Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump 552
Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
File 13 (Score:5, Interesting)
No political statement intended, but it would be surprising if one day the government contractors doing cleanup also found a more/less completed Nuclear weapon warhead buried in a trash pit too.
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
I am sure Mike Rowe will Not be going to film that Dirty Job... (But I would certainly watch it if he ever did... as I imagine seeing Barsky fall in a pit of Nuclear Waste as Mike kiddingly mocks him...
Worth a read - interesting article (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparantly the stuff was actually discovered in 2004, but it's taken them this long to do the scientific detective work to figure out where this particular sample came from.
Scary picture of the rusty unearthed safe & dirty glass bottle full of 99.96% pure plutomium here:
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16447-hanford-site/ [newscientist.com]
Re:Worth a read - interesting article (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239 [wikipedia.org] shows that Plutonium-239 is really hard to make and come by... anything more pure than 94% is considered weapons grade and anything more pure than 97% is considered "super grade."
What's more is that after doing some calculations, it looks like you only need about 510cc of the stuff to reach critical mass and there's 400cc here. Could this have been dangerous in the wrong hands?
The article is full of its own questions. There's still a mystery as to how the safe was contaminated and why this sample wasn't used in a bomb sooner. The article treats these questions like ancient history, but aren't there people alive and around who can answer them? Weren't there records kept?
Further investigation is warranted.
Re:Very surprising... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if you read the story.
The safe was contaminated. Probably by some very nasty but short lived stuff. So the did the "safe" thing by 1944/45 standards. They buried it.
Now the really nasty stuff is gone.
Do we really know any better now? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure those guys back then were just as smug about their technology as we are now.
Re:File 13 (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
Stuff you would not believe, ranging from nuclear-powered generators (for remote installations) that were abandoned all over the ex-Soviet Union on its collapse, to six nuclear submarines and ten reactor cores that were just dumped into the Artic...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Sea [wikipedia.org]
This not counting the nukes they lost at sea, or are still rusting away awaiting decomm.
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Researchers (Score:3, Interesting)
Radiation does not make stuff (including people) glow green, thats an invention of TV and movies.
Radioluminescent paint was invented in 1908 and originally incorporated radium-226 [wikipedia.org]. The toxicity of radium was not initially understood, and radium-based paint saw widespread use in, for example, watches and aircraft instruments. During the 1920s and 1930s, the harmful effects of this paint became increasingly clear. A notorious case involved the "Radium Girls", a group of women who painted watchfaces and later suffered adverse health effects from ingestion.
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
Hanford isn't that bad of a problem---yet. The important thing to note is that Hanford is proximate to the Columbia River, a major watershed for the Pacific Northwest. Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river. Once that happens, well, things won't be very pretty downriver. Portland is known for being a fairly "green" city, and that trend can be expected to continue. Possibly it'll be a glowing, radioactive green city...
More to be found (Score:5, Interesting)
Much more. Take a drive out there sometime. Mile after mile of desert. There is construction rubble, old reactors, contaminated pipes and equipment mixed with construction rubble. Even the stuff they know is there is bad. Tanks full of screaming hot radioactive waste that burp flammable gas. Can't stabilize it, can't remove it, and definitely no smoking near it. The cesium pool...no life guard on duty. N Springs, the canyon facilities. And that's just what we know about. There are certainly more finds like this one buried out there. More plutonium, uranium, americium, cesium, thorium, take your pickium there's a container of it buried out there, probably mixed with something toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic that's equally scary when it's not radioactive. They were in a hurry, didn't understand the risks, record keeping was...occasional...and what scientists did was not understood by the majority of people working out there and frequently not well regulated.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it is what it is out there. Just don't be surprised what turns up in a backhoe bucket out at Hanford.
Re:A little insight.. (Score:2, Interesting)
You might want to mention the fact the water tanks have leaked and the contaminated ground water is nearing a river that provides water to a major city. Hanford is one of the worst nuclear messes in this nation's history and it's the gift that keeps on giving since the clean up has barely started and we're talking 60+ years since it was opened. I keep hearing industry is doing much better then you hear about millions of gallons of coal slag cutting loose contaminating an area. They knew about the cracks in the retaining levees they just didn't do anything about it. The government and corporations both do what is cheapest and most expedient. It's why I don't trust either group to do the right thing with nuclear power they will do what is most profitable and leave it to the government to clean up the mess and we can see how well Hanford is going.
