191–200 of 254 posts
Why is the only lab that can make new cores for America's nukes privately owned? Honestly this is utter madness. Surely one of the most critical core components of America's entire nuclear deterrent should be government owned and run? What am I missing?
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…
Fun fact, if you ever want to locate sketchy sites, the keyword is "Wildlife Management Area". Odds are pretty good it's going to be some former superfund, government, chemical, or industrial cleanup site. They do their best to clean up what they can and then declare it a nature preserve. E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quehanna_Wild_Area
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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_...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile...
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…
I wonder why they didn't travel further to dump it. The ocean in particular was a popular dumping ground in Europe after world war 2 for anything toxic related to the war. Old warships was loaded to max and intentionally moved and then sunk in an undocumented regions in order to make sure that no one could recover it.
In later years when the city was no longer secret, the excuse was mostly the lazy one of "we've always done it this way."
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…
I drove through Los Alamos in the mid-1990s. It's an incredibly beautiful area, great topography dotted with such charming pre-kitschy neighborhoods and neato futuresce 1950's homes. Am I going to be ok?
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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.
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If a scientist wanted to commit suicide, couldn’t he trigger the criticality event just to see what it’s like and then promptly kill himself off afterward before radiation effects set in? Or is the agony instant?
By all the accounts I've read, there should be some lag time sufficient to commit suicide, unless you're knocked out (they usually wake before the worst of it, though not always), and excepting temperature burns. But somewhat like quantum suicide, it may be the type of experiment where even a tiny chance of the corner case is still a complete turn-off. Your insides slowly liquifying seems to be one of the worst ways-…
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> 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...
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> Well there's a reason why I think covid was the worst lab accident in human history. And that reason likely has to do more with the fact that you're not a virologist nor someone who has a deep understanding of virus evolution and how Sars-CoV2 does what it does.
If there's a big explosion in Los Alamos I'm going to think it's a nuclear explosion even if everyone else says it's a meteor. Balance of probability is that the biological weapons lab was doing biological weapons research and it got out. Without a non virologist investigating what happened there this is the same level of believability as cops clearing themselves of wrong doing in an afternoon.
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If there's a big explosion in Los Alamos I'm going to think it's a nuclear explosion even if everyone else says it's a meteor. Balance of probability is that the biological weapons lab was doing biological weapons research and it got out. Without a non virologist investigating what happened there this is the same level of believability as cops clearing themselves of wrong doing in an afternoon.
The probability of a nuclear explosion at Los Alamos is vanishingly close to zero for lots of reasons. The probability of a nuclear accident at Los Alamos is pretty much 1.0, since several have happened there before, and recently.
I said that if an explosion similar to the Chelyabinsk meteor happened there I'd need _extreme_ proof that it wasn't a nuclear explosion.