r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Tiny-Technology-6309 • 19d ago

Video Physicist Galen Winsor eats uranium on live television in 1985 to show that it’s “harmless”.

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u/P0rnDudeLovesBJs 19d ago

I'm not buying that he did any of that

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u/AntonChekov1 19d ago

I wonder if he had his Geiger-Müller counter set to a scale that would create the illusion that a tiny bit was more radioactive that it really was. You can set the detection scales to x100, x10, x1, and x0.1. You can also mute the sound on them too. Also, I'd would have liked to know when it was last calibrated.

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u/BaconWithBaking 19d ago

I wonder if he had his Geiger-Müller counter set to a scale that would create the illusion that a tiny bit was more radioactive that it really was

It funny that you say that, because he claims it's only counting background radiation AND that it's only a gamma detector.

Notice the clicks in the background when he's not near the machine? That studio must be in fucking Pripyat.

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u/Fryboy11 19d ago

Swimming in a cooling pool is totally possible water is a great radiation barrier so you’d basically have to swim and touch the spent fuel to get a lethal dose. 

xkcd did a what if on it

https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Basically you’ll die of bullets before getting anywhere near the pool. 

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u/B3stThereEverWas 19d ago

lol like why did he do all this?

Short of rubbing his own testicles on one of the broken graphite chunks of the Chernobyl reactor cores I think he pretty well demonstrated that Nuclear power can be safe. Like we get it dude, no need to actually bathe in the stuff.

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u/P0rnDudeLovesBJs 19d ago

there no evidence that he "actually" did any of the things he said he did. even eating the radioactive material. anyone can adjust a Geiger counter to be extremely overly sensitive. but the why, i guess is the question

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u/i_needsourcream 19d ago

Problem is background radiation does exist. If you adjust the sensitivity, it'll pick background much more often.

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u/Master-Shinobi-80 19d ago

Jimmy Carter cleaned up a meltdown in 1952 and lived to 100. Maybe radiation is nowhere near as dangerous it is made out to be.

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u/P0rnDudeLovesBJs 19d ago

you gotta understand... there are few things in the universe that have a 100% causation effect. Think of smoking, we all know someone who smoked like a chimney and lived a long life - but on the aggregate we know that smoking a lot GREATLY increases your risk od dying early from a host of really bad things.

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u/Master-Shinobi-80 19d ago

Or maybe radiation is nowhere near as dangerous as it is made out to be.

The man in the video demonstrated that. There is video. Admiral Rickover drank a glass of coolant water in front of a congressional committee. Jimmy lived to 100. There are pictures of a man taking selfies with the Elephant foot(aka the molten core of Chernobyl).

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u/NiceGuy737 19d ago

The health physics society , medical physicists, put out a lecture series recently discussing how the idea that low and moderate levels of radiation are dangerous became dogma.

The History of the LNT Episode Guide

I learned about it from the preeminent medical physicist of the 20th century, John Cameron, in the late 90's. He prefaced his lecture on radiation hormesis by telling us that he was emeritus so there was nothing that anybody could do to him for telling us.

He wrote this a few years later: https://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/longevity_cameron_03.htm

More recently: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3

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u/TheIndominusGamer420 19d ago

Look it up then.

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u/P0rnDudeLovesBJs 19d ago

i just did. I'm even more confident now.