Amen to that (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years.
It's amazing how they treated plutonium like a bag of groceries back then. Best example of that is the Demon Core. [wikipedia.org] A sphere of plutonium that killed two scientists, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. In two different critical exposures.
Both times were simply the experimenter being clumsy. Dropping a brick or bumping a screwdriver. The core would go near-critical and make a flash of radiation. Louis Slotin lasted 9 days, and Harry Daghlian made it 21.
A native's perspective. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
Our standing army and research and procurement programs during times of absolute peace are around 3% of GDP so it's been nothing in the grand scheme of things.
... military expenditures are a bit like unemployment figures. How high they are depends on how you do the math. It seems the actual US military/defence budget is just over 4% of GDP. For the year 2009 the figure is (According to wikipedia) $515.4 Billion which is some 5.7% of GDP. If you also count miscellaneous other military spending it gets closer to 8-9%. This only covers the US armed forces. The Iraq war comes on top of this figure since Iraq and Afghanistan aren't included in the defence budget they are funded through supplementary spending bills. If you take other military expenditures like: black projects, veterans expenditures, subsidising of military equipment to other countries including the massive aid to Israel (only a portion of this aid ever gets paid back even if it is theoretically handed out in the form of loans) and count them as military spending the total US military expenditures for the last few years will easily top 10% of GDP. Keep in mind that black projects include some very expensive gadgetry and Israel isn't exactly a cheap proposition either. To keep the peace in that region the USA has to subsidise the military acquisitions of several surrounding arab countries to ensure a reasonable degree of military parity. Plus every time the the Israelis decide to exercise their right to defend them selves with totally disproportionate bombing campaigns in Lebanon and the occupied territories it triggers another wave of bribery to keep their Arab neighbours nice and docile and that usually takes the form of new and better weapons.
Re:More to be found (Score:5, Interesting)
but its hardly the fallout 3 scenario you imply.
Nah, I was there. There's a ton of crap out there. A lot of it we know about, a lot we still don't. A bunch has been cleaned up but it's a huge expanse of land that's been in use over 60 years. I personally found stuff buried in cabinets in labs that have been in use for decades that scared me. The researchers using that lab at the time had no idea it was there. People come and go out there all the time. Stuff gets left behind, the next person to use that space doesn't have a clue what went on there before and doesn't want to deal with the paperwork to get rid of it. Now apply that to hundreds of square miles of desert dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction in a hurry. I'll take bizarre radioisotopes for 600, Alex. And the answer was always the daily double. Some of those projects were military, either secret or undocumented or both. And they tended to bury their mistakes.
It's beautiful country, no doubt. And cancer rate in the area population, adjusted for age, is actually lower than the general population. Ambient radiation...depends where you're standing and when you were there. The iodine releases...those were bad but a long time ago. The old A & B reactors might be a museum now, but I don't think you'll ever get the grand tour of the canyon facilities in the 200 Area. There are a lot of doors in those you wouldn't want to open. The K Basins, the rod pools...I wonder if those cases have corroded all the way through yet? I'd be surprised if they got those cleaned up, it was hard to even handle them. There were rooms full of rotting rods.
The real problem with the cleanup is a lack of will to get it done, not necessarily the contractors. I was on a site one day...15 contractors standing around, half of them half-way into protective equipment. I asked why everyone was standing around and they said they had to wait for a mandatory safety lecture but the person giving it was late. 45 minutes later some dude shows up and gives them a five minute pep talk on slip, trip and fall hazards. Cornered him on his way off site and asked if he knew how much money went down the drain because he couldn't get there on time. He was furious. I got a call a couple days later...I won't tell you who from...but they were concerned about hearing that I wasn't a team player. Still not, but that's not here or there. Contractors are what they are and everyone has a lawyer, but the real problem is good old fashioned mismanagement.
