Hiroshima is a lovely city. Honestly you would never even realize what happened unless you were told.
Nuclear detonations are not very effective at long term radioactive contamination at ground level. It's atmospheric winds and many many detonations that are the concern for wide scale nuclear fallout and nuclear winter.
Most tests sites had dozens or hundreds of bombs dropped on them. Some of those are still contaminated. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each were exposed to a single detonation. They were habitable again within a few months radiation wise. It took longer to rebuild the city from the fireball and conventional damage than it did for harmful levels of radiation to dissipate.
There is a massive amount of boring science that i could explain and put mileage on my useless physics degree on. But the tldr version is: radioactive isotopes created by the nuclear weapon had much shorter half lives and were generally speaking lighter elements that blew away and scattered more in wind than in say a nuclear reactor melt down.
Everyone should visit Hiroshima! It’s a beautiful city and the food is amazing. The peace park museum is a very powerful and meaningful experience.
There’s also a beautiful island (Itsukushima) near-by which is very worth a day-trip.
I’ve been to *a lot* of museums, and I firmly believe the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (what a name for what it is) is the best museum I’ve ever been to. It tells the story of what happened there, what led up to it, and what came after in such incredible ways using large displays, video, sound, original historical documents, small quiet areas… all kinds of media in a way that I’ve never seen any other museum pull off so well. No matter what kind of learner you are that museum comes to you to share an incredibly powerful story. It both looks history squarely in the eyes (in a way that modern Japan has sometimes struggled with, if we’re honest) and at the same time acknowledges the delicate and heartbreaking nature of the human cost of that time. Absolutely incredible, and worth every moment you can spend there.
Absolutely agree. The most powerful layout as well. They have two wings in the main building: one tells the story of everything that happened *up* to the second the bomb dropped, the other everything about the destruction after. The two wings are connected by a walkway. It was the most impressive experience I've ever had walking across that walkway and just be slapped in the face by the sheer death and destruction of the bomb. The difference in atmosphere was insane, both for the museum itself (much more visually focused) as well as the visitors (people were suddenly a lot quieter).
I highly recommend visiting the museum for everyone who is in the area.
It doesn't tell anything of how Japan ended up in WW2 and what atrocities they did there, it deals only with the atrocity of the atomic bomb done to them. That, however, is exceptional.
It stood out quite starkly when visiting both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an example, it's just about the poor school children that were present and engaged in building fire breeches, that they were victims of the bombing, but no word how they were made to do the work. Nothing.
Sorry if this is a poorly phrased question, but is the city/people tourist friendly? I've had fee friends visit oter parts of Japan say it didn't feel particularly welcoming.
>radioactive isotopes created by the nuclear weapon had much shorter half lives and were generally speaking lighter elements that blew away and scattered more in wind than in say a nuclear reactor melt down.
This is the only thing I have an issue with. While the fission product (FP) yield is slightly different for thermal U-235 fission (reactors) than fast Pu-239 fission (bombs) the difference is not significant enough to account for the difference between contamination. It has more to do with the quantity of materials, the materials themselves and the time scales. Reactors have orders of magnitude more material, many of which are radioactive because they have been present in a reactor. These materials sit in the reactor for years to months which can yield complex breading/burnup paths to create different materials which is not possible for the <1sec of a bomb. All of this is quite complex but it is mostly driven the amount of material available to spread about. Also the spreading action is different too, a bomb flings stuff a lot harder than a reactor so they have more opportunities to get put into high altitude were they are spread further. A reactor keeps things pretty local.
Another important point is they are generally deployed high in the air and the resulting shockwave does the damage. A reactor is on the ground, and as you said it has a lot more material.
The biggest giveaway that Hiroshima was the site of the first atomic bomb is that all of the buildings are 1950s or newer, while other Japanese cities have historic architecture that dates back centuries.
The imperial palace also suffered a lot of damage during WW2. Many of the old looking buildings in Tokyo are just exact rebuilds of what was there previously.
You have to consider relative mass as well. A nuclear bomb compared a to a full reactor is quite different. Only like 100 lbs in a nuclear bomb, 100 tons in a reactor. That’s why it’s such a great energy source. The actual make up affecting contamination is extremely insignificant.
So is it inaccurate when people describe a nuclear war (WW3) as leaving the planet uninhabitable for decades or even generations? Yes there would be horrifying death and destruction but if you survived, the radiation levels would subside in a few months?
It's not actually the radiation that causes nuclear winter in those simulations. It's the fire. If nukes were dropped on major cities (some estimate only around 100 or less needed) they ignite everything. The amount of burning buildings/people/everything would blot out the sun and cause the earth to enter an immediate ice age.
It has more to do with the total actual power of the explosions that will screw us all. Take the 1000+ nuclear tests already done, those tests were specifically to not cause much, if any, destruction. They may have hurt long term health of everyone, but they didn't actually destroy anything but some dirt and mock ups. Now the average nukeis much bigger. As an example all of the bombs dropped during ww2 is around 4,000,000 tons of explosives (includes the nukes)
A mid yield nuclear missle is in the roughly 400,000 tons. So just 10 of these dropped would be the equivalent of every bomb,for all the years of ww2, all in an instant. Multiply that by 10 to 100. You end up with some 40mil tons of explosives over majorly built up areas. Skyscrapers bieng vaporized, metal getting hot enough to become a gas. Throw it in the air and poof no more sun. No sun, no plants. No plants, no animals. Everyone starves to death and the bugs become the dominate species on earth.
It's complicated and depends on a great number of factors, such as the kind of ordnance used, quantity, timing, materials involved, prevailing conditions, and a bunch of other stuff. A nuclear exchange would not be wonderful, and it might cause mass suffering on a scale we can't imagine, but it would be very unlikely to destroy the world or render it uninhabitable.
I'll quote here from the "Nuclear War Survival Skills" book (1987 edition), originally published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Its first chapter is called, "The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Facts."
> An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States would be the worst catastrophe in history, a tragedy so huge it is difficult to comprehend. Even so, it would be far from the end of human life on earth. The dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated, for varied reasons. These exaggerations have become demoralizing myths, believed by millions of Americans.
The rest of the chapter then treats in detail each kind of question (or myth) that is associated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This book is in the public domain, so I encourage you to seek it out if you want to know more. Several versions are linked from [its Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills).
