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Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump
Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
"But sloppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth." :)
Oh, great.
show up on ebay?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
For some reason, just seeing the word "dump" in the title first brought feces to mind (cue word association, /. therapists).
When in doubt, always check File 13.
/chuckle)
No political statement intended, but it would be surprising if one day the government contractors doing cleanup also found a more/less completed Nuclear weapon warhead buried in a trash pit too.
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
I am sure Mike Rowe will Not be going to film that Dirty Job... (But I would certainly watch it if he ever did... as I imagine seeing Barsky fall in a pit of Nuclear Waste as Mike kiddingly mocks him...
By "Researchers" they mean "Homeland Security officers" who were contacted by "Police" who were contacted by "Hospital Staff" who had become sickened by "vagrants" admitted to emergency rooms with strange "green glowing skin" who had admitted to trying to sell a "Safe" they found in the "dump".
Namaste
Apparantly the stuff was actually discovered in 2004, but it's taken them this long to do the scientific detective work to figure out where this particular sample came from.
Scary picture of the rusty unearthed safe & dirty glass bottle full of 99.96% pure plutomium here:
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16447-hanford-site/
All across the jersey shore the sounds of shovels can be heard as terrorists smell pay-dirt.
Fortunately, there's enough garbage there to keep them searching until theyre all dead.
A much more interesting form of self-enforcement than the TSA, don't you think?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
We now see the real work of the Key Atomic Benefits Office Of Mankind (K.A.B.O.O.M.)... a fictional organization in the film "The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear".
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
man...this could be the plot of another season of 24.
My guess is that it's probably not weapons-grade anymore, but of course still suitable for a dirty bomb.
Ob. /. joke: This belongs in a museum!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I also like plutonium. It's just fun to say. Plutonium. 'How's your plutonium?' 'Good, thank you.'
It's worth noting that the sample was found at Hanford, a dedicated nuclear site. It's a radioactive mess, and the sample was not contained safely, but it's not as if they found it at a typical municipal dump.
I have personally visited the fields where they doing all this. The term "waste pit" is misleading. A lot of stuff was stuffed in 55gal drums and buried in rows underground just because they didnt know what to do with it. It was always intended to go back and clean them up, but due to delays they have been there longer than expected. It wasnt just thrown out in a big pile.
There is a huge tent on rollers (about football field size) that has a crane mechanism hanging from the ceiling. The barrels (and some boxes) are mostly rusted really bad so digging is done very slowly to avoid busting any. Those that are judged to be too weak are packed into a larger barrel that fits over the old one. There is also a ventilation trailer that has automated drills to pierce drums that are under pressure slowly to release gases so they dont explode. Its really pretty cool how they have it set up.
They just didnt know any better back then, and there was no way for them to have guessed what would happen with all that stuff. Unfortunately work on the vitrification plant is constantly delayed due to red-tape, but when it gets up and running then that will be a major break through.
Note: Most of the stuff in these barrels is solid. The liquid stuff are held in huge (over a million gallon) tanks. Those are also being replaced.
Not that they would be sloppy about disposal, history conclusively demonstrates that people, unless forced to do otherwise, don't care about proper disposal; but that they would dump that much pure plutonium.
Particularly in the early days, before processes were refined, highly pure samples of any of the exotic radioisotopes would have cost a bloody fortune, well more than their weight in gold. Not to mention the whole trying-to-get-the-Bomb-as-fast-as-possible thing. I'd expect to find radioactive trash all over the place; but finding a good size plutonium sample is pretty surprising.
Richard Feynman mustn't have had access to this particular safe.
With a 24000 half life it has gone from 99.96% to approx 99.85%. This stuff is still green. You need to keep it for at least 10k years to be cellar matured.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump"
Man, that's one powerful deuce...
