Slashdot Mirror
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."
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/
Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives.
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.
Do you have any idea of the kind of balls it took to be a part of this team? Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
And you judge them? You, with the heat on, comfortable, probably overly fed.
What. A. Putz. You. Are.
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years. Also I don't think they were any more heroic then anyone else who assisted with the war effort, although unlike many they were establishing for themselves quite a lucrative career. The men working in coal mines to supply energy to head up the war effort we far more heroic then a bunch of scientists getting paid handsome salarys to do what they like to do anyways, ground breaking science.
Richard Feynman mustn't have had access to this particular safe.
peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
>peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
With all due respect, there has been nothing to compare with WWII. All states of War are not equal.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
Stuff you would not believe, ranging from nuclear-powered generators (for remote installations) that were abandoned all over the ex-Soviet Union on its collapse, to six nuclear submarines and ten reactor cores that were just dumped into the Artic...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Sea
This not counting the nukes they lost at sea, or are still rusting away awaiting decomm.
All of it? Yeah we've had skirmishes since then but we haven't had a significant percentage of GDP geared towards war since. Even the trillion dollar fiasco in Iraq has only been about 1.3% of GDP over the time we've been there. 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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
No, minor skirmishes don't count. Even with the most pessimistic of calculations about civilian deaths in Iraq there have been about as many traffic fatalities in the US since the conflict began as there have been deaths there. I'm not saying conflict isn't horrible and bloody and messy, I'm just saying that most people alive today have no real concept of what war is.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
but its hardly the fallout 3 scenario you imply.
Nah, I was there. There's a ton of crap out there. A lot of it we know about, a lot we still don't. A bunch has been cleaned up but it's a huge expanse of land that's been in use over 60 years. I personally found stuff buried in cabinets in labs that have been in use for decades that scared me. The researchers using that lab at the time had no idea it was there. People come and go out there all the time. Stuff gets left behind, the next person to use that space doesn't have a clue what went on there before and doesn't want to deal with the paperwork to get rid of it. Now apply that to hundreds of square miles of desert dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction in a hurry. I'll take bizarre radioisotopes for 600, Alex. And the answer was always the daily double. Some of those projects were military, either secret or undocumented or both. And they tended to bury their mistakes.
It's beautiful country, no doubt. And cancer rate in the area population, adjusted for age, is actually lower than the general population. Ambient radiation...depends where you're standing and when you were there. The iodine releases...those were bad but a long time ago. The old A & B reactors might be a museum now, but I don't think you'll ever get the grand tour of the canyon facilities in the 200 Area. There are a lot of doors in those you wouldn't want to open. The K Basins, the rod pools...I wonder if those cases have corroded all the way through yet? I'd be surprised if they got those cleaned up, it was hard to even handle them. There were rooms full of rotting rods.
The real problem with the cleanup is a lack of will to get it done, not necessarily the contractors. I was on a site one day...15 contractors standing around, half of them half-way into protective equipment. I asked why everyone was standing around and they said they had to wait for a mandatory safety lecture but the person giving it was late. 45 minutes later some dude shows up and gives them a five minute pep talk on slip, trip and fall hazards. Cornered him on his way off site and asked if he knew how much money went down the drain because he couldn't get there on time. He was furious. I got a call a couple days later...I won't tell you who from...but they were concerned about hearing that I wasn't a team player. Still not, but that's not here or there. Contractors are what they are and everyone has a lawyer, but the real problem is good old fashioned mismanagement.
In short, you don't know shit. If you live in the Tri-Cities you only know what the PR people tell you. If you're DoE management, you definitely don't have a clue. If you work out there somewhere, you know your little space and that's it. If you're EPA or Ecology you know your projects but not the whole picture. If you do anything classified you don't talk to anyone else and no one knows what you really do. Everything is so compartmentalized, a lot of historical knowledge is long gone, and the Bush administration has been running things out there the last decade. The same people who brought us Katrina and Iraq supervising a hazmat cleanup. ROFL!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
And yet the first time a team of engineers tried to build one, it worked. They didn't even have a supercomputer to do simulations on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do.
BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
Will it actually rack up a large body count? No. But the resulting panic (OMG terrorist Radiation!!) would be far, far worse than anything we've yet seen.
Most of the whining about my statement has been for a citation. I find this rather hilarious, as the first person who responded to my post gave a citation that supported my point: that there had been earlier offers of peace from japan that were rejected by Roosevelt. Either way, the source I take my information from was the largely undisputed article printed shortly after Japan's surrender, authored by Walter Trohan. For those who do not have access to Proquest, The Journal of Historical Review gives a pretty good analysis of the article and also reprints the text at the bottom of the page.
From the Journal Article:
Trohan's article revealed that two days prior to Rooseveltâ(TM)s departure for Yalta, the president received a crucial, forty page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from highly placed Jap officials offering surrender terms which were virtually identical to the ones eventually dictated by the Allies to the Japanese in August.
Yes, there were 5 offers of peace relayed to the allies long before the atom bombs were dropped. The three I refer to in my original post were the three that had been relayed directly to US forces, the other two were relayed via the British.
Why is it that everyone focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely ignoring the months of fire raids that preceeded
I do not discount the magnitude of these bombings, but a quick search of Wikipedia does reveal that these missions began after the three offers of peace I am discussing. The terms which the allied forces made Japan agree to in the end (which only asked to keep their monarch in place) were identical to the ones given before these bombings. This means that the bombings were entirely unnecessary.
Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender.
True, they did not agree to an unconditional surrender, but since Roosevelt dismissed the offer out of hand, it is also true that there was no effort truly made to find out if they would accept unconditional surrender. However, since the eventual surrender still allowed Japan the one condition they asked for, I find your point is rather moot.
Though, the bombings did have one effect. They made Japan desperate enough to make similar offers to Russia.
From the end of the Trohan article:
Just before the Japanese surrender the Russian foreign commissar disclosed that the Japs had made peace overtures through Moscow asking that the Soviets mediate the war. These overtures were made in the middle of June through the Russian foreign office and also through a personal letter from Hirohito to Stalin Both overtures were reported to the United States and Britain.
The analysis about bombers and civilian war is mostly correct. Additionally, I never really disagreed that eliminating the enemy's ability to wage war was effective, I only note that the extent to which it was taken in the Pacific Theater was completely unnecessary.
You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could ... we just w