (we have something like a billion pounds of depleted UF6 at 
> Oak Ridge). That shouldn't change the radioactivity problems, since 
> radium 226 (which accounts for most of the radioactivity of old stocks 
> of uranium salts) is a decay product of U238. 
> 
> I agree with Fred Monson about nuke-u-lar. This barbarism is now 
> beginning to appear in biomedical usage, for the cell nucleus. The 
> first person I ever heard say nuke-you-lar was President Lyndon 
> Johnson. 
> 
> Bob Richmond 
> Samurai Pathologist 
> Knoxville TN 
> 
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