I'm sure those guys back then were just as smug about their technology as we are now.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic. If even the US can lose track of its weapons-grade plutonium, then how is Iraq supposed to account for all its nuclear WMD's before the Iraq war. I remembered EX-Pres Bush saying that unless Iraq comes clean with the accounting of the WMD's, then US will invade Iraq.
Of course, in hind-sight, accounting for the WMD's is probably an excuse to invade anyway.
Much more. Take a drive out there sometime. Mile after mile of desert. There is construction rubble, old reactors, contaminated pipes and equipment mixed with construction rubble. Even the stuff they know is there is bad. Tanks full of screaming hot radioactive waste that burp flammable gas. Can't stabilize it, can't remove it, and definitely no smoking near it. The cesium pool...no life guard on duty. N Springs, the canyon facilities. And that's just what we know about. There are certainly more finds like this one buried out there. More plutonium, uranium, americium, cesium, thorium, take your pickium there's a container of it buried out there, probably mixed with something toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic that's equally scary when it's not radioactive. They were in a hurry, didn't understand the risks, record keeping was...occasional...and what scientists did was not understood by the majority of people working out there and frequently not well regulated.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it is what it is out there. Just don't be surprised what turns up in a backhoe bucket out at Hanford.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Whereas I saw the words nuclear and safe in the summary and thought nature reserve
You're talking about something that was lost in 1951, not 2003. The Cold War wasn't even fully fired up yet. Speaking of hindsight, yes, this kind of thing should probably have been recorded. Maybe it was, somewhere on some piece of paper that was lost or burned or simply misplaced. It seems easy to forget how much computers help us organize information now.
I don't know what Hanford you're thinking of, but we're talking about this one.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years.
It's amazing how they treated plutonium like a bag of groceries back then. Best example of that is the Demon Core. A sphere of plutonium that killed two scientists, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. In two different critical exposures.
Both times were simply the experimenter being clumsy. Dropping a brick or bumping a screwdriver. The core would go near-critical and make a flash of radiation. Louis Slotin lasted 9 days, and Harry Daghlian made it 21.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The atomic bomb did not remove Japan's desire to wage war, three offers of surrender previous to the bomb would indicate that their desire was basically gone already.
[Citation needed]
Or, less tersely, your assertion flies in the face of everything I have read about World War II.
Hmm, let's consult Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
So, I guess there was sort of an offer to surrender, but President Roosevelt was not willing to accept the conditions, and it's not clear that the Japanese government as a whole would have gone along with it even had it been accepted.
Although this area is the site of a great deal of mistakes and consequences resulting from negligence back in the day, those of us who live here are proud of our history....And the fact that we are our own nightlights! But I digress, the community that has been formed around this area is just one of those gems that makes you want to live here for a very long time. I have lived here my whole life and the history, the community, and the natural beauty of the area are what keep me here. If anyone wants to see a great documentary of what happened out there, and how much crap is being cleaned up, buy the DVD Arid Lands from sidelongfilms.com. From a native's perspective, it is the best explanation and analysis of the history and community that I have ever seen.
"It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
Someone tag this Feynman ;D
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Versus a large loss of life amongst both American military and Japanese civilians in the event of a land invasion? (Yes, there was a huge death toll at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but there certainly would have huge amounts of civilian collateral damage in
Some Japanese were ready to surrender, but, then again, a lot weren't. Japanese military, and last-ditch defenders would further add to the death toll.
The death of X people is definitely a tragedy, especially for large values of X. However, how is killing X people with a nuke worse than killing the same type of X people in conventional warfare?
It's just more death per payload, and it makes a bigger statement, important to inducing psychological defeat.
[Granted, this psychological warfare maneuver was at least in part to be directed at the Russkies; this part at least is disturbing]
Honestly, it seems up in the air as to whether the A-bombs were necessary historically speaking, and some of the estimates and data have apparently been lost to time/are still classified.
I can see both sides of the argument
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
To be exact, the cost was much, much more than "hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives."
Ain't you people ever heard of "Pit of ten thousand corpses?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
Have you at least seen The bridge on the river Kwai?
