Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself 384
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
nukes do not work that way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Agree - I used to work on nukes - they are designed to disperse, not detonate, on anything other than a properly sequenced detonation.
Re:The good news (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.
it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
If the fission capsule were in there, it most likely would not have gone off. With a implosion bomb (fat man style, as the Mark IV was), all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds). If some goes off first, it just blows the core apart instead of pushing it to supercriticality.That is, if the core weren't scattered in the crash before the fire set off the explosives anyway.
Basically, you would have had a dirty bomb, no more.
Now, a little boy (uranium gun-type) bomb can go off by accidentally more easily, but getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made.
Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
So none of these times did we almost nuked our self... ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.
The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
The third was another un armed bomb.
The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children
Re:I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Only the conventional portions detonated, that's a pretty important omission there.
Plus Nuke Plants... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:nukes do not work that way (Score:5, Informative)
That's generally true, and the only weapon ever deployed that was prone to going off in an crash was probably Little Boy (that later went off on purpose over Hiroshima). The Mark IV, however, was probably somewhat more prone to accidental detonation that any of the others, which is why the core was inserted in-flight. Later, preventing accidental detonation became a serious issue and a lot of the later tests were negative tests to ensure that the safety features worked correctly.
Full details of each type of bomb and the underlying design can be found at : http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/ [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
Brett
Re:Wew, thank god. (Score:5, Informative)
This reminds me of the time the US was almost attacked by giant killer terrorist robots. Luckily, Osama didn't invent and deploy them, otherwise the death toll could have been in the 9 figures.
Ironically, that's kind of what happened with both the recent Times Square Bomber and the London nightclub carbomb back in 2007 - neither of the bombers built anything particularly dangerous. In both cases the bombs lacked oxidizers (and other things too) - which meant that at best they might blow the windows out of the car the bomb was in. But all the politicians were eager to make hay and said exactly the same sort of thing, "if the bomb had exploded it could have killed thousands!"
Re:I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:3, Informative)
To further elaborate, unless the conventional explosives detonate in the correct sequence, the chance that a nuclear explosion will occur is effectively 0. Just smashing into the ground and detonating because of the shock is NOT how you trigger an atomic bomb.
Plutonium doesn't even make a half-way decent dirty bomb. You'd be better off with Cobalt 60 or something along those lines.
Re:not to mention the US is the most nuked country (Score:2, Informative)
US is the most nuked country.
1,054 tests by official count (involving at least 1,151 devices, 331 atmospheric tests), most at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Amchitka Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
928 at Nevada Test Site, 105 atmospheric at Pacific Proving Ground, two underwater at Pacific Proving Ground, one underwater 500 miles from California.
715 for the Soviet Union.
Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
He who regulates something, runs it.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
Hah, notice the submitter - kdawson! When he isn't posting complete crap, he's submitting it :)
Fear mongering? (Score:5, Informative)
A an accidental detonation from a bomb twice the size dropped on Japan would not result in " immediate death toll" that " may have reached six figures".
In 1950, the population of Fairfield was around 3000. I don't know the size of the air force base, but I don't think it was close to the 6 figure range (today it has 15K military and civilian workers, it may have been higher during the cold war). Suisun City today has a fraction of the population of Fairfield.
Just 3km from the hypocenter of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, most structures withstood the blast and most people that were indoors survived the initial blast.
And that bomb detonated at an altitude of 500m to maximize destruction. An accidental surface detonation in an airplane crash is going to have a much smaller destructive zone, even though the bomb is twice as powerful. So even if that bomb had detonated in the crash, there would be survivors even on the airbase itself.
Even in a 1 megaton blast (50 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) , there's a 75% survival rate just 7.5 miles from the blast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html [pbs.org]
So even if a a 1 Megaton accidental detonation occurred in the NW corner of the base today, it wouldn't cause an immediate 6 figure death toll.
This, of course, this ignores the long term deaths and illness caused by radiation exposure.
...or the Greenland one (Score:5, Informative)
B-52 crash at Thule, Greenland, 1968.
4 hydrogen bombs aboard, contamination of a large area. The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
Re:The good news (Score:1, Informative)
General practitioners, who form the vast majority of doctors in the UK, are not on a government salary either. A doctor's practice is a private business that bills the government for NHS treatments. (Which is why there is no problem with your doctor providing private treatments; he's not a government employee.)
Our situations are more similar than you think.
Re:it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:3, Informative)
Re:5 times ... that we know of (Score:2, Informative)
How about reading classes?
Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
Kind of like Canada. The government pays doctors, builds and run hospitals, chooses what procedures are covered, but has no say in which doctor you use. I can use whatever doctor, at whatever clinic, at whatever hospital I want. The doctor doesn't have to worry about a "pre-existing" condition invalidating my insurance, or about caps, or co-pays.