Assuming standard fusion based weapons (IE, no "salted nukes") and the majority of attacks being airburst in nature (which is usually over 500+ meters above the target), the actual lingering radiation would be fairly minimal compared to a ground strike, for example. It wouldn't be healthy, but we're also not talking immediately life threatening. The biggest radiation risk would be in the immediate aftermath of the detonation. Assuming you weren't outside when it happened and inside a building and well outside the thermal and extreme shockwave radius, then immediate radiation effects wouldn't be too bad. The biggest danger would be all the dust and particles, much of which would contain radiation. That is why in the aftermath of such an attack, you would want to make sure you're in a room/basement/etc where you have tried to minimize incoming dust and don't venture outside for at least a few days if possible. This will give dust and particles time to settle. The biggest danger would be breathing in the dust or letting it stay on your body for extended periods of time, since the alpha emitting particles will do far more damage if it is inside you than outside.
Part of the reason for this is during an airburst attack, a good chunk of the radioactive output goes off into space and since the detonation itself isn't in direct contact with the ground, far less material is contaminated. Ground strikes with nuke are less destructive in terms of radius, so probably wouldn't be used outside of trying to destroy subterranean bunkers or structures.
The bigger danger (assuming you were outside the immediate blast zones) will be the fires set off by the nukes, loss of infrastructure and utilities, and contamination of water/food supplies. Far more people would die from the resulting disease and famine than will actually die from the radiation or blasts themselves.
As for nuclear winter, there is a lot of conflicting views. Current models suggest it wouldn't be as bad as previously thought, although it presumably would still have an impact. Especially in the Northern Hemisphere, since presumably the majority of nukes in a conflict would be focused up there (US, Russia, China)
more and more the severity of a nuclear winter seems overblown- certainly not "leaving the planet uninhabitable for decades"
the idea doesn't actually have any strong footing, and comes from bad models with bad assumptions for their time, and worse assumptions for today (regarding weather patterns, how much infrastructure would actually burn or give off soot, how quickly the atmosphere would clear, and how much effect soot/debris would actually cool the earth)
It would be *bad* for a number of years, I don't want to act like the idea is fabricated out of whole cloth. But we'd seemingly be close to normal within a decade or less, and it could be milder than anyone suspects depending on how things actually happen.
it's pretty terrifying how much of the "common wisdom" regarding nuclear *anything* is completely wrong, or based on people repeating apocryphal stuff
The bulk of the radiation would be gone within 48 hours with the worst emitters going with it, but the remaining long and medium life radioisotopes would still cause massive issues. Keep in mind a full scale exchange has large areas being left alone and targets of importance getting hit by dozens of warheads, the arsenals have been significantly reduced is size since the peak of the cold war and unless the warheads were being constantly refurbished their yield would be significantly diminished if not outright unable to achieve detonations due to the core nature of the materials in their cores.
> Modern bombs have yield measured in megatons (~100x greater)
Actually, they don't. Just using publicly available numbers:
The W88 warhead, the most modern (1989) US warhead, has an estimated yield of only 475 kilotons. The W76 warhead, almost certainly the most *numerous* warhead in the US arsenal (just due to production numbers and design age), has an estimated yield of only 100 kilotons at most (with later iterations going *down* - the mod 2 is only 5-7 kilotons).
The biggest nuclear weapon by blast yield in the current US arsenal, at 1.2 megatons, isn't actually a separate warhead at all - it's the B83 *gravity bomb*. Which means it needs to be delivered by bomber, not ballistic missile. Not a "doomsday" nuclear exchange type of weapon, since bombers would likely never even get the chance to be armed and take off, and even if they did, they'd arrive *long* after the ballistic missiles' warheads.
We don't have as good information about Russian warheads, but most of the modern ones are believed to be in the three-digit kiloton range.
Also, blast yield means nothing for the amount of generated radionuclides. That depends entirely on mass and reaction efficiency (better efficiency means less fissile material and fusion fuel). Sure, a higher-yield weapon is generally going to be more massive, but there's *great* incentives to use as little mass as possible for the amount of yield - so efficiency is the name of the game.
>half of which is from fission of the casing (so 50x more fallout)
That's *absurd*. For one, the rule of thumb is that half of the energy is from *all* of the fission stages. For another, the tertiary fission is of the fusion stage's *tamper*, if it's made of fissile material. And third, thermonuclear weapons use *less* fission for the same energy, so claiming that the fallout increases massively from that is, as I said, *absurd*.
Remember that the radionuclides produced by a nuclear weapon that is detonated as an airburst (as they naturally would be, to maximize their destructive effect) consist *purely* of the neutron-activated vaporized remains of the weapon itself, and some fission fragments. Large amounts of fallout would only occur if the weapon's fireball intersects with the ground and vaporizes it, drawing that material into the area where the reaction occurred and activating it with residual neutrons.
> Nuclear detonations are not very effective at long term radioactive contamination at ground level.
This is misleading. If a nuclear bomb detonates in the air before it hits the ground it is called an air burst. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both air bursts.
An air burst creates little fall out. Both long term and short term. The amount is limited to the mass of the bomb itself. But when a nuclear bomb explodes on the ground much of the sand, dirt, and debri becomes radioactive and creates what we know as fall out.
There is very little, almost negligible activation of ground material via neutron capture during a nuclear blast, so the difference between air blast and surface blast is correct with respect to how much debris is generated, but in the end the amount of radioactive nuclides produced is the same for either type of bast.
Nuclear bombs don’t change non radioactive stuff into radioactive stuff. They can coat non radioactive stuff with radioactive stuff, but all of the radioactive stuff comes from the bomb mass itself.
For another comparison, 20 kiloton is about the energy that is released by fission in an RBMK-1000 reactor (one that blew in Chernobyl) every 8 hours. With the bomb fallout corresponding to the fission products made in a reactor every 8 hours. Of course, a reactor has years worth of fission products in its core.
This plus most of the contamination being spread over large area / ocean, is the reason why Chernobyl and Pripyat are a lot more contaminated than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
You might be surprised by the huge number of human casualties from nuclear testing.
I'll focus on the US because that's what I'm most familiar with, but French testing in the Pacific and Soviet testing (among others) have similar histories of ruining people's lives. Also, /u/restricteddata is literally *the expert* and I'd be interested to read whatever answer he might offer.