It was so sick they gave Nazis the heebie jeebies.
Cheers,
...as if thousands of terrorists (and the dinner-jacket wearing leader of a certain country, but I repeat myself) are simultaneously slapping themselves on the forehead and saying "Doh!"
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
It was explicitly stated in the armistice agreement that Hussien signed that when he got rid of his WMDs he had to save the receipt. So to speak.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
It's not so hard to protect yourself from thermo-nuclear war: Duck and cover!
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
If you could just find a Delorean in the same junkyard, you'd have one-stop shopping for a time machine.
The picture of the safe, the one with the purest Pu239 ever manufactured -99.96% purity- sitting in the 50 year old bottle of LaF3, the safe with its back ripped open by the idiot running the backhoe, yeah that one. What do you think this article would have been titled if that dumbass had broken that bottle and scattered that Pu239 all over the landscape? It's just dumb luck that it became a 'historical' find and didn't become a nuclear disaster.
Sig this!
It's an Australian link. And we know you guys censor the internet. So who knows what shenanigans you guys have going on there with your internet thingy.
Germans didn't believe they lost, they believed they were betrayed. After WWII, they had a pretty good idea that they lost and lost badly and lost the will to fight any further.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
87% of the US manufacturing base is devoted to weapons manufacture. The US accounts for over 75% of all military expenditures, world wide, and over 50% is on our own military (not counting the costs of Iraq or Afghanistan).
As to what percentage of the GDP that is, the 3% figure is highly conservative and only counts the direct costs of bombs, guns, payroll, and some of the cost of weapons development.
The compounded cost of that wasted economic output is very high over time. Each year, even assuming 3% is the best figure, you loose 3% of your economic output which could have gone into growth without costing anyone a dime, net. The doubling time at 3% is what, 20 some odd years? So, starting in 1948 would make 60 years of this, so the economy is now roughly 1/2 the size it could be if we hadn't just plowed all that money into the ground.
Now obviously the US couldn't entirely do without a military, but the total cost of the military was considerably over 3% too, so on the whole it looks to me like if we had HALVED our spending (so we're only 1/3 of the total world defense budget) we would be an economic powerhouse right now instead of being a basket case with a military that is still designed to fight the Russians in Europe.
So your '3% is nothing in the grand scheme of things' is just a bit off ;).
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Our standing army and research and procurement programs during times of absolute peace are around 3% of GDP so it's been nothing in the grand scheme of things.
... military expenditures are a bit like unemployment figures. How high they are depends on how you do the math. It seems the actual US military/defence budget is just over 4% of GDP. For the year 2009 the figure is (According to wikipedia) $515.4 Billion which is some 5.7% of GDP. If you also count miscellaneous other military spending it gets closer to 8-9%. This only covers the US armed forces. The Iraq war comes on top of this figure since Iraq and Afghanistan aren't included in the defence budget they are funded through supplementary spending bills. If you take other military expenditures like: black projects, veterans expenditures, subsidising of military equipment to other countries including the massive aid to Israel (only a portion of this aid ever gets paid back even if it is theoretically handed out in the form of loans) and count them as military spending the total US military expenditures for the last few years will easily top 10% of GDP. Keep in mind that black projects include some very expensive gadgetry and Israel isn't exactly a cheap proposition either. To keep the peace in that region the USA has to subsidise the military acquisitions of several surrounding arab countries to ensure a reasonable degree of military parity. Plus every time the the Israelis decide to exercise their right to defend them selves with totally disproportionate bombing campaigns in Lebanon and the occupied territories it triggers another wave of bribery to keep their Arab neighbours nice and docile and that usually takes the form of new and better weapons.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Dir Bob:
Please report to your nearest Ministry of Health clinic for evaluation.
