Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

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I lived near Los Alamos, NM which was the site of the Manhattan Project. I was looking to rent a building for an art studio and one of the places I looked at was across the street from a large empty lot with a chain link fence, wrapped in green canvas. I looked into this and it had been a primary dump for nuclear weapons development in the 40s - barrels in unlined trenches, buried about 20-40 feet deep. They recently cleaned it up at the cost of a couple billion, if I recall.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/03/f61/TA-21...

Then I looked into what was on the end of that road - a radioactive metal milling facility which discharged waste water containing various toxic radioactive metals directly off a cliff into the desert (it's also a very beautiful area). They recently cleaned that up and the metal plume went down over 500 feet. In fact, all wastewater from the labs went to a central area in town (now an ecological park) and was simply dumped into the stream. The old metal mill area is now being redeveloped for housing. I asked a nuclear scientist I knew if he'd feel comfortable living there, and he said "Sure! I mean, you might want to get a geiger counter".

Then, I realized I was living 3/4 of a mile from the large material disposal area which is currently the lab's main waste dump - TA 54 I believe?

https://n3b-la.com/mda/

Reading about all the areas there and what is public about what they've stored was somewhat disturbing. Most of it was stored with very little documentation. But, the scientists and employees don't have any problem with living in town. From what I gather they stopped dumping waste carelessly in the 60s. I think they have it under control at this point, but there continues to be debate about long-term storage.

> The old metal mill area is now being redeveloped for housing. I asked a nuclear scientist I knew if he'd feel comfortable living there, and he said "Sure! I mean, you might want to get a geiger counter".

Radioactivity is, funnily, one of the easier human health hazards to manage for precisely this reason - by definition, it's (generally) detectable. Not as easily as, say, a bear, but easier than a virion or most regular chemical contaminants.

Plus, radionuclides don't actively evolve.

I have been fantasizing about a Covid-19 dosimeter - something that would indicate whether an indoor space is safe. It's fun to think about what kind of technology would be completely transformative for our pandemic response, if only it were cheap enough to be widespread.

> It's fun to think about what kind of technology would be completely transformative for our pandemic response, if only it were cheap enough to be widespread.

If people stayed home and followed some basic precautions it would be pretty effective.

I say this from New Zealand, with covid finally having a foothold and community spread escalating, seemingly from non-compliance.

If there’s one thing we learned with this entire pandemic, it is that expecting humans to take precautions and comply indefinitely is just not reasonable policy, in particular when the threat is invisible and evolves “slowly” (months instead of minutes). Same applies to other kinds of threats: everyone knows they should eat healthy, avoid sugar, etc. everyone knows people die to diabetes every day. People systemically still don’t care. (I’m not comparing the morality of spreading a virus vs dying if a disease that only affects you, just using the example as more evidence on how humans deal with threats and how self-compliance-based policies tend to always fail)

There might be a colony of the virus on a surface, or in a few air-born droplets hanging out in the room. If your device didn't happen to sample those particular droplets or surfaces, you'd never know they were there.

True, there are multiple methods for transmitting the viral particles in question, but contact transmission would require that you actually come into contact with the surface in question. I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but I believe that contact transmission is considered fairly rare for COVID.

Moreover, having a partial solution to the problem is better than no solution at all.

A first pass at that would be a CO2 dosimeter.

Because humans breathe out CO2, and if the ventilation in the area is poor relative to the number of humans inside of it, then you will get a higher concentration of CO2, and thus you would also be more likely to have a higher concentration of viruses and other substances that can be airborne.

Just because you have high CO2 doesn’t necessarily mean that you have high concentrations of the virus particles that could cause a COVID infection, but there is a high correlation, and high CO2 is bad for you in plenty of other ways as well.

So, yes please — give me a cheap, portable, badge-like way of measuring my exposure to high levels of CO2!

not seen wearable ones, but CO2 indicators for classrooms, offices, ... have been a widely promoted thing for this reason, with plenty commercial and DIY options.

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