In short, you don't know shit. If you live in the Tri-Cities you only know what the PR people tell you. If you're DoE management, you definitely don't have a clue. If you work out there somewhere, you know your little space and that's it. If you're EPA or Ecology you know your projects but not the whole picture. If you do anything classified you don't talk to anyone else and no one knows what you really do. Everything is so compartmentalized, a lot of historical knowledge is long gone, and the Bush administration has been running things out there the last decade. The same people who brought us Katrina and Iraq supervising a hazmat cleanup. ROFL!
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure why parent was modded Flamebait but he's right. The soldiers being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are just as dead as those killed in WWII or any other war or"police action." Believe me, all states of war are equal when you're on the wrong end of an enemy weapon.
Nonsense. Let me put it this way: when it comes to armed conflict, SIZE DOES MATTER. Sure, you're just as dead no matter what ... but World War II produced a lot more dead than Iraq and Afghanistan (and I'm not even counting what happened to the German Jewish population.) Look at the thousands upon thousands of Allied soldiers buried all across Europe, the loss of civilian lives ... and then tell me that you can in any way compare that conflict to any more recent "war".
... Fatman and Littleboy are toys in comparison to modern weapons.
Let's hope a real nuclear war never arises. No, I don't count Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Interesting)
There are still those who refer to as 3-mile-island as a "tragedy" and a "disaster" when in fact no one has been or ever will have been negatively affected by it. Aside those who experience the high electricity bills, and pollution side-effects, from abandoning nuclear energy over the hysteria.
I lived in the area when that occurred and I agree that only tragedy to the general public was a heightened fear of nuclear power. What I find interesting though is how the employees at TMI from that incident seem to be forgotten, or conveniently not mentioned. I dated a girl when I was in high school whose father was there during that time. He and quite a few of his coworkers who were dying from cancer received a fairly large chunk of change from their employer. So no, I wouldn't go so far as to say that no one was negatively affected.
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the whining about my statement has been for a citation. I find this rather hilarious, as the first person who responded to my post gave a citation that supported my point: that there had been earlier offers of peace from japan that were rejected by Roosevelt. Either way, the source I take my information from was the largely undisputed article printed shortly after Japan's surrender, authored by Walter Trohan [pqarchiver.com]. For those who do not have access to Proquest, The Journal of Historical Review [ihr.org] gives a pretty good analysis of the article and also reprints the text at the bottom of the page.
From the Journal Article:
Trohan's article revealed that two days prior to Rooseveltâ(TM)s departure for Yalta, the president received a crucial, forty page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from highly placed Jap officials offering surrender terms which were virtually identical to the ones eventually dictated by the Allies to the Japanese in August.
Yes, there were 5 offers of peace relayed to the allies long before the atom bombs were dropped. The three I refer to in my original post were the three that had been relayed directly to US forces, the other two were relayed via the British.
Why is it that everyone focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely ignoring the months of fire raids that preceeded
I do not discount the magnitude of these bombings, but a quick search of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] does reveal that these missions began after the three offers of peace I am discussing. The terms which the allied forces made Japan agree to in the end (which only asked to keep their monarch in place) were identical to the ones given before these bombings. This means that the bombings were entirely unnecessary.
Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender.
True, they did not agree to an unconditional surrender, but since Roosevelt dismissed the offer out of hand, it is also true that there was no effort truly made to find out if they would accept unconditional surrender. However, since the eventual surrender still allowed Japan the one condition they asked for, I find your point is rather moot.
Though, the bombings did have one effect. They made Japan desperate enough to make similar offers to Russia.
From the end of the Trohan article:
Just before the Japanese surrender the Russian foreign commissar disclosed that the Japs had made peace overtures through Moscow asking that the Soviets mediate the war. These overtures were made in the middle of June through the Russian foreign office and also through a personal letter from Hirohito to Stalin Both overtures were reported to the United States and Britain.
The analysis about bombers and civilian war is mostly correct. Additionally, I never really disagreed that eliminating the enemy's ability to wage war was effective, I only note that the extent to which it was taken in the Pacific Theater was completely unnecessary.
