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Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
In the case of the Travis accident, there was no nuclear disaster precisely because the nuclear core was not loaded. The Air Force was all too aware of the number of B-29's that crashed on or shortly after takeoff and never armed the weapons until they were close to the target area. To call this a "close call" is simply fear mongering to get page hits.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
IANANP, but AFAIK a regular explosion or fire will not set off a nuclear weapon. The trigger explosion has to be carefully controlled, otherwise it'll just blow apart the nuclear material instead of compressing it to supercritical. That's why it's so hard to build a nuke. Crashing with a nuke is at worst going to spread some nuclear material over a small area, in the same way that any other material in the crash would be. No nuclear explosion.
Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.
If the fission capsule were in there, it most likely would not have gone off. With a implosion bomb (fat man style, as the Mark IV was), all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds). If some goes off first, it just blows the core apart instead of pushing it to supercriticality.That is, if the core weren't scattered in the crash before the fire set off the explosives anyway.
Basically, you would have had a dirty bomb, no more.
Now, a little boy (uranium gun-type) bomb can go off by accidentally more easily, but getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So none of these times did we almost nuked our self... ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.
The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
The third was another un armed bomb.
The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Only the conventional portions detonated, that's a pretty important omission there.
In addition nuclear plants cannot cause nuclear explosions so while the US may have come close to contaminating areas there was zero danger of a nuclear explosion in such cases.
This reminds me of the time the US was almost attacked by giant killer terrorist robots. Luckily, Osama didn't invent and deploy them, otherwise the death toll could have been in the 9 figures.
Ironically, that's kind of what happened with both the recent Times Square Bomber and the London nightclub carbomb back in 2007 - neither of the bombers built anything particularly dangerous. In both cases the bombs lacked oxidizers (and other things too) - which meant that at best they might blow the windows out of the car the bomb was in. But all the politicians were eager to make hay and said exactly the same sort of thing, "if the bomb had exploded it could have killed thousands!"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
To further elaborate, unless the conventional explosives detonate in the correct sequence, the chance that a nuclear explosion will occur is effectively 0. Just smashing into the ground and detonating because of the shock is NOT how you trigger an atomic bomb.
Plutonium doesn't even make a half-way decent dirty bomb. You'd be better off with Cobalt 60 or something along those lines.
US is the most nuked country.
1,054 tests by official count (involving at least 1,151 devices, 331 atmospheric tests), most at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Amchitka Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
928 at Nevada Test Site, 105 atmospheric at Pacific Proving Ground, two underwater at Pacific Proving Ground, one underwater 500 miles from California.
715 for the Soviet Union.
He who regulates something, runs it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A an accidental detonation from a bomb twice the size dropped on Japan would not result in " immediate death toll" that " may have reached six figures".
In 1950, the population of Fairfield was around 3000. I don't know the size of the air force base, but I don't think it was close to the 6 figure range (today it has 15K military and civilian workers, it may have been higher during the cold war). Suisun City today has a fraction of the population of Fairfield.
Just 3km from the hypocenter of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, most structures withstood the blast and most people that were indoors survived the initial blast.
And that bomb detonated at an altitude of 500m to maximize destruction. An accidental surface detonation in an airplane crash is going to have a much smaller destructive zone, even though the bomb is twice as powerful. So even if that bomb had detonated in the crash, there would be survivors even on the airbase itself.
Even in a 1 megaton blast (50 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) , there's a 75% survival rate just 7.5 miles from the blast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html
So even if a a 1 Megaton accidental detonation occurred in the NW corner of the base today, it wouldn't cause an immediate 6 figure death toll.
This, of course, this ignores the long term deaths and illness caused by radiation exposure.
B-52 crash at Thule, Greenland, 1968.
4 hydrogen bombs aboard, contamination of a large area. The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
General practitioners, who form the vast majority of doctors in the UK, are not on a government salary either. A doctor's practice is a private business that bills the government for NHS treatments. (Which is why there is no problem with your doctor providing private treatments; he's not a government employee.)
Our situations are more similar than you think.
How about reading classes?
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Kind of like Canada. The government pays doctors, builds and run hospitals, chooses what procedures are covered, but has no say in which doctor you use. I can use whatever doctor, at whatever clinic, at whatever hospital I want. The doctor doesn't have to worry about a "pre-existing" condition invalidating my insurance, or about caps, or co-pays.
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states, and there are private clinics up here too.
Anarchists never rule
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So, now slashdot needs to add a filter for pathetic troll stories submitted by kdawson too? What, he's not happy with just approving pathetic troll stories anymore?
One big thing that has happend - the control over what is and is not insured has pretty much been ceded to the goverment now. It was previously in the hands of the state Board of Insurance in each of the 50 states. This has a huge effect on costs.
How does it effect costs? Well, let's say you are part of a group that believes that Fibromyalgia is a serious condition that must be covered by insurance plans. Previously, your group would have to lobby in each of the 50 states to get coverage approved and mandated. Now all you have to do is stop at one federal agency and if they agree, it is mandated for all 50 states.
Copy this for acupuncture, massage therapy, sex disfunction treatments involving use of a surrogate, etc. You get the idea. It has now become about 50 times easier to get coverage for the malady of the week covered by insurance.
Why is health insurance more expensive in California than in, say, Wyoming? Well, California mandates coverage for a lot of things that aren't required to be covered anywhere else.
When people say costs are going to triple in 2014, I'd listen to them. They stand an awfully good chance of being right.
Hopefully. The VA system actually has proper electronic medical records shared between hospitals.
Not a typewriter
I understand why you have been modded up for your comment but reinforcing a belief system is a poor substitute for examining the facts, so let's do that now.
To quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plant's auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core.
The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days* after. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured. So, in reality, the amounts of contamination released were beyond the Nuclear Industry capability to measure.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions." - So if they didn't know, how is it you do?
Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the elements released.
Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of Nuclear Physics at the City University of New York, was quoted to say of TMI "It appears that every few months, since 1990, a new estimate is made of core debris, often with little relationship to the previous estimate. Estimates range form 608.8 kg to 1,322 kg... This is rather unsettling....," he concluded. "The still unanswered questions are therefore: precisely how much uranium is left in the core, and how much uranium can collect in the bottom of the reactor to initiate re-criticality." Which means the containment building contains enough radioactive elements to still be capable of releasing *extremely* radioactive elements into the environment.
Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take measurements on which to base long term cancer studies, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have been lost?
What we do know is of the states highest in the list of cancer averages (within the cancer incubation period after the accident) the ones with similar population density surrounded Pennsylvania, where TMI occurred. New York with roughly 3 times the population, which topped the list, was also in the fall out zone. So it's easy for anyone to say that no-one died because of TMI because there is no gathering of data, no official study, no evidence. It's more honest to say "We don't know how many people died as a result of TMI because because no data was collected".
If you are aware of any such study please provide a link to it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Often if someone posts to say something will be modded down, people then mod it up. Also, just because you see something at +5 Informative, doesn't mean it wasn't blasted down as Flamebait, Overrated or Redundant which comments often are for a while first. On the whole, the Slashdot system balances things out because moderations are capped, so it only takes a few people to mod something up to counterbalance a horde of people modding it down. For some reason the process tends to go down first then up, so it depends how long after the comment was posted (and how far down the story it's slid) what outcome you see.
;)
I'm a anti-piracy AGW-skeptic. Trust me, I know about getting modded down.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.