re: #136 ckkatz

A few scattered thoughts on the topics from above:

The year after Three Mile Island was the first year we had House Finches at our feeder. My mother thought that they looked like mutant sparrows, so we there after called them Three Mile Island Sparrows.

I remember going to Shippingport reactor in 1967 as part of a class trip.

I did some reading on DOE emergency publications at Hillman Library one evening. Up until Three Mile Island (TMI), most of the papers were on terrorist attacks against nuclear reactors. After TMI, they were on accidents at reactors.

An echo of your scattered topics:

Our Butler Co HS class got to tour Shippingport around 1961—the clarity of the water in the containment pool is the residual memory. They did let me take a 35mm, raising jokes about fogged film. (Our Physics class built and operated a desk-top X-ray from a Crooke’s tube, Ford spark coil, and window glass “shielding”. We imaged hardware, dead birds, and each other.)

I lived and worked close enough to TMI that Con Edison jacked our electric bill through the roof, then paid it back over a couple decades. The Army health physicists in our office all disappeared to Harrisburg for a month or so, some working as civilian contractors.

Army sent me to a Texas A&M radiological protection officer’s class just to learn enough to talk to the real pros on my ad hoc team. We were surveying all the units that had been to/brought back East Bloc crap from Desert Strorm.

Radiation is hard to stay away from.