March,1st 2014 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo H-bomb disaster

[Hog]

Not the best of anniversaries, and I was leaning towards talking of this in another thread, but its extremly off topic so here it is.

Speaking of year past, March 1st commemorated the 60 year anniversary of the 15 megaton blunder thermonuclear test on the Bikini Atoll. It was supposed to be a 5-7 megaton yeild test, but the excess production of both Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 excessively fueled the fusion reactions causing an over yield to 15 megatons. The explosion was extremely "dirty" local inhabitants were evacuated 3 days later, then were re introduced a couple years later, only to leave again after birth defects and sickness were discovered. The area was evacuated again, people havent gone back yet. 60 years later. 23 tests were done in this area.

Map showing points (X) where contaminated fish were caught or where the sea was found to be excessively radioactive. B=original "danger zone" around Bikini announced by the U.S. government. W="danger zone" extended later. xF=position of the Lucky Dragon fishing boat. NE, EC, and SE are equatorial currents.

Sixteen crew members of the USS Bairoko recieved beta radiation burns and the eentire crew had elevated long term cancer rates.

Castle Bravo test


"Ninety minutes after the detonation, 23 crew members of the Japanese fishing boat the Daigo Fukuryū Maru were contaminated by the snow-like irradiated debris and ash. They had no idea what the explosion they'd seen meant nor any inkling of the deadly debris raining down on them. But they all soon became ill with the affects of acute radiation poisoning. One fisherman died shortly after the ship reached shore. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the Marshall Island tests, upon learning of the death of the fisherman, commented, “It’s unreasonable to make such a big deal over the death of a fisherman.” Eleven of the crewmen eventually died of radiation-related illnesses."

The bolded comment is quite a cold and harsh statement, at least the
ather of the Fission bomb Robert Oppenheimer, knew that that they had let the genie out of the bottle, he actively tried to not develop the Hydrogen-Fusion bomb.

We all wonder why Cancer rates are off scale high.
This video has a map of the Earth and shows every single nuke test over the years, man does the cold war

This video shows every single nuclear detonation that has occured on Earth from 1945 to 1998. Things really heat up in 1957 then again in 1963.
Then at 12:10 the video displays EACH countries tests for that country alone.
Chilling video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4UMi5YNYfQ

I was surpised how many United Kingdom tests were conducted in the continguous United States.

[scottfab]

If there are more superior beings than us, I wonder what they'd think watching us play with such nuclear devices and genetically altering food and changing the earth's climate and and and.....
Must be like us watching a child play with a loaded handgun.

Lately I've been hearing about the goal to create tiny black holes at various particle accelerators. Oh boy. Just as in the past with nuclear issues (no ill effects from radiation) the "best minds" say it is impossible to have a run away black hole event.

Ever watch some of natures creations like the Locus tree? They don't know enough to regulate the growth of their own branches. Stupid trees grown out a branch until it snaps under it's own weight.
Maybe humanity is so smart that we'll discover some great truth about physics that ends up destroying us at the same time. Sure hope not.
In the mean time..... I WANT SPRING TO GET HERE FAST so I can cruise on down the line and think about other things.

[John Boothby]

I've wondered what affect all the nuclear testing has had on the current fear of global warming?

There was a movie on the Military channel, I believe, called "Trinity" or something to that effect, that was one of the scariest movies I've ever seen!

Sweet dreams!!

Cheers!

[Schrade]

We had a little nuclear boo-boo about 14 miles from my house (although I was a mere hatchling at Ft. Bragg)...

DOD left the bomb at the site. So if I stop posting one day, you know someone has been diggin'...

D'OH!

[Hog]

Here is a pic showing the fallout from US and British nuke testing, radiation shown in the unit RADS. And this is just for radioactive Iodine.
1 rad = 0.01 Gy = 0.01 J/kg


Iodine of all sort NON-radioactive Iodine-127 and radioactive Iodine-131 is taken up by the thyroid, so if radioactive Iodine is taken up by the Thyroid, malignancies can occur. The sole reason we have Iodine in our table salt is to support thyroid health. If there is a nuke release, you can take Potassium Iodide tablets. Your thyroid is saturated with the Potassium Iodide and cannot uptake any furthur radioactive Iodine-131. The I-131 is simply excreted from te ebody.
This picture shows how the radioactive elements collect in the body. The darker the area, the more radioactive particles are present. Look at the throat area, those 2 small bits is the thyroid tissue. Then if you look down in the pubic region, there is a big black spot, this is the bladder filling with radioactive particles that have been filtered by the kidneys form the blood stream. If Potassium Iodide tablets were taken BEFORE fallout from a nuke blast contaminated you, the thyroid tissues would not appear blackened. That big black mass in the belly is a cancerous tumour which absorbs this particular radioactive material.



