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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"
/me puts on tinfoil pants
Do said trees have radioactive squirrels?
So are these considered to be weapons? I mean chop the thing down then drop them out of a plane, or strap an engine on it and you have a wooden missle.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
"Charmin Ultrasoft Disinfectant Radioactive Toilet Paper for the ultimate in clean"
The first signs that alerted KOB-TV to this phenomenon was when reporters were strolling through then canyon, the trees were giving them strange looks...
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Child: But Dad, I'm afraid of the dark.
Father: Oh, you don't have anything to worry about.
Child: How come, Daddy?
Father: Well you see son, our house was built with radioactive trees, so the entire house is like a big night light.
Child: Is that why my hamster got cancer?
Father: No more questions, time for sleep.
Of course, you seem to be ignoring the fact that we now have nuclear power (whether this is a good thing or not is debatable) and also the fact that millions of lives were saved from a conflict in Asia (whether this benefit outweighs the result is also debatable).
Bottom line: it can have terrible consequences, but it can also be construed as being something that has done much more.
No, think of it as a self-illuminating christmass tree !!
think of the money on electricity you'd save !
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
Aren't those more commonly known as "arrows?"
If you didn't get it, read this script.
It's not too hard to tell the difference between normal and radioactive trees. The radioactive ones talk and throw their apples at you. The others don't.
*DrugCheese rants*
Before someone marks this as funny, would a forest fire be an extream hazord because of the radioactivity?
Let's not forget that recently the Los Alamos area was on fire from forest fires.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
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.
When I worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late '80s, we had a stand of trees (poplars, I believe) between the main road through the heart of the facility and a research reactor building. I used to walk right by these trees every day to get to the cafeteria. One day, the sidewalk on that side of the road was blocked off, and several men, wearing bunny suits and wielding chainsaws, were hard at work felling the trees. By the next day, even the stumps were gone.
We've had our share of radioactive frogs too, some with some, shall we say, unique anatomy. Once, on that same main road, one of these unfortunate amphibians wandered underneath the tread of one of the facility's vehicles. Again, we see the bunny suits, this time with sprayers full of this black, sticky foam. Down the road every so often, you'd see a bunnyman either spraying or scraping an already-encapsulated piece of frog from the road where the contaminated tire had deposited it.
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.
But...
When combined with the power of ATOMIC energy, man and ant become...
Someone you trust is one of us.
This is why treehuggers are typically bald!
Today, on sale now! Get your very own Christmas tree that doesn't need lights! Watch your tree glow a festive green at night and feel the warmth of it as you sing the carolling favourite, "Walking in a Nuclear Wasteland"
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
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.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Gozilla
Mothra
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Jerry Farwell
Learn from the past ... these trees can only hurt us!!
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
a honking great radioactive sharpened *tree* hurtling toward you as an *arrow* you go right ahead.
I will duck.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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.
A couple years back I had the pleasure of going on a lengthy tour of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and their cleanup efforts.
I think people would freak out if they realized how careless the gov't has been with nuclear waste.
For instance, the underground tanks they stored certain types of waste in were set up in a series. When tank one fills up, it spills over into tank two. When tank two fills up, it spills over into tank three. When tank four fills up, it spills over into the ground.
Oh, and the tanks were only meant to be used for 20 or so years and they've been used for more than twice that.
Then there's the waste that's being stored in what amounts to coffee cans.
This is all right next to the Columbia River incidently. Want a glass of water?
Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants. Then you'll either have to switch to coal, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living (sorry now 1000 watt Itaniums for you instead you can freeze in the dark.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When I was a teenager, my father (a nuclear physicst) took a group of boyscouts on a merrit badge "expedition", we were "prospecting for uranium".
Back in the bad old days, there were tests done using mock-up weapons equipped with DEPLETED uranium (U-238). The experiments consisted of a fairly authentic weapon with a real primary (the high explosive part which "squishes" the fissionable materals together.)
The weapons did NOT have real uranium, rather U-238 (the stuff they use on armor piercing shells.) When they detonated the mock-up, the weapons usually blew all apart throwing chunks of U-238 all around the country-side.
My dear old dad, being a wise-ass, took us out with several geiger-counters looking for the U-238.