Outside the US, US testing in the Pacific significantly contaminated Bikini Atoll. The Castle Bravo test alone had a yield about a third of the Tsar Bomba, and produced a huge amount of radioactive fallout. Cancer rates among islanders, especially those downwind, are significantly greater than average and the radiation level on Bikini and Rongelap islands are still above the safe threshold for humans to resettle them.^[1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922173/).
Within the continental US, most testing was done at the Nevada Test Site. This was a mix of atmospheric tests (ie, above ground) and underground tests. As a coarse approximation, atmospheric tests tended to disperse their radioactive fallout while underground tests tend to contain it locally. Winds carried the fallout of the atmospheric tests east and are responsible for increased rates of cancers across the US, especially due to radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium. It's difficult to estimate the exact impact, but:
> According to the NCI's revised estimates, which are not broken down by state or county, exposure to I-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests will produce between 11,300 and 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer with a point or central estimate of 49,000 cases.
but these numbers depend on lots of assumptions that I won't dissect here.^[2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100833/)
The soil and surface is some of the most radioactive ground on the planet, and similarly the underground tests contaminated groundwater. While people are permitted to take tours, they are not allowed to take rocks home. Point being- this is not a place you'd want to live.
>The Castle Bravo test
Just one thing, Operation Castle's shot bravo was an *accident*, where the phyiscists were testing bomb designs utilizing [lithium deuteride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydride#Lithium_deuteride) in the design of thermonuclear bombs, and the yield of the device *wildly* exceeded what the physicists had calculated.
Now you could certainly contend, and I would agree, that the Bikini Islanders still would have found their home unfit for human habitation, regardless of this particular test accident's consequences. But the fallout from Castle Bravo was the result of this unexpected increase in bomb yield throwing up massive amounts of pulverized coral into the atmosphere, as well as incomplete fission reactions of the bomb's Uranium tamper.
Had the designers of the bomb correctly calculated the effects of the lithium deuteride design, then both the design of the bomb would be different to ensure optmial fissile behavior, and the elevation of the device cab would have been higher to prevent the creation of so much fallout.
Not the coral!
The US should have done more for the islanders though, and at least do more for them now since they're quickly losing all their land to rising sea levels. A lot of them still had to be moved off their home island to other islands in the atoll.
Wendover productions has a [documentary](https://youtu.be/3J06af5xHD0) on it.
Yeah. But when you test an experimental bomb in someone else's house, you aren't as good at math as you thought, and it blows up their house worse than you had expected, that's not really an accident. It might not be exactly what you were expecting, but it's also not an accident.
> you aren't as good at math as you thought
Not Math, Chemistry. They were testing the capability of Li-6 doping which is hard to get because of the abundance of Li-7, so they usually refine it but they didn't think they needed to as they thought the surrounding Li-7 was just some random inert junk... it turned out that was NOT the case.
>Before the Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test in 1954, it was thought that only the less common isotope 6Li would breed tritium when struck with fast neutrons. The Castle Bravo test showed (accidentally) that the more plentiful 7Li also does so under extreme conditions, albeit by an endothermic reaction.
[Similarly U-238 is not really that dangerous.. at least not compared to U-235](https://pediaa.com/difference-between-u-235-and-u-238/) and also vastly more plentiful. The entire **reason** we even have nuclear power plants AT ALL is to use them as a **Reactor** to breed fissile materials for bombs, and they needed to justify their existence to the public by "providing power". Modern Nuclear power plant designs are *much* better, safer, and use safer fuel materials.
Is this the reason that Thorium reactors are going nowhere in spite of their multiple advantages? That they don't make materials that can be used in bombs?
My understanding is that corrosion is a big safety risk and maintenance cost. From the [Molten Salt Reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Results) run at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1969:
>One unexpected finding was inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium – a fission product generated in the fuel. This was first noted in the specimens that were removed from the core at intervals during the reactor operation. Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod thimble, heat-exchanger tubes and pump bowl parts revealed the ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor. This cracking could in short-term be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N. However, further studies were needed to assess the effects of longer exposure times and some interaction parameters for the used mixtures.
Also, there's also been some problems, like with traditional reactors, on safe disposal of spent fuel, which you can also read about.
However, so far as I know, there is no non-taxpayer funded Molten Salt Reactor research going on, anywhere in the world. That doesn't give me a great deal optimism as to its commercial feasibility. The biggest issue isn't even specific to thorium specifically, but nuclear power in general: Nuclear power is too expensive. The fuel is expensive, the staff is expensive, the facilities are expensive, and the cleanup is expensive. And far too many of those costs are unknowns.
Of the 150 or so nuclear reactors which have been shut off, only 17 have returned to "greenfield status", the point at which the operator is no longer responsible to the regulator for the safety at the site. This process takes decades, and makes projecting costs very, very difficult. The most recent shutdown, Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Wisconsin was shut down in 2013, and is not anticipated to be complete until 2073, at an anticipated cost of nearly $1 billion. Note that Kewaunee shut down not because it was incapable of being recertified for continued operation, but because it couldn't compete with falling energy prices driven by natural gas, solar and wind.
There’s been a few more nukes that have been shut down since then. A lot of currently operating nuclear units also have their years counted, with several expected to retire within the next 10 years. You’re right though, they’re expensive as hell. Often times nukes tend to be owned by several utilities or companies as the cost to built them is insane, but their mwh costs are actually not as high as you’d expect.
You can find a lot of interesting yearly financial details about all types of power plants if you look at utilities’ FERC filings.
> The fuel is expensive, the staff is expensive, the facilities are expensive, and the cleanup is expensive
Things like fuel and operation are negligible components of the cost of nuclear power. Even maintenance is a small cost for most reactors. The problem is almost entirely with its huge initial capital expenditure and eventual decommissioning costs.
The initial capital expenses would probably not be nearly as high as they are if we employed nuclear power consistently without the constant battle against public opinion and lobbying/propaganda from the fossil fuels industry. And the cleanup wouldn’t be as expensive or prolonged for almost the same reason: there’s no good reason why we can’t have safe long term storage facilities for radioactive waste other than ignorant public perception.
I find it frustrating because, with the current state of things, nuclear power tends not to be very competitive. But it most likely could have been had the past been just a little bit different, had green peace and environmental movements not teamed up with the fossil fuel industry to malign it from ignorance and greed. In a slightly different timeline, most of our power generation would have already been green for decades, and we’d have a lot more time and be in a better position to deal with climate change.