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states, and there are private clinics up here too.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
The basic principle of a nuke is that a mass of fissionable material is put in a sufficiently small volume to create a runaway chain reaction. What makes it a bomb is that the material is "compressed" quickly enough that the beginning chain reaction does not cause most of the material to vaporize and leave the containment early. It's like the difference between a firecracker and a small amount of black powder on a piece of paper. One goes boom, the other fizzles.
Even though a nuclear bomb will not detonate without the proper application of force through conventional explosives, it still contains plenty radioactive and highly toxic material. I would not call that "inert" at all. One "broken arrow" [wikipedia.org] incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
And it is kinda that way just by necessity. Turns out that a nuclear bomb isn't the easiest thing in the world to build. If it were, well then probably every asshat dictator would have a few. After all Uranium isn't all that hard to get. However you have to properly make the nuclear materials and then build a device that can detonate them. It isn't like a conventional bomb where you just use heat or electric current or something. It requires precise operation because you more or less crush the radioactive material. Timing is critical, dimensions are critical, etc. So even presuming you know how to build one, it isn't so easy to actually make it work.
The flip side of that is they only go off if detonated properly. If you just set fire to some of the conventional explosives to cause them to go off, then it is almost impossible for it to cause the right kind of reaction to set off the nuclear bomb. Even if you don't really take any special design safe guards, it is still pretty hard to set off the nuclear explosion without meaning it.
Of course as you noted the ones that the military actually builds are taken steps further and actually designed NOT to blow up unless special conditions are met. They make deliberate choices making it even harder for the bomb to go off unless it is on purpose. Makes sense, no military wants to nuke their own country.
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons... (Score:4, Informative)
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons [statemaster.com]
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm [lexrex.com]
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
kdawson (Score:2, Informative)
So, now slashdot needs to add a filter for pathetic troll stories submitted by kdawson too? What, he's not happy with just approving pathetic troll stories anymore?
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
One "broken arrow" incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
From the wiki article you linked to:
Despite the cost and number of personnel involved in the cleanup, forty years later there remain traces of the contamination. Snails have been observed with unusual levels of radioactivity.[22] Additional tracts of land have also been appropriated for testing and further cleanup. However, no indication of health issues has been discovered among the local population in Palomares.
This is not even remotely as bad as what would have happened had even one of the bombs been armed and gone off on impact. There would have been an actual (probably large) death toll, in that case, and considerably more contamination. There are many more much more contaminated and dangerous sites around the world, many not even having anything to do with nuclear weapons, fuel, or byproducts.
SB
Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
One big thing that has happend - the control over what is and is not insured has pretty much been ceded to the goverment now. It was previously in the hands of the state Board of Insurance in each of the 50 states. This has a huge effect on costs.
How does it effect costs? Well, let's say you are part of a group that believes that Fibromyalgia is a serious condition that must be covered by insurance plans. Previously, your group would have to lobby in each of the 50 states to get coverage approved and mandated. Now all you have to do is stop at one federal agency and if they agree, it is mandated for all 50 states.
Copy this for acupuncture, massage therapy, sex disfunction treatments involving use of a surrogate, etc. You get the idea. It has now become about 50 times easier to get coverage for the malady of the week covered by insurance.
Why is health insurance more expensive in California than in, say, Wyoming? Well, California mandates coverage for a lot of things that aren't required to be covered anywhere else.
When people say costs are going to triple in 2014, I'd listen to them. They stand an awfully good chance of being right.
Re:it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
True, the timing has to be very accurate, but I'm pretty sure
microsecond accuracy is enough, or a million times less accurate than
your claim.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-1.html#Nfaq4.1.6.2 [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
4.1.6.2.2.6:
'Creating a symmetric implosion wave requires close synchronization in firing the detonators. Tolerances on the order of 100 nanoseconds are required.'
So I wouldn't go with accuracies on the order of microseconds if I were you, you're going to need nanoseconds. Looks like picoseconds is not needed though.
I don't think detonating a chemical explosive to the
picosecond is even possible, chemical reactions are slower than that.
The rate of the reaction is a component of latency. Latencies, as long as they are consistent, do not alter accuracy. Even if it took 10 minues for the chemical reactions to take place, starting them with 100ns accuracy may be necessary if they must finish coincidentally to an accuracy of 100ns.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully. The VA system actually has proper electronic medical records shared between hospitals.
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually everything I said makes perfect sense.
That bomb was just the shell. It had no core. For the longest time the cores where locked away and under the control of the NRC.
The Air Force didn't have control over them and in 1950 only trained with the shells.