You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could ... we just w
Re:Nuclear Dump (Score:3, Interesting)
not knocking the effects of those people, but I wonder how many curies a typical person downwind of a coal plant receives.
Broken Window Fallacy (Score:3, Interesting)
I see there has been a few people flinging that one around here lately, but it is totally appropriate in the context of military spending.
When you build a bomb, you produce something that certainly gives the bomb builder a job, but it produces no other useful input to society. When you instead spend that money on roads, bridges, renewable energy, R&D, or even just plain consumer goods at least you get SOMETHING out of it.
Some people will respond that the military provides some sort of 'security'. Well, up to a certain point that might be true, but consider it further.
No amount of spending is going to 'make you safe'. There are at least 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert pointed at the US. No amount of spending on more weapons is going to make any impact on that threat. Nor is there any reasonable way to defend the US against terrorism by more such spending. I'm not suggesting we should just ignore terrorists, but tanks, warplanes, warships, etc do not materially add to our security against such things.
In fact one can just as effectively argue that we are LESS secure because of the threatening size and capability of our military, which all other countries on the earth don't equal and must all consider as a possible threat, which then leads to increased spending everywhere else. Nor would George W Bush have had the opportunity to screw things up as he did if he wasn't given so many toys to play with.
I'll be amused to go back and consider all these points again after the US is forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban resumes power and after the government of Iraq degenerates back into anarchy and ends up either yet again a totalitarian dictatorship and/or an Iranian puppet state.
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, not really. If you want to create a 'suitcase nuke' or other highly-compact, highly-efficient design, then sure -- you need lots of testing and a pile of supercomputers.
On the other hand, if you're willing to be a bit sloppy and settle for less than the maximum possible yield - not a fizzle, mind you, just less than 100% efficiency - then you can do quite well without Cray supercomputers.
Since the grandparent post mentioned a grapefruit-sized chunk of plutonium, let's see how the numbers work. Figure a good-sized grapefruit has a total volume of about 600 mL (for US readers, that's a shade over a pint, or a grapefruit about 4 inches in diameter). The density of pure plutonium is almost exactly 20 grams per cubic centimeter (mL). A grapefruit-sized lump, then, is about 12 kilograms (26 pounds).
For comparison, the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained 6.2 kg (less than 14 lbs) of plutonium. (Indeed, a grapefruit-sized lump of weapons-grade plutonium would be dangerously supercritical.)
Are the calculations complex? Yep. You'd want to have at least one or two modern-day physics and EngSci grad students working on your project.
Do you need supercomputers? In 1945, you needed the best they had to offer. In 2009, your cellular phone has more computing power than the entire Manhattan Project. Dell will set you up with a suitable laptop for less than $1000. You only need to call Cray if you're trying to construct a suitcase nuke or ballistic missile warhead - projects where the size and weight of the device are critical - or if you need to use the absolute minimum possible amount of plutonium.
Is the manufacturing difficult and exacting? Sure. You'll want a skilled machinist or two, a good CNC mill, and the ability to work under inert gas. All of that, you can buy off the shelf today.
I could find you the people with the necessary skills in a week, have the workshop up and running in a month, and build a replica of the Fat Man in a year. Capital costs for the project would be less than a million dollars. The big challenge is locating people who want to participate and who won't blow the whistle -- the technical stuff, while difficult, is nowhere near insurmountable.
Re:More to be found (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Could have been worse (Score:3, Interesting)
You know plutonium is a metal, right? It's not like you touch it with a backhoe and it suddenly explodes into a fine powder, raining down "all over the landscape."
I suppose if the driver had rammed the backhoe into the core you might have ended up with two lumps of plutonium and a backhoe that needed to be scrapped.
Re:A little insight.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And of course the stirrers themselves just become more radioactive waste. I heard about that project maybe 15 years ago - there was some concern that these stirrers would just break down over a few years, and they would be unservicable since they were immersed in a million gallons of highly radioactive sludge. I wonder how it is working out...?