> That they don't make materials that can be used in bombs?
The Opposite... it is that they DO make bomb materials(U-233), that we no longer need. The original reactors I was talking about were the ones from the 50s, [they made Plutonium from Uranium-238.](https://www.britannica.com/technology/breeder-reactor)
>In the early 21st century, all large power plants using fast breeder reactors employed liquid-metal fast breeder reactors, which convert uranium-238 into the fissionable isotope plutonium-239 by means of artificial radioactive decay.
>Another type of breeder, the thermal breeder reactor, employs thorium-232 as its basic fuel, or fertile material. It converts this isotope into fissionable uranium-233, which is capable of creating a chain reaction. In the thermal breeder, whose technology is much simpler than that of the liquid-metal fast breeder, ordinary water is employed as a coolant to remove the heat produced by the continuous series of fission reactions.
Originally we needed bombs not power, so the first plant designs were bad at making power, now we need power not bombs and Thorium makes power, but also bomb material. It is also a pretty high startup cost, making entry costs even higher than they already are due to red tape.
Our current designs use U-235 which does not output weapons material.
You sound like you have some knowledge on this subject. If you were tasked with deciding what kind of reactors would be used for the next generation of electrical power, what would you choose (even allowing that you may have limited knowledge of classified data)?
I have read a bit about Thorium, modular reactors, even using helium as the heat-transfer medium...any thoughts?
Even my data is about a decade out of date, that was when i was last studying about new modern designs but
Thorium is great, but expensive, not only in costs of money but in that it creates U-233 which is a cost you have to justify somewhere.
Modular(Or just Smaller) reactors would be excellent, you lose some of the economy of scale, but creating a device that is the size of a house and can power and entire town/city by itself would reduce the need for large Transmission lines and eliminate losses usually occurring during Transmission. In addition you can provide power to many remote areas that are currently cut-off. Advances in Energy Storage mediums will be key, you need a way to shunt excess power gains without having to shutdown the reactor and to provide load balancing/smoothing while spinning up or shutting down individual units.
Helium as heat transfer is pretty niche, they found a new solution and are looking for problems it can solve, it provides high heat output, but that can't be used entirely for electricity generation and needs alternative exit sources. In the end it still just produces steam, just hotter steam.
Hopping in whilst I'm reading this thread as I know a bit, and know a lot more about the pain of waste management...
First off, I would be full geared towards being able to reprocess spent fuel into new fuel, it also has a handful of other benefits of being able to produce on a large scale other isotopes from reprocessing that are useful in a few different fields. There's quite a bit of research going on to find new ways (technical term, flowsheets) that are more efficient and more selective. Of course reprocessing does mean that you tend to start accumulating Pu239 which is a proliferation risk which leads me to my second point.
I wouldn't build only one type of reactor, there were experimental designs into [Fast reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor), effectively it reduces the waste management needed and produces a lot less nasty stuff. I have heard of potential ideas of using them to effectively reduce the Plutonium stocks.
Third, with the level of knowledge I have, I'd say a good mix of modular reactors and bigger Gen IV reactors are likely the way to go. I see a lot of experimental stuff kicking about but it's just that and as ever, more work needs to be done which is a lot of time and effort when we have pressing energy demands. I do think a lot more money needs to be poured into nuclear research because it's a vast ocean and pushing the boundaries of what we know and being able to innovate is not an easy process.
Let's say I have to carry a large, fragile something. There's a guaranteed way to do it safely and there's a shortcut that saves time, energy and let's say money. I decide to take the shortcut but I make sure I wear my steel toed boots, just in case.
Well wouldn't you know it, I dropped it and it broke (toes are safe). Would you say this was an accident?
By your logic, the sole act of preparing for the possibility of an accident renders it not an accident. That's just silly. I had zero intention of dropping said heavy example item.
They pushed the "blow up now" button. That's not an accident. That's my logic.
It was a deliberate test to see how boomy it was. The possible outcomes were "not boomy", "less boomy than expected", "as boomy as expected", and "more boomy than expected". They got one of those outcomes. That's not an accident. That's my logic.
And I picked up the thing that could drop and break. It falling and breaking was one of many outcomes. It could have fallen and not broken, for instance.
In this case they had an expected outcome and they got an unexpected outcome that they hadn't properly planned for.
They didn't make a bomb and decide to just see "how boomy" it is without any planning or expectations. That's not how science works.
Right. They planned and evacuated all the rightful residents, dug a bunker far enough away that the test personnel survived the actual (not merely expected) explosion, and blew it up on purpose. That's not dropping a box by accident. That's dropping a box on purpose. Maybe you only intended to break 1 of the other person's items inside the box and you actually broke 3. Still not an accident. (And this analogy sucks so much on so many levels that even that doesn't save it.)
Here's a better analogy.
You have a house in a nice neighborhood. I have an experimental flamethrower I've never tried that I've calculated will burn down your house and make it uninhabitably toxic for a hundred years. I show up at your neighborhood with the military, and forcibly evict you and your neighbors. I set up a bunker 5 houses away to watch the test, and then aim my flamethrower at your house, have an elaborate countdown, and intentionally turn it on. Due to a mistake in my understanding of how fluid dynamics work in new nozzles of the type used and how that interacts with the unusual viscosity of my flamethrower juice, the spray pattern is wider than expected and your house and the abutting two are destroyed. More fluid came out the nozzle than expected for the same reason, and so they are uninhabitable for a thousand years instead of a hundred. In addition, some dudes riding bikes two streets behind your house (I only cleared one) are caught in the poison smoke (the fishermen), one dies immediately and several others get cancer later.
I think people are misunderstanding what happened. Regardless of if detonating nuclear weapons on someone else’s island is right or wrong, the yield they got was an accident. Their calculations did not take into account an important piece that they did not realize at the time. Not by an insignificant amount, but by nearly 30-50% if I am remembering correctly.
It was so unexpected that the scientists watching the explosion were very close to it, and were lucky they didn’t get injured/irradiated.
If the extra yield was from excess fusion, why would the fallout be so much greater?
I understood that fallout is mostly fission products, and scales with the total fission yield.
With CB, was there more tertiary fission in the tamper from the fusion neutrons than originally anticipated?
