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.'"
5 times ... that we know of (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how many other times good risk management and fail-safes prevented a nuclear disaster?
To err is human, to err without planning for eventual mistakes can be criminally negligent homicide.
not to mention the US is the most nuked country (Score:2, Interesting)
Or at least one of the top two.
It has nuked itself on quite a number of occasions, often in Nevada. It hasn't done this for a long time now, but it used to.
Scary scary oooh nuclear we're all gonna die! But somehow, against all odds, life on the planet survived the repeated nuking of Nevada. It was a slim chance! How we made it through, god only knows. Good thing luck was on our side.
Captcha: TARGET.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Interesting)
I see a lot of comments like this immediately following things modded to +5. It seems the Slashdot Groupthink is less powerful than some might imagine.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It strikes me that Tybee Island and Travis Air Force Base belong more on a "times safety systems stopped a disaster effectively exactly as they were designed to" list.
Fermi 1 could also fall in that catagory.
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule" could be replaced with "had the bomb contained a black hole or killer vampire ghost" and be about as scary. it wasn't armed for exactly that kind of situation.
Tybee Island strikes me in a similar manner.
Re:The good news (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly, the legislature really didn't do what those who elected them wanted them to do, which was get the insurance companies out of the system entirely. The current half-measures... they're not going to work.
I see your point, and raise you another...
The insurance is the leading cause of escalating health costs, these days.
Example: Go to the doctor's office for some reason. Speak to the doctor for 8 minutes, after a 47-minute wait (but if you're 15 minutes late for your "appointment", they charge you for the visit and cancel your appointment). Speak to the financial desk immediately after (if not before) the appointment. If you have insurance, the visit is $480. If you don't, it's $120.
In any other field, this would be called fraud. What gives?
Medicare (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:3, Interesting)
It is FUD. There is no doubt. As you said not a single incident in here was a potential "nuking" of the US by itself. Reactor accidents are not nuclear explosions, not by any measuring stick in the world. Anyone that says they can be equivalent to a nuclear bomb either simply doesn't understand a meltdown or is spreading FUD deliberately. The other examples are really great examples of the safety procedures that were used and why accidents didn't happen but at no time did either case represent a potential nuking of the US by the US.
This post and story reads like something the anti-nuclear lobby would write, something that is 50-100% pure FUD, exaggerations and lies. This is also the primary reason there is such skepticism of the environmental movement in the US, because most of the environmental movements frequently lie through omission, exaggeration and outright deception. This results in serious problems like the US public not believing global warming is real.
People that truly care about the environment need to stop lying. The nuclear lobby needs to stop lying and present the real truth, even if it means that portions (maybe even most) of the population don't think the risks are that serious. All they do by over exaggerating the risk and deceiving the public with lies is give the people trying to cover up the risks legitimate truths about the environmental lobbies that alienate the public and make the public believe that the real risks are lies and exaggerations as well.
I consider myself a balanced environmentalist in that I believe risks need to be balanced, people still need to go on living but I cannot support organizations that lie, exaggerate and spread FUD to scare the public into action and I haven't found an environmental movement yet that believes in anything other than radical positions. Greenpeace is adamantly against carbon emissions but also opposes hydro power and nuclear power plants which are two of the most successful methods to reduce carbon emissions that exist right now. They won't support balancing risks, they simply oppose everything with any environmental risks even if they are less than the current power plants and as a result no progress can be made. I consider this unwillingness to compromise a serious problem, we could make some major progress reducing carbon emissions by moving coal to nuclear then in time moving to renewable resources but that path is continually blocked by the environmental movement because nuclear is "bad". These type of positions alienate the public and as a result nothing gets done.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that we've had several approved drugs recently kill & maim a whole lot of people, how do you propose to make the current system both easier (and thus cheaper) and safer?
Because your state has different regulations than your neighboring state. See, in a democracy, the people elect representatives who then create "the rules". "The rules" for health insurance in CA are different than "the rules" in DE.
Conservatives used to like having that kind of local control, where individual states got to decide what was important to them. Apparently, conservatives now believe we should let some other state decide what the de-facto regulations are in our own state. At the same time they're decrying federal regulations...but with the federal regulations we at least get to vote on the people making "the rules".
Actually, we evil liberal commie bastards have been working on this for a very, very long time (Truman administration, to be precise). We know what's happening. We know that health insurance can never be an efficient market due to factors like adverse selection, and their being 'no price' on our individual lives. That's why we've been trying to get health insurance out of the private sector for so long - the 'invisible hand' only works in an efficient market.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:2, Interesting)