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US Will Clean Area In Spain Where Hydrogen Bombs Fell (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Rafael Minder writes in the NY Times that almost 50 years after coming close to possibly provoking a nuclear disaster, Secretary of State John Kerry, following years of wrangling between Spain and the U.S., signed an agreement to remove contaminated soil from an area in southern Spain where an American warplane accidentally dropped hydrogen bombs. In 1966 a bomber collided with a refueling tanker in midair and dropped four hydrogen bombs, two of which released plutonium into the atmosphere. No warheads detonated, narrowly averting what could have been an explosion more powerful than the atomic strikes against Japan at the end of World War II. Four days after the accident, the Spanish government stated that "the Palomares incident was evidence of the dangers created by NATO's use of the Gibraltar airstrip," announcing that NATO aircraft would no longer be permitted to fly over Spanish territory either to or from Gibraltar. The U.S. later announced that it would no longer fly over Spain with nuclear weapons, and the Spanish government formally banned U.S. flights over its territory that carried such weapons.
Neither Kerry nor Spanish Foreign Minister García-Margallo said exactly how much contaminated soil would be sent back, where it would be stored in the United States, or who would pay for the cleanup — some of the issues that have held up a deal until now. Spain has insisted that any contaminated soil be sent to the United States, because Spain does not have plants to store it. Concern over the site was reawakened in the 1990s when tests revealed high levels of americium, an isotope of plutonium, and further tests showed that 50,000 cubic meters of earth were still contaminated. The Spanish government appropriated the land in 2003 to prevent it being used.
Neither Kerry nor Spanish Foreign Minister García-Margallo said exactly how much contaminated soil would be sent back, where it would be stored in the United States, or who would pay for the cleanup — some of the issues that have held up a deal until now. Spain has insisted that any contaminated soil be sent to the United States, because Spain does not have plants to store it. Concern over the site was reawakened in the 1990s when tests revealed high levels of americium, an isotope of plutonium, and further tests showed that 50,000 cubic meters of earth were still contaminated. The Spanish government appropriated the land in 2003 to prevent it being used.
Whatever you do, don't vote for Hillary Clinton.
Americium is NOT an isotope of plutonium, it is a decay product of Uranium/Plutonium, specifically
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium#Isotope_nucleosyntheses
Jack ass
They'll turn all that Americium into smoke detectors and we'll all get to listen to that fucking beep in the middle of the night because nobody can seem to make a detector that has a light sensor on it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just load it onto ships and dump it in the Atlantic near a subduction zone.
i mean it sucks and all, but why should we be on the hook for this???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I know the poster pulled it from the article, but Americium is a by-product from the radioactive decay of Plutonium, not an isotope of Plutonium. Isotopes have the same number of protons, and Pu has 94 while Am has 95. Plutonium converts to Americium via a beta decay, which causes a neutron to turn into a proton.
It's the best place for it, and will guarantee it will be treated appropriately by those most qualified to know.
Of course there wasn't. This isn't nitroglycerin, and there are SO MANY layers of safety devices on these bombs this just not a possibility. The bomb has to be employed intentionally.
After 2 generations...
No warheads detonated, narrowly averting what could have been an explosion more powerful than the atomic strikes against Japan at the end of World War II.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I have poured hot grits down my pants. Thank you.
[T]ests revealed high levels of americium, an isotope of plutonium
Americium is not an "isotope of plutonium", by definition. There are isotopes of Am and Pu whose nuclei are isobars to each other, but one element can never be isotopic to another.
And this sentence, if read as "[T]ests revealed high levels of americium, [AND] [the tests also revealed] an isotope of plutonium", would in theory be grammatically correct and factually acceptable, but still confusing.
More research needs to be done on this... Spanish Soil welcome to Idaho
The US Air Force still hasn't recovered the H-Bomb accidentally dropped in 1958 in Wassaw Sound not to far from Savannah, Georgia.
Just load it onto ships and dump it in the Atlantic near a subduction zone.
Geology nerds will tell you that, other than a speculative subduction zone starting up offshore Portugal, the Atlantic Ocean doesn't have subduction zones.
...more powerful than the atomic strikes against Japan at the end of World War II was not "narrowly averted". A nuclear detonation requires a very specific chain of events to occur. Which is extremely unlikely on a bomb being dropped from an airplane. The bomb is not even designed to detonate on impact.
The Atlantic Ocean currently has three subduction zones: in the Caribbean, the South Atlantic and the Mediterranean. A new one may be forming off the coast of Portugal. http://www.earthmagazine.org/a...