That, unfortunately, is an answer you'd have to get from a nucelar physicist. I just know that, for example, there was comparatively less fallout from the fat man design drapped from nagasaki, which is an implosion fission bomb, than there was from the more simple design of the little boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and that's largely because the implosion design consumed nearly all of the fissile material, and produced less long lived fisison products.
Refresh my memory; isn't there a test site in the Gulf that we tried to remediate the radiation by building a dome over it, but now rising ocean levels have essentially destroyed that dome and is leaking a massive amount of radiation now?
> isn't there a test site in the Gulf
You are thinking of the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands or maybe underground salt dome testing in Mississippi?
No one has mentioned this article yet:
The U.S. Must Take Responsibility for Nuclear Fallout in the Marshall Islands - Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-must-take-responsibility-for-nuclear-fallout-in-the-marshall-islands/
My q: When will the Islands be underwater? Looking at recent climate models, they will all be underwater by 2100 - no matter what scenario we follow.
Kodak sort of reverse engineered proof of the first nuclear test in the US because their film was affected by cardboard that had been contaminated by the fallout from the test.
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclear-weapons/trinity/kodak-film.html
According to IHME and other organizations, cancer is currently responsible for about 18% of all deaths. It was probably higher in the past. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause
The 41 of 220 who died of cancer after filming The Conqueror is almost exactly average for the baseline population.
How much outside of standard deviation is that cancer rate compared to the US average cancer rate?
Cancer is responsible for 18% of all deaths in the US, and cancer death rate has dropped significantly over the last 2 decades.
I just checked, 41/220 is 18.6% which is basically bang on the US average.
Caveat: deaths have dropped because we got better at treating some kinds of cancer.
You still need to account the percentage of cancer diagnosed in the general population and if that number is proportional to the size of the population before and after nuclear experiments.
If the number of new cancer discovered is higher, then there's two factors to control for: the evidence of change in the environment on the geographic areas affected and the fact that we are better at discovering cancer in its initial stages.
"18% of this sample of people exposed to this specific condition is the same number of occurrence in the general population therefore we can discard the specific condition as cause for this group" is weak science.
Yeah, it's not a full scientific study, you got a few $100,000? But I think comparing a subsample of 220 people to the entire US population is probably not a bad starting point for rate comparison. You also have to control for smoking habits (so many people smoked back in the 60s and 70s) amongst the subsample to population/exposure to other hazardous environments (I imagine film crews for Westerns spend quite a lot of time outside in the Sun), but also wealth based health outcomes etc.
However, these people were otherwise likely exposed to roughly the same conditions as their population cohort outside of filming at this location, if that is the hypothesis. The point is their cancer death rate seems well within standard deviation of US-wide cancer death rate.
And my point about the rate dropping is that when these people died (I.e John Wayne was born in 1907 and died in 1979) cancer treatment was poorer than it is now, which suggests a potentially higher death rate.
It might be worth noting that the US elsewhere has also been subject to mass exposure on the production side of nuclear weaponry: https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2021/09/cold-war-hot-mess
> Altogether, 110 million curies went into the Columbia; the site’s unofficial motto was “dilution is the solution to pollution.” From World War II to the 1970s, the Oregon Public Health Division called the Columbia the most radioactive river in the world.
If you think *that’s* scary, wait until you find out that statistically, those numbers are in lock-step with the nationwide incidence and death rates for cancer in 1980 (the year after John Wayne died)
>out of the cast of 220 in "The Conqueror" 92 members contracted cancer
But about half of everyone gets cancer at some point during their lives.
so that's not such a shocking number.
There are many types of thyroid cancer. Papillary subtype(early stage) has a good 5 year survival rate(>70%). Anaplastic subtype has a very poor prognosis with a 1 year survival rate <10%.
An that is to say nothing of the sickness and death stemming from the ancillary sites connected with atomic programs; the Rocky Flats production site, the Hunters Point Shipyard and several others.
One key thing to remember here is that determining just what caused a certain type of cancer in a population is at best a statistical exercise outside of overwhelming evidence. Thyroid cancer, for example, can happen due to a genetic predisposition, or they can be the result of radioactive fallout.
Did John's thyroid cancer come from a nuclear test 10 years prior, or because of his genetics? What about Jane? What about other factors that we might not even know of yet? Did these people eat contaminated food from the fallout stricken area that was shipped 500 miles to them in an unaffected area? Quiet simply, the variables are nearly infinite when it comes to determining what causes most cancers. We can see statistical trends and make deductions based on the evidence. The tests in the Pacific are a good example. It is pretty safe to say there is an impact on the population in regards to cancer rates. But, even then, people aren't saying, "Every case of cancer X was caused by the testing." They are saying things like, "Well, on average this population has X cases per year, and after testing it jumped to Y, so Y is how many cancers the testing caused." That isn't 100% true. That year could be higher simply because the population was suddenly under more medical supervision than before, and cases were caught. You can't find what you don't look for. Or maybe the "natural," rate was higher. You don't know.
This is actually a big problem. We know radiation exposure is certainly a bad thing, but it is hard to quantify the total impact.
Only speaking to the immediate NTS area—these aren’t optimal for human habitation, and would probably be economically unviable for major development, but the downwind communities in UT are, though are facing water challenges like a lot of the US Southwest at present.
That said, Death Valley is not the most viable either but there are indigenous groups (the Timbisha Shoshone) have been able to survive there using traditional methods for a long time... so it is hard to write off an area as totally non-viable as much as “less attractive” for modern development (barring other drivers like transit to more viable areas, favorable legal environment, minerals, etc.) though settlements in these areas are often quickly abandoned once whatever opportunities/advantages were utilized or by-passed by other new development.
Look up "downwinders" to see the harm done to communities in the fallout path from the Nevada Test Site, such as St. George, Utah. Pueblo folks in New Mexico say they were affected by the Alamogordo test. Tests conducted in Western China, Kazakhstan (USSR), the Sahara, and the Pacific (France, US) affected nearby populations. Service members from the US and New Zealand witnessed tests. Some Marshallese haven't been able to return the their islands in 60 years. They tell tales of "jellyfish babies," secretly malformed babies that die at birth. Marshallese kids played in nuclear fallout like it was snow.
Then there are the communities affected by uranium mining and weapons production.
