Comments on: Broken Arrows Before the Storm?

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:23:16 +0000

Bikini atoll was the site of successful nuclear explosions, where the fissile uranium and plutonium was mostly transformed into other elements and isotopes of them, many with short half-lives. A fizzle or a conventional explosion, with or without fire, would disperse the original elements. So the environmental and health hazards must be quite different. Plutonium at least is highly poisonous, an eternal chemical property independent of its radioactivity. The site of a non-explosive nuclear accident should perhaps be thought of as a major toxic waste spill. No, you would not want to live there.

By: paul staniland

paul staniland — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 02:38:43 +0000

people interested in this kind of thing might want to check out Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan’s book “The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons” (Princeton, 1993)

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:59:59 +0000

A good analogy is that a fusion weapon (and to a much lesser extent a plutonium fission weapon) is a lot more like a computer program than a standard mechanical device, by which I mean:
we are used to the fact that computer programs are brittle; things have to happen in an exact order and any deviation from expectation probably means the program won’t work, unlike something like a car or an airplane which degrades gracefully in the face of mechanical damage.

One way to see that this has to be true is to remember that the US is not the only country in the world. The Soviets and Chinese have surely also been flying and shipping these things around and all indications are that they are a lot more cavalier about safety than the US. Whatever problems resulted from their accidents, they certainly weren’t of the city-block-destroying, visible from space variety, and the soviets and chinese appear to have been able to keep them hidden. A few people probably died, but as a result of the conventional explosives, and much like as happens every year shipping conventional munitions.

On a secondary point, I’d like to ask all the people who made fun of Brett to consider just what they think they are doing for their cause. Brett and I may disagree on most political issues, but we are discussing issues of FACT here. How is a claim (even embedded in mockery) along the lines that Bikini is uninhabitable, when scientific evidence clearly says otherwise, any different from a claim that “global warming is unproven”.
Once you switch to a mode of rhetoric unanchored to facts and based purely on emotion and what you want the world to be, you’ve lost all credibility, and it doesn’t matter whether the issue you are pushing is left-wing or right-wing.
If you don’t like nuclear power, justify your dislike in real science and real numbers; don’t just make up shit to try to scare people.

By: American Citizen

American Citizen — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 20:38:25 +0000

I’m just amazed there were 14 “Broken Arrows” as of 1961. I thought the movie “Broken Arrow” was wildly far-fetched. The “Broken Arrow” part of it obviously isn’t (though the rest is).

By: Jake McGuire

Jake McGuire — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:59:02 +0000

Worth pointing out that there are lots of different plutonium isotopes, and that the one you want to use in a bomb (Pu-239) is comparatively non-radioactive. Still nasty stuff, but not even remotely as nasty as the fission products that Chernobyl scattered across Europe, or what’s left after a nuclear explosion.

And you’d probably want to cart the topsoil away anyhow, to prevent someone from buying the farm and carting the soil away to extract the plutonium and use it in a nuclear bomb.

By: PersonFromPorlock

PersonFromPorlock — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:12:31 +0000

The 10^-6 figure is for weapons involved in accidents, not for weapons in existence. If your assumption was correct we would have seen many accidental nuclear yields by now.

By: Michael Mouse

Michael Mouse — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 11:52:35 +0000

I’m not terribly reassured by the risk of an accidental explosion being 10^{6. A risk around 10}9 is considerably better. (To be precise: it’s about a thousand times better!)

At a very rough guesstimate, something of the order of 100,000 nukes have been produced. The USA has produced, at one time or another, somewhere around 75,000 (with a current stockpile is around 10-20,000 depending on who you believe). Rounding up to allow for Warsaw Pact and a handful elsewhere gives 100,000.

Taking the conservative position that the odds of accidental explosion are for the lifetime of the weapon (not, say, an annual risk figure), if you start with a chance of 10^6 per weapon, you’re actually looking at a 1 in 10 chance of one going up by mistake.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 23:19:55 +0000

Nah, I usually have squid ramen for breakfast, washed down with a diet Mt. Dew. Though who knows what’s really in the Dew… lol

By: Barry Freed

Barry Freed — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 22:14:01 +0000

Sure, plutonium’s pretty harmless stuff. Brett eats the stuff for breakfast, or didn’t you know he’s on the Silkwood diet?

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:52:23 +0000

John, Bikini atoll has been safe for a while now.

“It is safe to walk on all of the islands… The Advisory Group reaffirmed: although the residual radioactivity on islands in Bikini Atoll is still higher than on other atolls in the Marshall islands, it is not hazardous to health at the levels measured. Indeed, there are many places in the world where people have been living for generations with higher levels of radioactivity from natural sources – such as the geological surroundings and the sun – than there is now on Bikini Atoll… By all internationally agreed scientific and medical criteria… the air, the land surface, the lagoon water and the drinking water are all safe. There is no radiological risk in visiting the lagoon or the islands. The nuclear weapon tests have left practically no cesium in marine life. The cesium deposited in the lagoon was dispersed in the ocean long ago.

“The main radiation risk would be from the food: eating locally grown produce, such as fruit, could add significant radioactivity to the body… Eating coconuts or breadfruit from Bikini Island occasionally would be no cause for concern. But eating many over a long period of time without having taken remedial measures might result in radiation doses higher than internationally agreed safety levels.”

That’s from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report of 1998.

The Bikinians haven’t moved back yet, but that’s a sad and complicated story that no longer has anything to do with radioactivity.

Doug M.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:27:54 +0000

So if it crashes in somebody’s basement, you’d definately want to install a ventilation fan. ;)

Worst case, short of an actual detonation, would be the bomb breaking up on impact, and the fisile materials catching fire. (Both uranium and Plutonium burn quite well.) I don’t think that would make any place uninhabitable as such, but you’d have to dig up a fair amount of topsoil if it was a farm, and haul away that year’s crops

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 18:08:41 +0000

Most of the radioactive release in today’s nuclear weapons is from the second stage fusion reaction. The isotopes used for this reaction are stable, and, even if spread by an initial detonation device gone wrong, not harmful. Most detonation devices are built to explode a weapon in air, so are not designed for impact expolosion. There is still an amount of plutonium and uranium but it won’t spread in the way a dirty bomb is designed to spread radioactive materials. Perhaps I’m a bit cavalier about these risks. Naturally occuring uranium poses an actual danger in the form of radon with tens of thousands of deaths every year.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:32:33 +0000

There's been a number of false alarm incidents as well.

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:45:34 +0000

The world’s leading sleuth on these matters is a fellow named Chuck Hansen. Here is his summary of the Goldsboro incident.

http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/hansen.html

Wikipedia has an exhaustive catalog of known incidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_accidents

By: paul

paul — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:30:31 +0000

Try 10^6, for exponents, if using ^{tags doesn’t give you what you want.}