Slashdot Mirror
LANL Warning About Radioactive Trees
coryboehne writes "KOB-TV in Albuquerque is reporting that Los Alamos National Labs is warning personnel who are cutting trees in a canyon east of Los Alamos that some trees in the area might be radioactive.
The canyon, known as Bayo Canyon, was formerly known as Technical Area 10, and was used for weapons testing from the 1940s until 1961. A full summary of Environmental Direct Penetrating Radation in the Los Alamos area is available from the LANL Meteorology & Air Quality Group"
The last couple weeks I have been knee deep in research about nuclear testing working on my web site (Buy a nuclear testing shirt! My kid's gotta eat!)
The only test I can think of offhand that was in New Mexico was the original Trinity bomb that was set off pre-Hiroshima.
There were, however, several criticality accidents at Los Alamos, and several "downwind incidents" in Nevada around the same time.
See the "history" page on my site for a description of the Army SL-1 that went critical in Idaho in the 60s. That's one I didn't learn about until recently, and apparently it was a pretty hot one too. The more I research into this, the more amazed I am about the amount of contamination there is scattered around the US, and on the islands we ran tests on.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You're still talking about a few hundred millirem per year... only about twice what you'd receive from the sun at the same elevation. You need about 50 REM in the space of a few hours to alter blood cells. Inhaling the smoke would lead to slightly higher dose rates, but in that case the smoke will kill you long before the exposure does anything to the living tissue.
Most of the radioactive material used had a very short half life, but there are traces of the nasty stuff. A more complete version of the story is here.
I recall hearing many years ago about changes in the trees (maples and birches, I believe) near Chernobyl after the accident there. If memory serves, the trees underwent some abberant type of polyploidy resulting in their leaves increasing in size up to 300%. The result were trees with enormous leaves.
A quick google search of chernobyl polyploidy tree brings up a handful of good bibliographic links. I am not a biologist (nor do I have access to all of the references). I do suspect that there is a great deal of additional related information on the effects of the continued radiation on the environment.
any place where there was at some time in its history a possible outflow of radioactive material, the plants will be contaminated. At least its not like hanford where the Tumbleweeds are sometimes radioactive.
But these are all well known. The reason they issued the warning was because the western bark beetle killed something on the order of 80% of the trees in that canyon's mouth in a single season. (No that's not an exageration) . Given the horrific forest fires that burned about 4% of the homes in town, there is a great deal of preventative tree cutting going on. far more than in any other rear with lots of new loggers. An they are cutting trees in areas they traditionally would not have access too. Hence the public warning.
now give it a rest. Hey want to know the good bit about radioactive contamination? you know exactly where it is and how to find it. Unlike for example, chemical contamination. The main thing that is different about los alamos and say your neighbor hood is that we actually know where the contamination is. PLus when we do have a spill it gets cleaned up. I recall a photo in the news of two guys in moon suits cleaning up a chemical spill of ethylene glycol in a parking lot (bottle dropped from fork lift). Front page news. Mean while that same day probably 500 people in chicago city flushed their car radiotors and dump a few thousand gallons of ethylene glycol into the river.
new stories like this suck
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I used to work at LANL for a short period of time, back in TA 35 (at the time, working on the SSC detectors). They're somewhat strict about their rules on radiation, and who can go in what areas. The building I was working in was T-shaped, and one of the top pieces of the T (the opposite one from my office) fell within the specified distance from an old tritium dump site. It was well posted that NOONE was to be in that wing without the proper training and badging. When my work required that I go down into that wing for a bit, I had to go to a different radiation safety class and get new radiation badges so that they could measure exposure. And that part of the building was only barely hot.
Having family that lived in Los Alamos for many years, and an uncle who worked at the labs as well, LANL was always very good about keeping people apprised of any possible issues. Los Alamos started off as a company town, and it still very much operates that way. If you don't work at the labs, you work for a business that supports the people who work for the labs. Everyone knows plenty of people who work there, and the town and the labs are very much dependant on each other.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
There is a common belief that 'going critical' is synonymous with a meltdown, or out-of-control chain reaction or manifold other bad things. This is, however, false.
A nuclear reactor is a device which creates chain reactions to amplify the effects of neutrons. The neutron multiplication factor describes whether the number of neutrons present in the core is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same. Based upon this, the following are defined:
Therefore: 1) A reactor must be critical to maintain its power. 2) A reactor must be supercritical to increase in power. Criticality and supercriticality are normal states for a reactor. It's prompt criticality which is bad.
I cant answer your first questions but as for your latter questions:
Blame the movie Sum of all Fears for this curiosity. To ruin it for you, when the nuke goes off and it shows this big shockwave, I figured anything that gets hit by that is going to be contaminated. In my head this means you are going to get cancer sometime soon.
No, the shockwave is jsut a normal shockwave, nothing special about it. The radioactive fallout is more caused by dust and other particles being sucked into the core of the explosion after this shockwave has passed.
Also, slightly related, can someone explain the EMP to me? I thought Sum of all Fears really fucked that one up but some people have said the EMP is really weak and doesnt travel very far. In another movie, Broken Arrow, the EMP goes out for Miles and Miles. In True Lies, they land the planes and shit before the nuke goes off for which I assume was to avoid an EMP related crash.
Sum of All Fears actually got it more right than any other film. EMPs do not occur for ground detonations at all, they are an effect of detonating a nuclear device high in the atmosphere (ionosphere springs to mind, but im not certain). Broken Arrow got it totally wrong, there would have been no EMP from a underground explosion. Again, in True Lies, either they got it wrong, or they were landing the planes because of the shockwave.
Hope that helps.