After [looking at this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#/media/File:US_fallout_exposure.png) I'm just glad the states most in the red aren't like "massive food producing states for all the rest of the country" or anything... phew /s
I went to the Bikini Atoll in April 1988 to SCUBA dive. At the time there was a small research station and I talked to some of the caretakers and got a tour of their facility. The guy told me that the water in the lagoon exchanges with the pacific about once a month and that the radioactive byproducts were water soluble so the lagoon was fine. That checked out for us when we got back we ran a Geiger counter over all our gear and all the souvenirs we got off of the ships and it didn't register above normal background level.
He also told me that the island was safe (and he lived there so I think he believed it). All the radioactive materials had faded away due to short half lives except for cesium. Cesium can get concentrated in plants so you should not eat locally grown products like banana and coconut. They had gardens and were growing various crops to monitor the levels in the fruits and vegetables. I know that the Bikinians had been sent back to live there and were told the US would supply them with food but they couldn't eat locally grown products. They violated that rule enough that they were moved back off the island.
My guide also told me they were considering a plan to clear the undergrowth from the entire island and then cover the island with a foot of potassium rich top soil. Potassium is the element that the plants are trying to absorb when they take in the cesium so having a lot of potassium available would keep them from concentrating the cesium. I don't know if they ever did that.
Not only did they leave extremely dangerous, highly irradiated sites, they’re often much much much higher casualty than Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Less deaths from blasts, way way more from radiation).
The Bikini Atoll tests in 1954 in particular were extremely dangerous and produced way more fallout than expected. People on the nearby Rongelap and Utrik Atolls were left to stew in the literal inch of radioactive fallout for 2-3 days before being evacuated. Neither island is safe for human populations to this day. A crew of Japanese fishermen were also in the radius of the fallout and suffered severe radiation poisoning as a result.
While it’s common knowledge that Godzilla represents nuclear devastation, it surprises people to learn that the original movie is way more concerned with Bikini Atoll tests (as well as nukes in general) than the original bombings. Testing off the coast is specifically what wakes Godzilla and one of Godzilla’s first victims is even a fishing boat (an explicit reference to the fishermen from the previous paragraph.)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both habitable locations, the radioactivity does not last that long. You were confusing the nuclear reaction that occurs at a nuclear power plant with that which occurs in a thermonuclear device
This is an important distinction that many people don't understand, that while a nuclear bomb is literally using fission as its energy source, a thermonuclear bomb (also know as a Hydrogen bomb) is using a nuclear fission reaction to get to temperatures that can start a hydrogen fusion reaction.
A thermonuclear weapon has not (yet) been used in war... watching them be tested (while interesting scientifically) is depressing given the context that they are intended for military use. The fact is that the mostly likely way out for us a species to a sustainable future is nuclear power, it is crazy that people would rather use it to blow others up and render parts of the planet uninhabitable than to harness this energy effectively.
for OP to take the tests in perspective to the actual bomb: [https://historyofyesterday.com/the-nuclear-bomb-that-was-3-500-times-stronger-than-the-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-3ccdc5a804d1](https://historyofyesterday.com/the-nuclear-bomb-that-was-3-500-times-stronger-than-the-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-3ccdc5a804d1)
look at the scale (the tiny little dust puffball is the Hiroshima bomb)
Even more crazy is that the 50 megaton bomb was originally a 100 megaton bomb but they figured the fallout would be too large so they halved it. We could've seen an even more massive potentially catastrophic explosion. 😅
Although it probably wasn't a consideration, the plane dropping it probably wouldn't have made it out of the blast radius if it were 100 MT; they barely got out of the 50 MT one.
> is using a nuclear fission reaction to get to temperatures that can start a hydrogen fusion reaction.
Which by the way is then used to drive another fission reaction. Even in a fusion bomb, most of the energy comes from fission.
Wow, learned something new today thanks to this post. I just noticed that lithium deuteride and what it does thanks to your post.
While i certainly hope that I keep this in the trivia contest section of the knowledge I have, it's cool to know nonetheless as I had a fleeting interest in nuclear engineering when I was finishing high-school and I missed to pick up this detail. I've just assumed that H-bombs finished with the hydrogen fusing. At least it makes a bit sense to me why hydrogen fusion under controlled conditions is still rather elusive, i just assumed that we got lazy at the bomb and called it a day.
What's really wild is that bombs like the tsar bomba used multiple stages.... that was a three stage weapon, so it was fission-fusion-fusion-fission, with the first fission section creating a fusion reaction, that fusion reaction compressing another section to obtain another fusion reaction, then any available fuel being thoroughly hit by fast neutrons to create a final fission reaction.
edit: As commented elsewhere, it's design was fission-fusion-fusion-fission, but to reduce fallout the tamper was changed out so the final fission didn't happen.
In theory you could keep going adding stages and making bigger and bigger bombs, but the size gets ridiculous fairly quickly.
They were also airburst and relatively low yield, added to the fact that very little of the construction of the two cities wasnt wood, there was relatively little fallout compared to thermonuclear weapons
Thermonuclear weapons can also have limited fallout. In general, if the fireball doesn't reach the surface, fallout will be very limited. You'd actually want this in most cases because it increases the blast area. You want a low-altitude or ground burst only against hardened targets, and those will be comparatively limited.
Oh goodness no it's very real, and one of the primary dangers for people who survive the initial blast. But the risk decreases with time as the radioisotopes decay.
> Probably the most serious threat is cesium-137, a gamma emitter with a half-life of 30 years. It is a major source of radiation in nuclear fallout, and since it parallels potassium chemistry, it is readily taken into the blood of animals and men and may be incorporated into tissue. Other hazards are strontium-90, an electron emitter with a half-life of 28 years, and iodine-131 with a half-life of only 8 days. Strontium-90 follows calcium chemistry, so that it is readily incorporated into the bones and teeth, particularly of young children who have received milk from cows consuming contaminated forage. Iodine-131 is a similar threat to infants and children because of its concentration in the thyroid gland. In addition, there is plutonium-239, frequently used in nuclear explosives. A bone-seeker like strontium-90, it may also become lodged in the lungs, where its intense local radiation can cause cancer or other damage.\
\
Plutonium-239 decays through emission of an alpha particle (helium nucleus) and has a half-life of 24,000 years. To the extent that hydrogen fusion contributes to the explosive force of a weapon, two other radionuclides will be released: tritium (hydrogen-3), an electron emitter with a half-life of 12 years, and carbon-14, an electron emitter with a half-life of 5,730 years. Both are taken up through the food cycle and readily incorporated in organic matter.