Similar "radioactive tracing" is used everyday for things like "bone scans". Technitium pronounced tek-nee-shee-um. It is injected IV into the patient, then after a wait time, a whole body scan is performed to see where the Technitium can be found.
Canada produces 2/3's of the worlds Technitium. It is made by placing some HEU(highly enriched uranium) into a nuclear reactor, pulling it out processing it and sending it around theworld. The problem is that someof these medical grade isotopes
have a half life of just 6 hours. So if I pulled 1 pound of Technitium out of a Canadian reactor and mailed it to a hospital in the United States. 6 hours after I pulled theTechnitium out of teh reactor, that 1 pount of Technitium would become 1/2 a pound of Technitium, then after another 6 hours that 1/2 pound would half again into a 1/4 pound, the 6 hours later an eighth of a pound.

Obviously this isnt practicle, so what they do is pull teh material out of teh reactor in a differnt form such as Mo-99 then once they transport that closer to teh hospital, the Mo-99 is converted to Technitium via a technitium-99m generator.One technetium-99m generator, holding only a few micrograms of 99Mo, can potentially diagnose 10,000 patients
because it will be producing 99mTc strongly for over a week. Even with the Mo99 to Technitium method you cant dilly-dally as the halfl-life
of Mo-99 is still only 66 hours, so the generators must be replaced weekly.

We had to shut down a couple medical isotope generator reactors for safety reasons, and thee was an immediate international shortage. Some of these reactors 1st went critical way back in 1957. (Going critical means the 1st time that a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occured-basically similar to starting theengine of a car for the 1st time)
Needless to say, you dont want your patients to miss scheduled nuclear medicine appointments.


I watched a show where the cast/crew of John Waynes movie the "Conqueror" filmed the movie at St George Utah. There was a nuke test days before they shot the movie. There were many cats and horses that stirred up the sandy ground which contained the fallout. 50 years later a few millimeters under the surface, there is still measureable radiation in the exact spot where the fil was shot.
Out of the 210 cast/crew members 91 people developed some form of Cancer.
"Despite the suggestion that Wayne's 1964 lung cancer and his 1979 stomach cancer resulted from nuclear contamination, he himself believed his lung cancer to have been a result of his six-pack-a-day cigarette habit"

Dose comparison of Chernobyl and nuclear bombs.



A side note: I did a search on "Unethical human experimentation in the United States" and I was surpised what I came up with.

Then there are the 560 American children that between 1948 and 1954 had 2 thin metal "rods" inserted into their nostrils. The rods were tipped with radium, and this was done under the guise as an alternative to removing the adenoids (adenoidectomy).
Feeding and injecting Plutonium and Uranium to American children, exposing Canadians to radiation for testing.

there is 100% nothing wrong with testing ANYTHING on humans, doing such testing without COMPLETE INFORMED CONSENT is simply wrong, unethical and barbaric.

[Hog]

Originally Posted by Schrade

We had a little nuclear boo-boo about 14 miles from my house (although I was a mere hatchling at Ft. Bragg)...

DOD left the bomb at the site. So if I stop posting one day, you know someone has been diggin'...

D'OH!

It's amazing how many actual scanrios such as this one have played out. A lost nuclear weapon carries the call sign "Broken Arrow" just like the movie.
These "Broken Arrow"scenarios were bound to happen though as we had multiple B-52's actively loitering in the skies around North American and off of the coast of the Soviet Union. Operation "Chrome Dome" started in 1960 and ended in 1968. There were also Operations "Head Start","Hard Head","Giant Lanc", and "Round Robin".
The B-52 crash at Thule Airbase in Greenland prompted teh USA to end all operations of "Chrome Dome". This accident in 1968 caused the nuclear weapons conventional explosives(which are used to initiate the nuclear part of the detonation) to explode, but due to the saftey mechanisms the thermonuclear weapons did not dentonate. These explosions and the crash itself casued the hydrogen bombs to rip apart and throw radioactive contamination into the area. After the cleanup, one single hydrogen bomb could not be accounted for.
Operation Chrome Dome


