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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."
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.
Actually that number is a very very low estimate.
Did you know that the US military is still using the stockpile of purple hearts that was made for the invasion of Japan.
The military estimates for the losses are in the hundreds of thousands for US and over a million for Japan.
Japan had also already crossed the NBC line before the US dropped the bombs. They had used chemical and biological weapons in China.
Yes it was a terrible waste of life. If the government of Japan had just cared enough about their own citizens lives it never would have happened.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
When they talk about Purity, they mean how pure it is in terms of P-240. The amount of P-240 is usually determined upon creation conditions, since it is -very- difficult to separate P-239 from P-240.
Now, P-239 decays into U-235, and it -is- easy to chemically separate them.
All of this I learned in the last 10 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
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.
We killed just as many Japanese civilians in one bombing run with incendiary bombs as with one atomic bomb.
Everything I've observed and studied about the war points to the loss of Japanese lives would have been far higher if we invaded. If you question this, look at casualty numbers for German civilians. Plus we (racially) hated the Japanese far more than the Germans. And the Germans weren't culturally opposed surrender.
Relatively speaking, building a space shuttle is easy once you have enough fuel. Relatively speaking.
Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.
Perhaps you're thinking of gun-type weapons? Those are stupidly simple to build in comparison to an implosion device. However, they are made from Uranium rather than Plutonium.
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That is a myth. Japan never offered to surrender. They offered to negotiate an end to the war but they would have kept Korea and most of what the had left in China..
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The numbers don't add up - IIRC, the pessimistic (Lancet) figures are about 600,000 dead from violence, many more if you compare the pre-Gulf War I death rates with today - lots of deaths from bad water, especially among young children. The UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 died under sanctions beyond the pre-war mortality rates. AFAIK child mortality has not fallen much since, certainly not to pre-Gulf War I levels.
The US annual auto crash fatalities used to be around 40,000-50,000 last time I looked, so that's at most 300,000 since the start of Gulf War II.
Of course the US has a much larger population than Iraq, so even if the numbers of deaths were equal, -and they aren't even close- the death rates would be proportionally much higher in Iraq.
Neither the proportion of US GDP spent on war nor the number of US auto fatalities are a good measure of the harm to the people of Iraq.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
For your sake, I hope this is a joke. The tolerances of implosion nuclear weapons are incredibly tight. The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance. Anything you can get out of a textbook or off the internet is simply not detailed enough to produce a functional weapon.
Think of it this way. You need to pack C4 in a casing such that:
1. The force of the C4 is completely contained.
2. The force is evenly applied to the plutonium sphere such that it won't shift or move about during detonation.
3. The force is projected as close to spherically as possible.
Those are tall orders for any engineer! As I said, the tolerances are so tight that the most likely outcome of any detonation is a fizzle. Only with very sophisticated R&D can any superpower even hope to create an implosion device.
Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)
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Why is it that everyone focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely ignoring the months of fire raids that preceeded Fatman and Littleboy? Those raids caused far more devastation than both atom bombs put together. The effects were made infinitely more dramatic because of the Japanese habit of building their homes out of what was essentially paper.
... or The Bomb. So we nuked them. Then, after absorbing not one but two nukings, the Japanese military still wouldn't surrender! it was Hirohito himself who had to finally call a halt.
... off. The GP is correct: if you don't want a war (or want to stop one) you eliminate the enemy's capacity to wage it. The truth is, World War II changed the face of war forever, and it wasn't the atom bomb that did it. It was the long-range bomber. All major conflicts leading up to the Big One were fought with little ability to affect the other side's manufacturing base. You could cut his lines of supply ... but there was no way to reach out and attack his means of production. That meant that most conflicts were between military personnel and involving military targets. Civilian areas could be occupied or overrun, but were generally not blown to pieces.
... we just wouldn't let them arm themselves, made them allies, and we provided for their defense. Some allies they turned out to be, using the capabilities we gave them to successfully attack our manufacturing sector. Don't underestimate the Japanese: yes, we rebuilt their their industrial engine after the War (just as we did for Germany) but our generosity came back to haunt us.
Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender. The only thing left was a bloody ground assault
Your history is a bit
The long-range bomber allowed direct attacks upon factories, transportation hubs, storage facilities and other paraphenalia of a modern industrial economy. This had the effect of involving the civilian population, who had previously remained distant from actual warfare (until a nation's defenses were overrun and an occupation began.) Germany and Japan both built their military machines using civilian workers and production facilities, who became legitimate targets once the ability to hit them was available.
You know what? We deduce the existence of peace because there are intervals between wars. Peace is an ideal, and like most ideals it is rarely, if ever, fully realized. Not for long, anyway. You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Boy, well that sure worked well with Germany post WWI.
One of the more uninformed remarks. Look, after World War I the Allies essentially bankrupted Germany with war reparations. That left Germans prime targets for the first demagogue to come along. After the Second World War, we did exactly the opposite ... rather than destroying what remained of their economy we rebuilt it. The two situations are simply not comparable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.