Day: September 10, 2025💾

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Eating Radioactive Shrimp 🦐

On summer vacation I bought a bag of shrimp and cooked it up with a few meals during the mid-week. Fried up with onions and zucchini it’s wonderful! I didn’t start glowing at night and the risk was basically zero. We are constantly being bombarded with radioactivity from space and radon is constantly seeping from the ground around here. Radioactivity is an invisible force and in that sense it’s scary, but let’s be realistic only 60 years ago the world was testing nuclear bombs above ground, and milk and ice cream had significant amounts of Cesium-137 in it.

It’s not to say we should go out of our way expose ourselves to radioactivity or that Cesium-137 in ice cream and milk is desirable. But whatever. There are far less healthy things to eat besides slightly radioactive shrimp, namely most of the processed food and sweets that are all over these days. Frozen pre-cooked shrimp are one of the most inexpensive and convenient sources of protein to add to a dish and are quite tasty to. If you eat processed food, then why are you concerned about radioactive shrimp?

Map: Belfry Mountain Firetower

State Owned Property in Albany

Albany often complains that there is a lot of state owned land in city limits that is off the tax rolls. This land is shown in orange.

Terrain Map: Moose River Plains
Terrain Map: Hills and Hollows from Fort Hunter to Scotia

Energy and the Empire Plaza

The Empire Plaza and connected buildings (Alfred E Smith and Capitol) use 111 gigawatt hours of power a year (electricity only, doesn’t include fossil heating or cooling).

To build a solar farm to power the Empire Plaza it would require demolishing 320 acres of buildings in the city of Albany, which is three and third more buildings then had to demolished to build the Empire Plaza itself – figuring 2.8 acres of land needed within the city for every gigawatt hour per year of electricity generated.

That’s roughly the area of the South Mall Arterial to Interstate 787 to the FBI Building to an imaginary line connecting to Eagle Street. 100 percent renewable sounds like a good idea, but it has an enormous environmental impact.

After the rain

At least that’s what my back of the envelope calculations show.