Your Truely
B. B.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
done on this, I think back in the 60's. They concluded that the actual likely casualties were much lower on both sides. Most of Japan's Army was in China or isolated in various places. The Allies had TOTAL air and sea superiority, so they could outflank any defense along the coast and prevent any movement or concentration of enemy forces, or even resupply. At that point there was basically no oil anywhere in Japan.
This may not have been as apparent to the Allies in 1945 however. We can endlessly argue one way or the other about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth is they attacked us and showed no mercy and we fought back against them with everything we had. If you have a guy on the ropes and he isn't quite down yet you step up and hit him again, as hard as you can.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
> Dirty Bombs are pretty trivial to make.
They're far less deadly. Scary, but not that deadly. You're more likely to increase the incidence of cancer in some population than to kill a lot of people, though you'll scare tons of people half to death, I guess.
We've gone from being ridiculously cavalier about radiation to paranoid. I wish there were more of a middle ground.
It seems military spending went up by 5.7 percent in from FY08 to FY09, it was not raised to 5.7%. In that case the total military spending is just over 5% of GDP. As far as I can tell expenditures for Iraq, Afghanistan, black projects veteran affairs, military aid, Israel and other military related expenditures still pile on top this figure.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Top dollar now for old surplus US Government safes. Good for scrap metal they say!
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Something compounded at 3% interest doubles in 24 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Not sure if military spending is completely wasted.
In many ways, military spending is wasteful (negative externalities to the areas in which the war is fought, diversion of social focus, lost productive capacity of dead, injured & psychologically damaged personnel, etc)
Not sure it's 100% though.
However, Keynesian economics, which makes a lot of sense in many regards, holds that increased government spending boosts the economy, no matter which form that government spending takes.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Hanford Site in Washington State... It is a secure location that is ... in the process of enviornmental remediation.
Guessing you're not a Washington resident, or else you'd know that this "environmental remediation" is only progressing at all due to the WA state Department of Ecology suing the federal government over it. And that its current rate, it will be hundreds of years before the waste *we know about* has been cleaned up. Time during which shit continues to leak, and spread.
Generally speaking, the whole place is considered an absolute disaster by Washingtonians.
This sample was not weapons ready. If it were, it would have been used in a weapon and not left behind.
You obviously didn't read TFA. 99.96% purity. The article can only guess at why it didn't make it into a bomb. From the article:
"But the puzzling thing is, why didn't this plutonium make it into the bomb?" In 1944, the Americans were working flat out to develop a nuclear capability - it's strange that any first large batch of plutonium-239 should be stored and not used, he says.'
They go on to postulate that it was because the safe it was being stored in became contaminated, so the whole shebang got tossed.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.
Bad Nibbler!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Not sure if I suck at math... (And I posted this on the site before I saw slashdot picked up the story)
Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years. If it started COMPLETELY PURE, it would only be 99.8% pure at the end of 70 years.
"Once all the Germans were warlike, and mean
But that couldn't happen again
We taught them a lesson, in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then"
And to think, Doc Brown could have avoided all dealings with those wacky Libyan terrorists!
Actually, it would have made the whole lightning plot completely moot. Then Marty would only have had incest to deal with!
Wikipedia can say whatever it wants. The truth is this:
We gave them an ultimatum saying were would bomb the shit out of them unless they agreed to us. They said no.
We bombed hiroshima.
Then, we airdropped leaflets and told them that we would do it again unless they surrendered. They said no.
We bombed nagasaki.
Even _then_ the majority of the military elite wanted to keep fighting. It wasn't until 5 days later that the emporer decide to capitulate.
Fuck this shit about 'oh, the poor poor japanese' The alternative was for us to invade japan with troops (estimates at the time said it would take 1,000,000 troops to take it). Yeah, it sucks that we bombed them, yeah, it was terrible for the people that had to experience it, but we were in a war where the loser was going to be vanquished. If I were the president at the time and I had a choice between bombing some cities and conceivable losing a significant percentage of 1,000,000 of my own citizens, I would make the same choice.
