Maybe just stop building nuclear weapons!? The last thing the world needs is more of this shit.
The issue is that Russia, China, and North Korea would all agree. Except they would say "Let the US go first".
A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
161–170 of 254 posts
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhere between known incidents with 6.2 kg of plutonium and nothing happened incidents with some sticks there’s a point at which something could happen. And modeling exactly where that point is is difficult, hence the rules and restrictions. The reaction of those involved lends much more credence to the “stop being idiots and clean this up Homer” reading.
> Somewhere between known incidents with 6.2 kg of plutonium and nothing happened incidents with some sticks there’s a point at which something could happen. Yes, but that somewhere is an epsilon below the demon core. How do I know? All nuclear bombs have a core, that's more or less the size of the Demon Core. They don't go critical until they need to. Here [1] is a photo of scientist holding a plutonium pit with not…
I was curious so I went to check, it seems that the minimum size (as a sphere) for a critical mass of Pu-239 would be around 10cm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of...
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#163My favorite nuclear disaster! Criticality events. I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure ten…
> Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them. I mean, are they wrong? By all conventional metrics, Los Alamos County is one of the healthiest counties in the country. Obviously there are major confounders, but if it doesn’t readily show in the data maybe zero concern is the right level.
Are they being screened more frequently and thoroughly than the rest of US, on average?
You can solve a lot of health problems by just screening people frequently... including offsetting pretty serious pollution.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them. I mean, are they wrong? By all conventional metrics, Los Alamos County is one of the healthiest counties in the country. Obviously there are major confounders, but if it doesn’t readily show in the data maybe zero concern is the right level.
Are they being screened more frequently and thoroughly than the rest of US, on average? You can solve a lot of health problems by just screening people frequently... including offsetting pretty serious pollution.
They are also typically more highly educated and more well off. After all, it is a town settled by scientists. These types of towns typically are outliers under a lot of metrics.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to be a feature of lowest-bid procurement, no matter whether the bidders are non-profits or whatever.
Agreed. But "going to bid" will almost certainly constrain to a profit motive. Even if there was a case where a bidder is non-profit, I can't fathom how they would bid on a project with the intent to be in the red. Maybe there are more exotic ways to run a lab, but it seems like the choice is to either figure out how to work with a profit motive or be a primarily civil servant lab. The govt can sometimes try a "best…
> Even if there was a case where a bidder is non-profit, I can't fathom how they would bid on a project with the intent to be in the red.
Yes, exactly. Budget constraints exist for all organisations.
Profit isn't usually a big part of any budget.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like the same story as Rocky Flats west of Denver. Same thing, after "Cleanup" it's a (still radioactive) nature preserve and housing development now.
Pu in soil within the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge contributes (NIST soil standard data) about 0.8% of total soil radioactivity. Remembering that 239Pu emits almost no gamma rays, it's no surprise that annual doses from soil inhalation plus ingestion give 50 year doses of less than 0.1 milliSievert. By contrast, ANNUAL doses from background radiation around RF are about 1850 times larger, and a chest X-ray is…
A chest X ray is about 0.1 mSv.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#167> ... tested to see if they remain safe and reliable for use in the nuclear stockpile. Note here this expression " safe and reliable ", taken from the DoE's founding legislation, is officially re-interpreted to be very, very different from what a normal person would conclude. Most particularly, "safety" doesn't mean anything about risks to the public or to people handling equipment and materials. It does not mean any…
Always/Never Always explode when we desire it/Never explode when we don't desire it.
"Never" is outside the scope of "safety". Just Always.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit it's alluring. It's just a chunk of greyish metal, how dangerous could it be? Radioactivity is already a mysterious and fascinating and alluring phenomenon, and somehow radioactive things not looking particularly dangerous only adds to that effect. There's something strange about ionizing radiation: it's extremely dangerous, yet we have never evolved the ability to detect it and have no intuition for it.
> never evolved the ability to detect it How much of a problem was it before we started mining uranium and putting it into glass? That was only 100-200 years ago, I think?
There was a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. But that was 2 billion years ago. It ran for long enough that a microbe evolved to harvest the radiation to use in place of regular chemical energy sources.
Which still exists.
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
This type of thing is common in all industries - so much so that one way that railroad workers would strike is to “work to rule” - follow every single safety regulation to a T causing productivity to plummet. Many safety rules can be summed up as “don’t be a dumbass” but trying to proceduralize that can be difficult. It’s part of the reason nuclear stuff is so expensive - you have to work to rule every single time.
Indeed, if memory serves, the incident I mentioned above was somewhat attributed to an old rubber buffer that was supposed to be pressed against the ICBM - by regulation, it should have been replaced due to age but wasn't, and it was dry and cracked so it did not form a good seal which allowed the socket to fall through. That failure to follow regulation caused the (non-nuclear) explosion of an ICBM, killed a person…
This seems to be the incident, right?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_...
Re: A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
2002 according to https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obv...
Oh, I misread _dain_'s comment. I thought they said The Rock was based on the dossier. Obviously, they meant it the other way round. I remember the official reasons for attacking Iraq back then being obvious bullshit. But that might have just been a function of living in Germany where the media was against the war (because the German public was a against the war), so the media would give that impression anyway.
Yes, Hans Blix, the UN inspector who visited the supposed labs well before the invasion, openly reported it was all bullshit. Even the New York Times, which was a huge invasion booster, ran that story. On page 18.
Never forget, Thomas Friedman was the most rabid invasion advocate at the NYT.
Never doubt that all of these people, and Colin Powell, knew all about Hans Blix's reports.