And yes they did assemble them in flight. As a safety system the core was not installed in the bomb until they where well on the way to the target.
From the wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_4_nuclear_bomb [wikipedia.org]
" In addition to being easier to manufacture, the Mark 4 introduced the concept of in flight insertion or IFI, a weapons safety concept which was used for a number of years. An IFI bomb has either manual or mechanical assembly which keeps the nuclear core stored outside the bomb until close to the point that it may be dropped. To arm the bomb, the fissile nuclear materials are inserted into the bomb core through a removable segment of the explosive lens assembly, which is then replaced and the weapon closed and armed."
So as you can see not armed == no nuclear material in it and yes they can and did put it together in mid-flight.
.
Re:Yep (Score:3, Informative)
I understand why you have been modded up for your comment but reinforcing a belief system is a poor substitute for examining the facts, so let's do that now.
To quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plant's auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core.
The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days* after. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured. So, in reality, the amounts of contamination released were beyond the Nuclear Industry capability to measure.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions." - So if they didn't know, how is it you do?
Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the elements released.
Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of Nuclear Physics at the City University of New York, was quoted to say of TMI "It appears that every few months, since 1990, a new estimate is made of core debris, often with little relationship to the previous estimate. Estimates range form 608.8 kg to 1,322 kg... This is rather unsettling....," he concluded. "The still unanswered questions are therefore: precisely how much uranium is left in the core, and how much uranium can collect in the bottom of the reactor to initiate re-criticality." Which means the containment building contains enough radioactive elements to still be capable of releasing *extremely* radioactive elements into the environment.
Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take measurements on which to base long term cancer studies, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have been lost?
What we do know is of the states highest in the list of cancer averages (within the cancer incubation period after the accident) the ones with similar population density surrounded Pennsylvania, where TMI occurred. New York with roughly 3 times the population, which topped the list, was also in the fall out zone. So it's easy for anyone to say that no-one died because of TMI because there is no gathering of data, no official study, no evidence. It's more honest to say "We don't know how many people died as a result of TMI because because no data was collected".
If you are aware of any such study please provide a link to it.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear weapons area very easy to make IFF you have the materials for them. The most difficult part is either getting the enriched uranium OR plutonium (even more difficult).. After you have the materials, it's very easy to make a bomb. So please, stop speaking out of your ass.
A working nuclear weapon is not easy to make. Seriously, do you think the entire Manhattan project was solely about obtaining the requisite amount of fuel?..
Merely pushing two pieces of nuclear fuel together to form critical mass are not sufficient to set off the explosion. If you do it slow, they'll just heat up and start melting. If you do it kinda fast, they will start exploding, but the force of that explosion will blow the bomb into pieces before most of fuel reacts, so you'll just have a moderate-size conventional explosion. The problem with making a working weapon is putting the critical mass together really fast, and also making it stay there for as long as it is needed to get the substantial part of the fuel to react. This is not easy by any means.
Gun-type assembly is relatively easy, but 1) it does not work with plutonium, 2) you therefore need much more uranium since its critical mass is higher, and 3) still only a minor part of that uranium actually produces the explosion, the rest is wasted when it's blown up into pieces. It's not completely trivial because criticality is actually achieved before the bullet runs into the rest of uranium (neutrons can travel between two pieces), and it may blow the bullet off the path, preventing a full-scale explosion. So it's not your common gun.
So, basically, yeah, it's not that hard from an engineering perspective to build a gun-type assembly (but still not something you can do without some specialized knowledge), but it's prohibitively expensive due to the sheer amount of uranium that needs to be obtained, and its efficiency is rather low - it won't wipe out a whole city.
Implosion design, which lets you achieve significant yields even with pure fission weapons, allows the use of plutonium, and is much more efficient. But from an engineering perspective, the thing is much harder to make due to precision requirements to get everything just right; even a slight misalignment results in a fizzle. This requires both significant technical expertise, and advanced equipment - it's not something you can make in your garage.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:3, Informative)
This might be silly but there was no such thing as Russian Federation in 1983.
You're incorrect. One of the 15 constituent republics of the USSR was Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which was occasionally shortened to Russian Federation (or further to Russia).
There is ample documentary evidence for that - e.g. when Crimea was reassigned from Russia to Ukraine, in the protocol of the meeting, the very first phrase is:
Comrades, the issue of transfer of the Crimean region of the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian SSR is brought to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR .
(Here [www.rg.ru] is the protocol in original Russian.)
This was back in 1954. I've also seen it used in some contemporary (for me, which is 80s) Soviet literature, though I cannot provide references for that.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a anti-piracy AGW-skeptic. Trust me, I know about getting modded down.