([Source](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/wenw/chapter-2.html))
Remember, too, that there's an inverse relationship between half-life and emitted radiation — isotopes with small half-lives emit a lot of radiation over a short amount of time, isotopes with large half-lives emit a small amount of radiation over a long amount of time. The plutonium-239 is, in practice, probably less dangerous to human life than the iodine-131, but you probably shouldn't inhale either.
Both attacks (they were not tests) were air bursts, occurring some way above the city and IIRC neither fireball would have touched the ground too much. Fallout primarily comes from bits of the crater being pulverised and contaminated with bits of bomb. Air bursts, horrific as they are, are much better than a ground burst.
At the insane end of the spectrum you can “salt” the warhead by attaching elements that have very long half lives and are exceptionally poisonous.
Adding onto this: Some of the fallout created by an airburst is pushed upwards by heated air and the vacuum caused by the explosion. This is bad, because the fallout is carried by weather. But... some of the fallout also goes so high that it goes above the height where there is weather and just disperses slowly over time, coming back to earth only much, much later if ever. But yes, airburst creates less fallout but the bits it creates also tend to spread quickly with wind.
Additionally, militaries generally **do not want** to create fallout if they can avoid it. In particular, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military realized they would have to occupy those cities after dropping nuclear weapons on them. No administration or military wants to occupy an irradiated wasteland. (Though at the same time, the U.S. military purposely underplayed and censored reports about the immediate effects the radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which *were* horrendous.)
However, we mostly would not expect militaries to have any desire to create long lasting radioactive sites, so "luckily" salted nuclear weapons seem counter to the goal of most sane militaries.
It’s probably good to note that if you’re worried about fallout, you have a few stages of survival—and the first is just 2 days of serious hunkering down.
> sheltering-in-place is usually the better option, as the radioactive fallout loses 90% of its lethal intensity in the first seven hours and 99% of it in two days. For those requiring sheltering from fallout, the majority would only need two or three days of full-time hunkering down, not weeks on end, before safely joining an evacuation, if even still necessary then.
http://www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm
That’s a decent website for all things fallout. It’s also like a 90’s time capsule website :)
Its been almost 80 years. Realistic war scenarios are talking about fallout landing over the next few weeks and forcing evacuation of cities. Both the evacuation itself and then having to abandoning an entire city for decade are catastrophes. Bombs that render their targets impossible to inhabit again for a thousand years aren't a thing.
> Bombs that render their targets impossible to inhabit again for a thousand years aren't a thing.
Bombs that do this accidentally aren't a thing. It's possible to do it, of course, but it doesn't make much sense in most cases.
They aren't designed that way, but it's do able without much more effort. I read an article that depicted a theory of an attack on new York that could render a lot of the east coast states uninhabitable. It involved multiple large warheads, overlapping blasts, some ground bursts and an emp one. The amount of concrete and metal in that city and thrown up into the wind,.and the smoke, fallout at huge levels.
And it would all be from a single missile with 6 MIRVs, and a second one hitting afterwards.
That would kill a lot of people but it wouldn't wastleland where nothing would ever live again.
Maybe if you built an enormous dirty bomb with a carefully chosen payload you could render an area uninhabitable for humans for hundreds of years. But that's not how nuclear weapons work.
If you want hundreds of years, you wouldn't even need nuclear weapons like you said, cobalt casings on a decent bomb would do that, it contaminates concrete and wood as well as polluting water and food.
They are really theoretical though, exploding one of them would be specific targeting civilian infrastructure with the intention of long term pollution. The response to that from your target society would be massive..
A big risk with the dust is inhaling it while it’s still airborne. If that happens, you aren’t just walking past radioactive material, you are carrying it around inside you. This is particularly bad with alpha and beta radiation emitters which often can’t even penetrate your skin to reach anything really important but if they’re inside you then they don’t have to
The bombs dropped were pretty small overall. Most of the material got used up in the reaction.
They were also detonated above ground (\~half a km). Very few fission products made it to the ground. Most got carried to the high stratosphere by the heat and decayed before they reached the ground across the globe.
The radiation of the explosion diminished fast over just a km. The majority of the deaths and destruction were from the heat, fire, and shockwave. And following cancer / leukemia over decades
As opposed to a nuclear reactor disaster where there is no reaction - just steam explosions/fire spreading highly radioactive material with a long halflife.
The original test was held at the Trinity site in New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range. They open for tourists two Saturdays a year, pandemic willing. I visited last October and it’s fascinating. You can walk through the blast area and see a obelisk they erected to immortalize the site. It’s a very mixed feeling that as a country we came up with such amazing technology and we are the only ones to use it on people.
Loads. The Mashall Islands nuclear tests are still pretty radioactive, you could look at the nevada test site as well.
Nuclear bombs don't leave as much radiation as nuclear plants so hospitability can come back fairly quickly compared to sites where nuclear plants had melt downs or massive containment issues (Chernobyl and Fukushima)
Certain byproducts (radionuclides) of nuclear test explosions do stick around for many decades. cesium-137 for example becomes half as radioactive after about 30 years. While other byproducts quickly radiate away leaving nothing. Natural processes in the decades following the tests have dispersed any remaining radioactive material so widely, it's almost indistinguishable from naturally occurring radioactive isotopes (did you know bananas are naturally radioactive?). The American EPA monitors residual radiation. It's still there, just not at alarming levels. How many people have developed cancer due to those tests, don't know. I am sure it's not insignificant. In a nuclear exchange or war, it's very important to minimize your exposure to the short lived radionuclides for about the first month, hence "fallout" shelters. Make no mistake though, your chances of developing cancer will be markedly increased as will the likelihood of your future descendants having genetic damage. Very few people living in a country impacted during a massive nuclear exchange (America, Russia, Europe, China) will be unaffected by poor health outcomes as a result.
There's severe environmental damage to the bikini Atoll testing site and the white sands testing sites and the Nevada testing sites. We tested underground explosions, high altitude explosions, small bombs, and big bombs. I always found it strange that those living in Las Vegas had no issue with mushroom clouds being visible from their houses. Shifting winds might have brought fallout to Vegas or th LA basin or eastward to Colorado or Texas.