Learn to love Alaska
So we have agreed to clean it up where are we going to put it?
The US agreed to store nuclear waste from all of our reactors back in the 1960's they still haven't been able to decide where to put it over 50 years later.
If they do clean it up and ship it back to the US by boat it will stay on that boat at the dock until the boat rusts out and sinks.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The Mediterranean is not part of the Atlantic. It is the remaining sea after the closing of the Thetys ocean.
Do you really think they won't dump this waste in the same place on their trip home?
Nukes from day one have been designed to only detonate after a specific series of human and environmental interactions. A non-activated nuke is dirty, but it's never going to explode.
Democrats running out of things to spend money on or something? Lets buy dirt!
Hm, if the Atlantic is California and Oregon, then the Mediterranean is New York, or well something closer ... Wyoming?
In other words: they are separated seas and only connected by a rather small passage, the straight of Gibraltar.
Regarding subduction zones, I have no idea :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm guessing Idaho - what better place to hide it away than in the farming heartland.
This is clearly part of a long-term plot to steal ALL of Spain! Now that the precedent has been established, we just need a few more "accidents" to contaminate the rest...
From the summary:
Now, I'm not really John Kerry's biggest fan, but I think it's a bit much to blame him for "coming close to possibly provoking a nuclear disaster".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier
I also find the phrase "coming close to possibly provoking a nuclear disaster" rather strange. What sort of "disaster" does one "provoke"? One might provoke a war, or cause a disaster. And is "coming close to possibly" the same thing as "coming close", or does "possibly" mean that it wasn't that close?
P.S. It's not actually likely that a nuclear bomb that isn't armed will go off in a nuclear explosion by accident. The carefully-designed explosive charges need to go off in a specifically timed sequence, and if one of them goes off first because the bomb fell on it from a high altitude, what you would expect to happen is exactly what happened here: a non-nuclear explosion that scatters the radioactive components of the bomb over an area. If you define "scattering radioactive material" as a "nuclear disaster" then one did occur; if you don't define it that way, then no "nuclear disaster" was very likely to occur.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bm65m/has_a_nuclear_bomb_ever_been_accidentally_set_off/
It's because of the above that I had trouble swallowing the plot of part of The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. The protagonist needs to prevent a nuclear detonation from a warhead, and comes up with a needlessly elaborate plan involving a magical gadget that changes chemical compositions. All they needed to do was stick an explosive on one side of the warhead and light it off with a delay timer or remote detonator; after that, the radioactive bits would be blown here and there and no nuclear detonation would be possible.
I guess the protagonist of that story never read "The Long Watch" by Heinlein. You can read it, though, at this link:
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1439133417/1439133417___4.htm
The US wanted to expand a couple of bases it has in Spain, but Spain needed something in return to make it easier to sell to the Spanish voters. So they can now say that they forced their will on the US and only had to give up a a little military base expansion in return.
I'm guessing a lot of American dollars will also head that way since Spain is pretty much insolvent, but that wouldn't look good to voters in either country so they won't brag about it.
Although people associate uranium with radioactivity, it is only very slightly radioactive (half life > 1 billion years), so if you don't assemble a critical mass the danger is actually chemical. (Heavy metals have a strong tendency to be toxic.)
Other posters have said that here we are dealing with plutonium-239, which has a half life of 24000 years. That is orders of magnitude greater activity (shorter life) than uranium. I've reached the end of my knowledge here - which is worse, is the radioactivity or the chemical toxicity of plutonium-239?
TFA suggests they are worried about radioactivity: "A main concern has been that the remaining plutonium was being allowed to degenerate into other radioactive components like americium, which emits gamma rays that travel farther and are hard to block" but concern is not always well founded, and reporters don't always get it right.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
wow, that's rare. What's gotten into them?
The posters here with the blase attitudes regarding nuclear weapons accidents ought to consider reading the book "Command and Control" and marvel at the fact we made it thru the cold war at all.
Regarding clean-up: when accidents happened on US territory we cleaned it up, even at Thule AFB, which is about as close to the end of the earth as you can get. We also contaminated the other end of the earth for good measure (leaky reactor at McMurdo Station Antarctica). In both cases the contaminated soil was 'disposed of' at the Savannah River Plant.
They'll turn all that Americium into smoke detectors and we'll all get to listen to that fucking beep in the middle of the night because nobody can seem to make a detector that has a light sensor on it.
Of course they have light sensors in them. That's how they know to wait until the middle of the night before they start beeping.