-Bucky
who ever is claiming "dirtiest place on earth" has never been to Samarra, Salah Ad-Din, Iraq. trust me, you don't know dirty till you've been here.
Yes especially. Subcritical masses can be made to go critical through rapid compression. Some of our earliest fission bombs were done that way. If it's pure enough 400cc is more than enough to make a small bomb.
A comment on this article from New Scientists 'online technology reporter' suggests that the actual quantity of plutonium is less than 400mg.
But I'll take the computing power of Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Segre, Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Compton, Bethe, Tolman, von Karman, Ulam, Feynman, etc etc over any supercomputer every day of the week ;)
not the original poster but I got curious.. apparently the US accounts for about 47% of worldwide military spending and accounts for about 85% of the total military market. If those facts are correct, the arms industry represents about 63% of US industry (12.99% of GDP for arms industry, 20.6% of GDP total). I don't know how or if these numbers account for Iraq/Afghanistan expenditure.
I, Official Ghost of Saddam Hussein, declare war on the United Sloppy-contractors of America for having weapons grade Plutonium in suspicious locations.
With me in my War On Error will be North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran (latest ally), and Pakistan.
"That's what happens when your emperor takes the bait and tries standing up for his own people living on American soil."
Yes, the emperor's main concern after bombing Pearl was the treatment of ethnic Japanese American Citizens on American soil.
[rolling eyes]
I suppose that's why the Rape of Nanking occurred? Out of the emperor's deep concern that Japanese were in internment caps in the United States?
You are a funny little man.
"Unheard of"?
Now who's going to be blamed for this?
Iraq? Iran? Russians?
War on Terror and WMDs?
Wither the great Republican Anti-Terror Brigade?
For four years, they covered up their really serious gaffes!
as in the place from where the colored people come.
an AC said:
>might save tens of thousands of American lives?
Did save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives, both American and Japanese.
A cousin of mine was in the occupation forces and happened to be stationed near where his unit was scheduled to hit the beach --- he said it would've been a suicide run, resulting in 90--95% or higher casualties for his unit, and almost as bad for those who would've followed them.
My mother and her parents were in Japan during World War II (``contract'' labour for the Japanese imported from Korea) and said that at the end of the war the Japanese were setting up defense units of every able-bodied woman aged 18--40, arming them w/ sharpened bamboo poles for want of other weapons.
Japan's surrender, which could not have been brought about by any other means (if fire-bombing Tokyo, which proved as _Time Magazine_ described it ``... that a Japanese city, when properly kindled will burn like autumn leaves.'', then what would a mere military invasion such as Okinawa had already been through) saved millions of lives, on both sides.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Is the bridge they found that under for sale, too?
(Don't listen to the voices that the Amerikanski stole.. I mean, appropriated.. I mean.. secured the Wunderwaffes and used them on Japs)
It is good to know that weapons grade plutonium is being logged and tracked safely to ensure it does not get either into the hands of terrorists, nor into the environment until it decays to a 'safe' level.
O, wait...
(I wonder if all weapons grade plutonium is subject to the same strict guidelines ?)
Depends on who's numbers you look at. Different groups count different things depending on what they'd like you to believe. My main point was that the 3% figure is FAR below a realistic total number. 3% only counts direct DoD spending budgeted for the existing military. It doesn't count huge costs like the support of the VA, much of the R&D budget, and a whole lot of ancillary expenses and things that are only being paid for because they indirectly contribute to defense.
No doubt there are reasonable arguments against counting some of the things the numbers I threw out there do count, and the numbers you quote don't seem unreasonable either. I'd accept them as being a reasonable point of discussion.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I get modded 'Flamebait'? Great huh? Truth hurts I guess. What do you get when a bunch of morons are the moderators, the lowest common denominator of crap just rises right to the top...
Oh well, it matters not. The US has finished itself off anyway. I figure we'll have that 50% defense reduction pretty soon now. Hard to hire soldiers when you're broke.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The mistake Japan made was the same mistake that Muslim countries are making now.
