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Considering that we are talking about Japan, which had a few 100 thousand post bombing nuclear death (people who died from radiation poisoning - or how ever you want to call it - from the remnants of the two WWII bombs till into the early 1980s)

This is a highly spurious claim. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority of H&N deaths that were not immediate or mechanical in nature (killed by vaporizing, flying debris, crushing injuries, bleeding to death after injury etc.) and that were attributable to radiation poisoning happened in the few weeks following after the explosions. Any deaths following that period attributable to the bombings were cancer deaths where the exposure acted as a cause of heightened probability of getting cancer later in life. Wikipedia (linking to http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/...) claims that 2000 such deaths (of cancer precipitated by long term effects of short-term radiation exposure) took place, not hundreds of thousands.

There are thousands of medical articles about this topic.

I don't think I've seen thousands, but definitely more than a hundred (A few to get you started...), and of the dozens I've read, they all would strongly disagree with what you describe, and pin the number at a couple thousand deaths for those that died more than a couple years after the bomb.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not noticeably radioactive today. The residual radiation from the bombings is below normal background levels.
http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa12.html

Cleaning up the mess of any conceivable "dirty bomb" is a mop and bucket affair.

Mopping every square centimeter of every surface in a large area would be quite an undertaking. Then, how do you dispose of the slop?

Think clean-up from a toxic bomb would be easy? Seventy-five recovery workers from the WTC site have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that were likely caused by their exposure to the toxic stew of Ground Zero, while the EPA said everything was honky-dory. The total number of cancer cases caused by the toxic cloud may be in the hundreds. That wasn't even at attack designed to be toxic.

We can also look to the "clean up" in New Orleans to see just how well we could expect the government to respond to such a disaster. If a dirty bomb just needs a mop and a bucket, surely some spilled water would be even easier, right? Ha, ha. It's funny because it's tragic.

Shit, a full-on nuclear weapon exploded at altitude didn't render Hiroshima uninhabitable.

No, but it killed a whole lot of people - disproportionately children, who were working outdoors clearing firebreaks at the time of the attack - in very nasty ways. Then those who survived the first few years after the bombing had about a 9% chance of dying from cancer. (This study didn't start until 1950, so probably misses the worst of it - people who survived the initial blast and radiation exposure, but got fatal cancers in the first years afterwards.)

If you took a small amount of quality radiologicals, wrapped it around some semtex, and made it go boom! in the middle of Manhattan, you'd kill a couple of people in the explosion, create several score cancer patients, and for years you'd have an area of maybe a square kilometer where few people would be willing to live or work. That's a pretty significant impact.

According to FAS, with a one-foot-long chunk (about a kilogram and a half, if I calculated right) of radioactive cobalt from a food irradiation plant, you could contaminate 1,000 square kilometers and raise the cancer risk for everyone who stayed in Manhattan to 1 in 100. Manhattan real estate would get really cheap.

Now imagine a Ryder truck full of fuel oil, fertilizer, and various other common nitrate/hydrocarbon mixes to make up an explosive sundae, and for the cherry on top, say 8 kilograms of high grade uranium. Place in a highly populated area, preferably on a breezy day, and let the good times roll.

IANA Radiation Researcher, but this may be what you were looking for (and did not expect to find).

334 more deaths due to solid cancer than expected for a population that size (table 2)
87 more deaths due to Leukemia than expected (table 5)

Studies of the Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 12, Part I. Cancer: 1950-1990
Donald A. Pierce; Yukiko Shimizu; Dale L. Preston; Michael Vaeth; Kiyohiko Mabuchi
Radiation Research, Vol. 146, No. 1. (Jul., 1996), pp. 1-27.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-7587(199607)146%3A1%3C1%3ASOTMOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G

The results are sort of summarized at http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html (although the numbers don't quite match)

The idea that nuclear waste might need to be protected "for thousands of years" has driven a lot of the debate. This is unfortunate, since it doesn't turn out to be particularly true.

One of the fundamental laws of radioactivity is that elements that are highly radioactive lose their radioactivity quickly, and elements whose radioactivity lingers a long time don't emit much radiation. The danger, of course, is those things that are in the middle along both axes. But as a point of comparison, it turns out that there is essentially no radiation left from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

It is true that the concentrated fission products and neutron-activated junk from current fission reactors would still be pretty hot after 20 years, but I suspect they'd be way less dangerous to climb around in than a 20-year-old dioxin spill. I think the evidence suggests that dumping the stuff deep-ocean in 50-year barrels would be a perfectly reasonable disposal method; it would be hard to convince the general public of that, though. Kind of sad, really—in many ways, nuclear power is our safest and most environmentally friendly energy alternative.

Your trying to do an apples to oranges comparison. A Watt is a unit of power. The bomb is usually measured in kilotons or megatons, energy units. But I'll try:

P = E/t
A Watt is a Joule per second.

The energy released by a ton of TNT exploding as a unit of energy is 4.2 x 10^9 Joules. So divide 10^39 (10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts) by 4.2x10^9 and get 2.38095238 x 10^29 tons of TNT per second. That's 2.38 x 10^26 kilotons or 2.38 x 10^23 megatons.

The Hiroshima bomb released about 12.5 kilotons of TNT of energy. That means at one point the magnetar was releasing the energy at the rate of about 1.9 x 10^25 (19,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)Hiroshima bombs per second.

Of course assuming all my math is correct...

Fallout levels depend on whether they are ground or air bursts, and weather patterns. Fallout radiation levels decay quickly. Very little land would be uninhabitable for long periods of time. Contamination is relative. People can live and farm on land that is heavily contaminated by modern radiation safety standards without immediate and severe health problems. Human populations are surprisingly resilient when exposed to non-fatal levels of radiation. If you survive the first 60 days after the event, you will probably live a normal life.

See http://www.rerf.or.jp/top/qae.htm for data on radiation effects from Japan.

Before you throw something out as "full of shit", here something a simple googling turned up:
"The induced radioactivity decayed very quickly with time. In fact, nearly 80% of the above-mentioned doses were released within a day, about 10% between days 2 and 5, and the remaining 10% from day 6 afterward." [regarding Hiroshima]

So it seems residual radiation isn't so hard to hide, after all. Whether the conspiracy theory still holds water, though, is another matter...

You are correct: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no longer noticeably radioactive. The fact that the lifetime and power of a radioisotope are inversely proportional is probably a factor here as well as those cited.

OTOH, it seems unlikely that those around at the time could fail to tell an air-burst explosion from an underground one, so simple Geiger Counter testing of ground samples should quickly settle the Port Chicago issue: some fission products are extremely long-lived, yet powerful enough to be easy to spot.

The long-term effects of radiation aren't as bad as some people would have you think. It doesn't take thousands of years to make the area liveable.

It would be nice if there was a conventional explosive without any long-term residuals, but unfortunately there isn't (yet).

Check this out for a study done by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare on the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Basically, people in the initial blast zone are (obviously) fucked. Survivor's offspring will show a huge spike in cases of leukemia, and small spikes in other cancer types. The grandchildren of survivors show close to baseline birth defects, meaning nothing statistically significant.

And these are people living on the actual ground that is contaminated.

This study could be bullshit, but it's done by a Japanese organization, along with the U.S.

Knunov