Americium is not an isotope of Plutonium. It's a separate element. Americium is atomic number 95 and Plutonium is atomic number 94. Isotopes have the same atomic number.
Surprised there's not a +5 comment explaining this already.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Forgotten work of genius that ended the previously Academy Award nominated director's career - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
smilies are for reetards
Americium: a dangerous, unstable element which decays with a half life of 141 years. On the periodic table exists below the lanthanide europium, with which it shares many similarities. It has a silvery-white metallic lustre when freshly prepared which slowly tarnishes over time. While similar to europium it is much denser partly due to the larger mass of its constituent atoms.
From TFA
What does it mean by 'contaminated soil' ?
How can soil mixed with Uranium - one of the naturally occurring elements in the universe - be called 'contaminated'?
BTW, what has Hillary got to do with contaminated soil?
I'd hate to see this stuff laying around for years, I mean decades, no I mean centuries, yeah that's it!
at tanagra
Here is what’s really going on.
For the last fifty years the 6th Fleet has been headquartered near Naples, Italy. There are no shore bases in Italy for the roughly 1,100 Marines assigned to the fleet. The fleet is routinely called the Mediterranean fleet but the area it controls includes most of the eastern Atlantic and south western Indian oceans. (See map at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). The U.S. has only ten full sized aircraft carriers and none are operating in the Med right now The real action is in the Indian ocean and the western Pacific facing China. http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocatio....
For some reason the U.S. government and NATO have decided to move the Naples headquarters to Rota, Spain, which is potentially a much larger facility that Naples, with room for a few thousand Marines on shore.
Of course Spain wants something in return and we had to get the deal done before the Spanish election, which might bring in a leftist government. The best article on the deal is, as usual, in the British newspaper the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/wor.... To quote from the article (paragraph brakes removed):
“The Palomares clean-up deal is seen by many as a sweetener in exchange for Spain agreeing to Washington ramping up its military presence in the country. The number of marine personnel at the base in Morón in southern Spain is to be increased from 850 to 2,200, and to 3,000 in the event of a crisis. Meanwhile, the US navy base at Rota, near Cádiz, is set to become the largest in the Mediterranean. Talks with Spain’s right-wing government over the military build-up have intensified in recent months amid fears that a government less sympathetic to Washington’s strategic aims may be elected in December. Barack Obama said during the King of Spain’s visit to Washington in September that a change of government might harm bilateral relations. Kerry refused to comment on the possible outcome of the election but said that the US supports “a strong and united Spain”, a clear reference to the Catalan region’s aspiration to break away and become independent.”
So in the end the U.S. gets roughly 50,000 cubic meters of irradiated soil- how irradiated is still unclear. 50,000 meters equals roughly 80,000 tons. If the dirt is packaged first, it will take two-or-three medium-sized shiploads to get it to the U.S. and the equivalent of roughly 1,000 railroad freight cars or 2,000-3,000 forty-foot containers to move the dirt inside the U.S. My guess is railroad cars.
The present speculation says it will go to Idaho but I’m not sure. There is always the example of the USS Sturgis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which had a small reactor that suffered damage during storms in the 1960s and 1970s. The ship had not been designed so the interior of the reactor room could be cleaned by water spray. So for 40 years the ship was stored in Quantico and on the James river, too hot to dismantle and yet not really a danger.
Finally I should say I’m not clear on why the U.S. and NATO have decided to move to Rota although I’ll throw out a few possibilities. First, it may be hard to find places to train in the central Med because
I accidentally truncated what I wrote by about 50 words. Mia culpa... Here is the last section:
Finally I should say I’m not clear on why the U.S. and NATO have decided to move to Rota although I’ll throw out a few possibilities. First, it may be hard to find places to train in the central Med because of refugee boats. The Navy has not picked up one refugee. The U.S. navy has clearly been told “The President doesn’t want pictures of a hundred Africans on board a U.S. warship with no place to land them except back the U.S.” Second is the Ruskies and ISIS; we may need Marines to land in a hotspot like Syria and for that we need a serious logistical base like Rota. Third, there may be a general NATO realignment in the area. European warships are doing all the refugee rescues. Building “a fence in the Med to stop immigrants” will clearly be a European activity, not an American one.
So we get Rota and the Spaniards get rid of the dirt. The only question is about the 50,000 cubic meter number; is it a firm number or is it guess that might balloon into something much larger.
Americium is an element, not an isotope of plutonium. It is, however, produced from plutonium (or uranium) by bombardment with neutrons.
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