The cult of the emperor led to the impression that the Japanese did not think rationally and thus had to be countered by physical force, like a wild dog being shot.
Countries that have no love of individual life are cases of collective mental illness. While these are interesting topics for professors to research, the practical implication is that when you stop behaving rationally, you are no longer going to be negotiated with, you will be penned and herded like cattle.
I see there has been a few people flinging that one around here lately, but it is totally appropriate in the context of military spending.
When you build a bomb, you produce something that certainly gives the bomb builder a job, but it produces no other useful input to society. When you instead spend that money on roads, bridges, renewable energy, R&D, or even just plain consumer goods at least you get SOMETHING out of it.
Some people will respond that the military provides some sort of 'security'. Well, up to a certain point that might be true, but consider it further.
No amount of spending is going to 'make you safe'. There are at least 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert pointed at the US. No amount of spending on more weapons is going to make any impact on that threat. Nor is there any reasonable way to defend the US against terrorism by more such spending. I'm not suggesting we should just ignore terrorists, but tanks, warplanes, warships, etc do not materially add to our security against such things.
In fact one can just as effectively argue that we are LESS secure because of the threatening size and capability of our military, which all other countries on the earth don't equal and must all consider as a possible threat, which then leads to increased spending everywhere else. Nor would George W Bush have had the opportunity to screw things up as he did if he wasn't given so many toys to play with.
I'll be amused to go back and consider all these points again after the US is forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban resumes power and after the government of Iraq degenerates back into anarchy and ends up either yet again a totalitarian dictatorship and/or an Iranian puppet state.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The World's Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium sitting ignominously in some waste dump? It should be in a museum!
The Soviets had a triply redundant materials tracker. I don't have a reference immediately available
You might want to check what came out of stacks in Miami, Ohio, U.S.A. .
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout.
If you count all production which supports the entire defense establishment, then it is a VERY large percentage!
The production dedicated to actually building military hardware is much lower, but that effectively just represents the tip of a very large iceberg. Of course were defense spending to be reduced, that proportion would decrease much more.
But it is a fair number in that it gets at the actual total impact of military spending on the US economy.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I don't quite buy Eisenhower beleiving in slave labor because from his journals he comes across as rational, but anyway here is an article that probably covers most of what this guy is talkign about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_and_German_POWs
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
They had a super-genius, no need for a super-computer. Complex maths n' shizzle.
I was reading this in someone elses post and it gives a figure on all the documents http://www.downwinders.com/hanford_hist.html/ 7 billion pages of documents is alot for a group of typists to input into a computer. I just thought you would like a number to go with your thought. That's not to mention a file that was misfiled or lost in transit to where ever they store the documents now(the Hanford site is closed besides the cleanup I think) I would think the pentagon or some other major government facility.
"It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe." With about fifty caps and a copy of "Guns and Bullets"
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/4298/googleadsxz1.png
Can I have that old safe when you're done with it?
Here's a nice gallery of other scary images related to nuclear waste: http://www.spaceman.ca/gallery/chernobyl
"What about that safe, no one knows the combination?"... "Chuck it out then." "It might have plutonium in it." "Don't be ridiculous... we need to make space for additional admin staff to comply with the new regulations on radioactive substance control."
If they come up with 2 lbs of WeaponsGrade material (50* more than was found in the safe), and overbuild the initial compression by a factor of 10 (ie build the 4 Ton Hiroshima bomb, from directions available) likely they get the same result the US did on it's first, second, and third tries, which was sized at 10k Tons of TNT.
Contrast that with the precise weapon you describe, that is possible with the correct data, that the US builds now. With less than the same 2 lbs of material, and now comes inside 1/4 the total weight (1 Ton) and now can produces a 4 MegaTon bang.
so if 10k ton bang is all they wanted, not much else needed than the materials, and time. if you want the whole 4 MTon, or a small enough package to transport discreetly, then you need the data.
No kidding.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson