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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.
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
When someone sees an image of the Virgin Mary burned into their face from the radiation.
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/
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.
Richard Feynman mustn't have had access to this particular safe.
Not if you read the story.
The safe was contaminated. Probably by some very nasty but short lived stuff. So the did the "safe" thing by 1944/45 standards. They buried it.
Now the really nasty stuff is gone.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm sure those guys back then were just as smug about their technology as we are now.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
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.
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,
If you could just find a Delorean in the same junkyard, you'd have one-stop shopping for a time machine.
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.
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
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
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).
While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, do you have a citation for any of these bold claims?
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.
Not at all. Go read up on the fire raids the lead up to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They caused far more total destruction and loss of life than those two atom bombs did ... and that still wasn't enough to force an unconditional surrender. To the Germans, who were willing to acknowledge that they'd fucking lost the war it was a no-brainer, but the Japanese were a much tougher nut to crack.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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 ;)
Was one requirement of the dumbass's job that he be psychic, and be able to locate radioactive materials in office supply dumps simply thru sheer concentration?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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
You know plutonium is a metal, right? It's not like you touch it with a backhoe and it suddenly explodes into a fine powder, raining down "all over the landscape."
I suppose if the driver had rammed the backhoe into the core you might have ended up with two lumps of plutonium and a backhoe that needed to be scrapped.
"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"