It is scary to note that the British nuclear weapons have been stored with the ability to be detonated directly without any sort of detonation code or PAL(Permissable Action Link). A PAL is a device which is powered by a Plutonium-Pu238 powered RTG(Radioisotope Thermal Generator) which is pretty much a slug of Pu-238 that creates heat as the Plutonium decays and this heat is used to create an electrical charge. The picture below is of a slug of highly enriched Plutonium 238 which is glowing red hot simply because of it's Beta decay. AFtyer many many years this slug would stop producing heat It's half-life is 88 year though.
It should be noted that Medtrinic produced 250 Plutonium-238 powered heart pacemakers, after 25 years, 22 of teh pacemakers were still functioning in patients. Longevity that chemical batteries cant even begin to approach.



RTG's are used on deep space probes such as Voyagers 1 and 2, the SNAP-27 RTG's used on Apollo 14 and lost during re-entry during Apollo 13, some Russian coastlines have RTG's to help with shipping navigation.
It should be noted that Plutonium Isotope 238 or PU-238 is NOT a fissile isoptope, so it isnt used for nuclear weapons, Pu-239 was used in the Fatman nuke used over Nagasaki.

So these RTG's power the PAL of almost all the worlds nuclear weapons, with Btitain only installing PAL technology within the last 5-10 years.
The USA has been trying to get Pakistan to use PAL technology, but in doing so could expose and possibly weaken it's own PAL technology, so the USA has decided to give PAkistan extra vehicles and helicopters to protect its nuclear arsenal.
Lets be clear here, PAkistan has mobile nukes as pictured below. Not very safe.

These PAL's have a few different designs and generations. Some will not allow a detonation unless the proper code is typed into a keypad. SOme will render the nuke useless if morethan a certain number of attempts have been made. The nuke would then have to be shipped back to its manufacturer for repair.
Some modern nukes have different codes for different yield sizes.
Code 1,3,6,2,7,6, might get you a small 2 kiloton explosion to take out a subway or something. But code 8,3,7,9,1 might give you the full 500 kiloton yield to take out not only the subway, but the entire city and surrounding area.

It is interesting that many of the American land based Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles(ICBM's) had launch codes that were set at "0,0,0,0,0,0" in order to speed up the reaction time and to avoid confusion during a nuclear engagement. That's akin to using the letters "P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D" for your email password.

There were nuclear stockpiles up here in Canada that were simple UNGUIDED Air-to-Air missiles that used fast interceptor aircraft to carry the missile close to Soviet bomber formations, launch the missile into the center of teh bomber formation and teh nuclear warhead woudl explode, taking out a large portion of the bombers.
Here is a pic of the test of such a missile during Operation "Plumb-Bob" in the Yucca Flats. The rocket flew 4240 meters in 4.5 seconds at an altitude of 6,000 m (18,500 ft) before detonating the 1.7 kt warhead. Up here in Canada we carried and fired tehse weapons from the CF-101 Voodoo jet up until 1984 when we became a "non-nuclear weapon country".



A fasinating story of the Cold War was when the CIA decided that it was going to "recover" a sunken Soviet submarine that was loaded with three 1 megaton on 3 D-21 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile(SLBM) with a range of approx 1000 miles.
the CIA used a "mining barge" to position itself over the sub, bring it up underneath the ship, and transport it back to the USA, at one point Soviet ships were cruising around the "barge" taking pictures and watching through binoculars, not knowing what was happening under the water.

This CIA Operation was called "Project Azorian" and is one of the craziest stories of the Cold War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

One of the most dangerous stories of the Cold War. Just imagine, in 1983, you are the commander of a Soviet missile laucnhy detection center and the alarm goes off twice that the USA has actually launched ICMB's at the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...alarm_incident

IMO That is even scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the CMC was more widely publicized, there were no actual or percieved missile launches. Although during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviet submarine Capatains did have teh authourization to use their Nuclear Submarine Mines against any USA ship that was trying to sink/board her.
IMO IF a submarine started setting of nuclear mines on American ships, teh whole situation would have spiraled out of control.