There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.
A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
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Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#12So, has the management at Los Alamos been replaced? That's clearly the cause of the problem. It's been 5 years now. What's happened?
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#13The US has an interesting history of poor safety around nuclear related facilities. Not far from Denver is a great example with some interesting history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=Th....
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#14There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.
isn't that the film MI6 based their fake iraq WMDs dossier on
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#15Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together...
I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#16They keep saying that profit seeking was the issue, but taking selfies with plutonium, running a lab for 4 years that produces nothing, and not having any employees that don't understand the most basics of nuclear physics does not sound like profit seeking. It sounds like someone just has way too much money and runs a nuclear weapons lab as vanity project.
If you continued to read the article, you'd see that there was a culture of throwing caution to the wind to increase productivity at not only that lab, but other nuclear facilities around the world. Hell, the article even went on to say that workers at the facility even came up with a euphemism for orders that ignored basic safety protocols, they called them "Bubba said" orders. And the article said that after those…
> And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating.
And how exactly did they convince those employees to keep working? The employees are not making extra for not following rules, do people really just not care about their lives?
(I don't for a second believe someone working in a nuclear lab would be unaware of criticality, so ignorance can't be the explanation.)
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#17The BLS says:
> There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a 10.7-percent decrease from 5,333 in 2019.
We should diligently work to reduce work injuries, especially fatal ones. It appears that LANL is a safer workplace than average and its three criticality-accident fatalities in 80 years are not a significant contributor to its overall workplace accident risk.
However, it sounds like the lab's safety staff left en masse because they felt they didn't the power to make changes to improve things. That suggests that too much power rests with management and not enough with rank-and-file workers, and that is a situation that tends to result in safety risks, because those fall disproportionately on rank-and-file workers in every workplace.`
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#18Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
It's only fissile material that behaves this way, not all radioactive material.
The supercritical state must be reached very quickly (with explosives) to get city-destroying power levels out of a few kilograms of plutonium. But getting enough power out of a few kg of supercritical plutonium to kill someone standing nearby is easy to do even accidentally.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#19Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
Nope, the conventional explosive is just there to keep the chain reaction from blowing the critical mass far enough apart to stop itself. Nuclear reactors do not use conventional explosives, as you probably knew.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#20Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
To make it explode you are correct, you need to bring a lot of material together very fast.
This explains the difference between the two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality