People have been trying to figure out what the basic stuff of the material world is for thousands of years. An ancient Greek named Democritus said around 460 BC that there were tiny indivisible things he called atoms that made up all material objects. After that there were a lot of other ideas proposed that were not as advanced.

            In the early 19th Century, John Dalton built on earlier work to propose that chemical elements were made up of a single type of unique tiny objects or atoms. These elements combined in various ways to make up compounds. Elements and compounds constitute all material substances and objects.

            In the mid 19th Century, Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic table which arrayed all the elements in a grid based on increasing numbers of atoms which make up a particular element. The elements in each column shared similar chemical properties. The gaps in the grid have been steadily filled in until today we have a complete table containing elements with up to118 atoms.

            In the early 20th Century, it was discovered that the “indivisible” atoms were actually made up of smaller units. These were call electrons, protons and neutrons. It turned out that atoms were mostly empty space with a cloud of electrons surrounding a tiny nucleus containing protons and neutrons. The electrons carry a negative charge, the protons carry a positive charge and neutrons are neutral. (Actually neutrons are composed of an electron and a proton.) The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom uniquely identifies that atom as a particular element.

            While the number of protons in the atoms of a particular element is a fixed number, the number of neutrons can vary. An atom of a particular element that contains a specific number of neutrons is referred to as an isotope of that element. The term nuclide is often used in place of isotope when the focus is on the behavior of the nucleus in nuclear chemistry as opposed to the behavior of the element in conventional chemistry. The neutron number can have a big influence on nuclear properties but has very little effect on the chemical properties of an element.

            Elements are identified by their atomic number which corresponds to the number of protons in their nucleus. The combination of the protons and neutrons in a nucleus is referred to as the mass number. So a particular element will always have the same atomic number but the isotopes or nuclides of a particular element will have different mass numbers.

            Some isotopes are radioactive and are referred to as radioisotopes or radionuclides. This means that they can decay. There are several different types of decay including spontaneous fission, alpha decay and double beta decay. The time it takes for half of the atoms of an isotope to decay is known as the half-life of that isotope. Half-lives can vary from nanoseconds to trillions of years. Many of the naturally occurring isotopes are considered to be stable and to never undergo any type of decay. Other naturally occurring isotopes have estimated half-lives longer than the estimated life span of the universe. I will be primarily concerned with naturally occurring and man-made isotopes which have half-lives from nanoseconds to millions of years.

            The particles of energy and matter emitted by an isotope when it undergoes decay are the types of radiation that I will be discussing in this blog.

Welcome to Nucleotidings. This is a blog about radiation. Radiation is a general term with different meanings. This is a blog about dangerous radiation in our environment. There are different types of dangerous radiation and there are multiple sources. I will be most concerned with radioactive emissions from man-made sources.

The greatest current man-made source of radiation is from nuclear reactor accidents. The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan that destroyed the reactors at Fukishima has released a great deal of radiation into the environment, some of which has made its way to the United States.

Nucleotidings will contain a broad variety of articles dealing with various aspects of dangerous radiation including science, history, politics, economics, etc. There are two related blogs that I will also be producing. www.rad-links.com will contain links that deal with current news about dangerous radiation. www.geigerthis.com will contain daily radiation readings from my home in Seattle, Washington.

My name is Burt Webb. I am a retired software engineer who now has time to write and publish novels, non-fiction books and blogs posts. Many years ago I was a founding member of the Evergreen Chapter of the World Future Society here in Seattle. One of the things that we spent a lot of time discussing was the benefits and dangers of technology. I was very concerned with environmental issues and looked into the pros and cons of different sources of energy.

Nuclear power has been advertised as a safe, clean and inexpensive source of energy. Unfortunately, none of these qualities have proven to be true.  The disaster at Fukushima has illustrated how unsafe nuclear power can be. The enormous problem of how to dispose of accumulating radioactive waste belies of the claim of clean energy. And the rising cost of plant construction, clean up, uranium, etc. have shown us that it is not really inexpensive.

Long ago during an argument about nuclear power, I said “I am sure that the engineers could design a safe, clean and cheap nuclear power plant. The problem is that we would have to be able to trust government and industry to be 10 times as honest and capable as they have ever proven to be in the past.” Nothing that has happened since that conversation has convinced me that I was wrong. Government has been woefully incompetent at monitoring and policing the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry has often put profits over safety and failed to deal adequately with many risks and problems associated with nuclear power. We still have no permanent solution for how to deal with waste products from nuclear power plants. And many of the functioning nuclear power plants are reaching the end of their projected life-spans and will have to be decommissioned.

Since Fukishima some countries like Germany have decided to build no more nuclear power plants and to decommission the ones that are currently operating. Here in the United States we don’t seem to really be getting message and there is a new effort to promote the licensing and construction of more power plants.

One of the big problems with engaging the public in the debate over the pros and cons of nuclear power is that fact that biological radiation damage can be invisible and take decades to manifest itself as cancer and other illnesses. Nucleotidings and its companion blogs are an attempt to increase public awareness and knowledge of the dangers of radioactive contamination of our environment.