As I recall, we found a rock which seemed "hot", we began digging under the rock, getting closer and closer to the source of what seemed to be setting off the counters when my dad told us to stop. Not because of the radiation, rather the damn rock was likely to roll over and crush the lot of us.
He ended our field trip by letting us push the rock over into the hole we had excavated; great fun.
I'm a native New Mexican expatriated in hostile, relentlessly right-wing Texas (but in the oasis of Austin). I'm not sympathetic even the tiniest bit to the nuclear alarmists in northern New Mexico. CCNA's bullshit just infuriates me more than most things, actually. (When I was there last fall, I heard on their little news show on KUNM a story about low-level contaminated stuff recycled into materials incorporated into consumer items and they provided no scientific context whatsoever. I actually shouted at the radio.) I've known many people that worked at LANL (and Sandia), and I know some that still work there.
Having made it clear that I'm skeptical and hostile to nuclear fear-mongers, I think that there's reason for Los Alamosans to be mildly concerned about their risk. As a casual student of the history of the Manhattan Project, I know that a) the health danger of cumulative, long-term radioactive dosages was grossly underestimated at that time (and the acute danger was somewhat underestimated, too); and b) in the interests of expediance justified by national security concerns, they were notoriously careless about safety during and after the Project. Just take a look at Hanford and Rocky Flats for examples of just how careless the DOE has been. Or take note of what the supposedly ex-Oak Ridge employee writes above.
Also, my sister was a tumor registrar. She was not a registrar of that district, but she was a registrar of another district in a different state that included a DOE nuclear-related facility. It was her observation that there was clearly an unusual rate of cancers clustered around the facility, although it didn't reach the rigorous threshold of confident statistical significance. But it was not discussed, and the community remained unaware of any possible risk.
I also know that in the case of the cluster of brain tumors of ten years ago that the LANL and the DOE were shown to have been at the very least uncooperative and at the most actively dissembling.
I really think that people need to consider the implications of the fact that Los Alamos has a unique history. It was in its entirety a government installation on an urgent mission where civilian safety considerations didn't apply. It was only in the early sixties that it stopped being a "closed" city. LANL and the DOE is in the awkward position of worrying about a civilian apple-pie American population living in a city that was once wholly part of a government nuclear installation. Whether or not they were reasonably or unreasonably cavalier about safety in the past is irrelevant to the fact that, today, many people live alongside areas that were contaminated to a greater or lesser extent.
These trees are probably not of any real concern. But that doesn't mean that there's not some amount of significantly heightened risk in the area, nor that LANL and the DOE aren't always entirely forthcoming.
(Note: upon reviewing what I've written, I'm uncomfortable that I may give the impression that I'm sympathetic to the people that go berserk and totally irrational at the mention of the word "nuclear". I want to make the point that people are, in general, very very bad at risk analysis. Even though I write above that I believe there's some risk in Los Alamos, I want to make it clear that it is very likely that many people do things, thoughtlessly, on a daily basis that put them at considerably higher risk.)
also people who work in those areas wear Dosimeters. SO they KNOW for sure that people are not being exposed. Even the town dump is ringed with dosimeters. What about your town. Got any dosimeters? Lots of industries produce rad waste. to name a few: phosphate fertilizer plants, (old) ceramics, coleman laterns, glow in the dark exit signs, hospital isotope waste and manufacture.... For example, the dosimeters in our town have gone off lots of times. One time was a vet disposing of radioactive kitty litter (radioactive iodide is used as a medical treatment). Another time my neighbor set of the alarm because he was wearing pile (patagonia) jackets which if you did not know collect Radon gas that accumualtes in poorly vented closets in many parts of the country. Another time a load of radioactive steel manufactured in mexico drove through town on its way elsewhere. (the mexicans plant hat recycled and melted down a hospital cesium canister. Many steelworkers and truckers in the US and Mexico received high doses, something like a dozen people at the steel plant eventually died of exposre related illnesesses.
So the good news about living in los alamos is that we know we're no being irradiated cause we monitor it. You dont know and there are lots of ways you could be exposed. for example do you know where the steel rebar in you concrete walls came from? Are you breathing radon?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
[raises hand]
What the heck is an "extream hazord"?
If you meant extreme hazard, the answer is no: I live upwind of Los Alamos.
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.