171–180 of 254 posts
The 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... .
Today 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
Maybe just stop building nuclear weapons!? The last thing the world needs is more of this shit.
My 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…
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.
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Doesn’t that happen in every manufacturing or dangerous environment? I always assumed the bubba said or similar euphemisms exist everywhere
If true, that sounds like a serious indictment of manufacturing power sources with the ability to destroy a good portion of the Earth. That does remind me of the incident where a technician dropped a socket off a wrench and quite nearly detonated a 9 megaton bomb in Arkansas.
For a value of "destroy" equal to "detectable increase in cancer risk" maybe.
My 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…
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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 una…
Nuclear in general is very over regulated and over safety conscious. This leads to many pointless or overly cautious rules, which slow things down and lead to people ignoring ALL the rules, including th important ones.
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A safety incident that results in the unsafe worker or someone with him dying is usually considered a regrettable occurrence. A safety issue that could irradiate a portion of the city is a bit higher. Same reason we investigate air and rail incidents much more than we investigate most car crashes.
It's true, but the risk of that is fairly small. There were 60 publicly disclosed criticality accidents from 01945 to 01999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc... causing a total of 21 deaths, though for some reason that list doesn't include Chernobyl, which killed 31 people directly and about 6000 people over the years. But you aren't going to get a Chernobyl-style disaster from a criticalit…
Note that this is heavy disputed, with estimates going from under 100 to the hundreds of thousands.
God, nukes and everything about them is terrifying. I'm sure people working at plants that make conventional explosives aren't exposed to such risks, not even close. I think that we lack the technology to make such things safely. It's unfortunate that robotics is such a failed science, because no one should be handling anything remotely close to criticality with rubber gloves. It's 2022 but when it comes to our abili…
I'd expect the opposite tbh. More dangerous dust inhalation in the explosives plant.
So I guess it turns out that Homer Simpson was more realistic than we thought... all the way through to only avoiding nuclear accidents through sheer luck.