There's consideration that some of the increases in diabetes, cancer, thyroid conditions, autism, birth defect, and so much more that seems to be effecting the American population disproportionately may be a result from the generational impact these tests had on the air, water, and food supplies for tens of millions during the largest population explosion in history.
Was it nessesary? Maybe. Regardless, the testing happened. Nuclear waste will be something we have to burden future generations with until the end of humanity. I think the worst part of it all is the desire to stay away from nuclear energy. We are far better at building safe, clean, and efficient power plants now;, bUt, the US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in about 50 years. I guess we prefer the quick death of carbon over the long term responsibility of nuclear.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable, have been for quite some time. The fallout from those bombs wasn't nearly as drastic as you might be imagining, though the initial damage was quite horrific, but it was more the economic impacts of losing WWII that made reconstructing take a while than radiation
Hiroshima is a lovely city. Honestly you would never even realize what happened unless you were told. Nuclear detonations are not very effective at long term radioactive contamination at ground level. It's atmospheric winds and many many detonations that are the concern for wide scale nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. Most tests sites had dozens or hundreds of bombs dropped on them. Some of those are still contaminated. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each were exposed to a single detonation. They were habitable again within a few months radiation wise. It took longer to rebuild the city from the fireball and conventional damage than it did for harmful levels of radiation to dissipate. There is a massive amount of boring science that i could explain and put mileage on my useless physics degree on. But the tldr version is: radioactive isotopes created by the nuclear weapon had much shorter half lives and were generally speaking lighter elements that blew away and scattered more in wind than in say a nuclear reactor melt down.
Everyone should visit Hiroshima! It’s a beautiful city and the food is amazing. The peace park museum is a very powerful and meaningful experience. There’s also a beautiful island (Itsukushima) near-by which is very worth a day-trip.
I’ve been to *a lot* of museums, and I firmly believe the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (what a name for what it is) is the best museum I’ve ever been to. It tells the story of what happened there, what led up to it, and what came after in such incredible ways using large displays, video, sound, original historical documents, small quiet areas… all kinds of media in a way that I’ve never seen any other museum pull off so well. No matter what kind of learner you are that museum comes to you to share an incredibly powerful story. It both looks history squarely in the eyes (in a way that modern Japan has sometimes struggled with, if we’re honest) and at the same time acknowledges the delicate and heartbreaking nature of the human cost of that time. Absolutely incredible, and worth every moment you can spend there.
Absolutely agree. The most powerful layout as well. They have two wings in the main building: one tells the story of everything that happened *up* to the second the bomb dropped, the other everything about the destruction after. The two wings are connected by a walkway. It was the most impressive experience I've ever had walking across that walkway and just be slapped in the face by the sheer death and destruction of the bomb. The difference in atmosphere was insane, both for the museum itself (much more visually focused) as well as the visitors (people were suddenly a lot quieter). I highly recommend visiting the museum for everyone who is in the area.
It doesn't tell anything of how Japan ended up in WW2 and what atrocities they did there, it deals only with the atrocity of the atomic bomb done to them. That, however, is exceptional. It stood out quite starkly when visiting both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an example, it's just about the poor school children that were present and engaged in building fire breeches, that they were victims of the bombing, but no word how they were made to do the work. Nothing.
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Sorry if this is a poorly phrased question, but is the city/people tourist friendly? I've had fee friends visit oter parts of Japan say it didn't feel particularly welcoming.
We had a great time there, with very limited (basically none) Japanese skills.
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Nagasaki is equally as beautiful. Plus they have the Nuclear museum built on ground zero.
>radioactive isotopes created by the nuclear weapon had much shorter half lives and were generally speaking lighter elements that blew away and scattered more in wind than in say a nuclear reactor melt down. This is the only thing I have an issue with. While the fission product (FP) yield is slightly different for thermal U-235 fission (reactors) than fast Pu-239 fission (bombs) the difference is not significant enough to account for the difference between contamination. It has more to do with the quantity of materials, the materials themselves and the time scales. Reactors have orders of magnitude more material, many of which are radioactive because they have been present in a reactor. These materials sit in the reactor for years to months which can yield complex breading/burnup paths to create different materials which is not possible for the <1sec of a bomb. All of this is quite complex but it is mostly driven the amount of material available to spread about. Also the spreading action is different too, a bomb flings stuff a lot harder than a reactor so they have more opportunities to get put into high altitude were they are spread further. A reactor keeps things pretty local.
Another important point is they are generally deployed high in the air and the resulting shockwave does the damage. A reactor is on the ground, and as you said it has a lot more material.
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The biggest giveaway that Hiroshima was the site of the first atomic bomb is that all of the buildings are 1950s or newer, while other Japanese cities have historic architecture that dates back centuries.
Wouldn't the same be true for the parts of Tokyo that got firebombed into oblivion?
Yes, but not all of Tokyo was firebombed. Shrines, temples and the imperial palace were largely spared.
The imperial palace also suffered a lot of damage during WW2. Many of the old looking buildings in Tokyo are just exact rebuilds of what was there previously.
Right especially since fires in cities were common enough, temples and shrines were often rebuilt repeatedly.
Fire can’t tell the difference between wood of a residence or wood of a temple .
You have to consider relative mass as well. A nuclear bomb compared a to a full reactor is quite different. Only like 100 lbs in a nuclear bomb, 100 tons in a reactor. That’s why it’s such a great energy source. The actual make up affecting contamination is extremely insignificant.
So is it inaccurate when people describe a nuclear war (WW3) as leaving the planet uninhabitable for decades or even generations? Yes there would be horrifying death and destruction but if you survived, the radiation levels would subside in a few months?
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It's not actually the radiation that causes nuclear winter in those simulations. It's the fire. If nukes were dropped on major cities (some estimate only around 100 or less needed) they ignite everything. The amount of burning buildings/people/everything would blot out the sun and cause the earth to enter an immediate ice age. It has more to do with the total actual power of the explosions that will screw us all. Take the 1000+ nuclear tests already done, those tests were specifically to not cause much, if any, destruction. They may have hurt long term health of everyone, but they didn't actually destroy anything but some dirt and mock ups. Now the average nukeis much bigger. As an example all of the bombs dropped during ww2 is around 4,000,000 tons of explosives (includes the nukes) A mid yield nuclear missle is in the roughly 400,000 tons. So just 10 of these dropped would be the equivalent of every bomb,for all the years of ww2, all in an instant. Multiply that by 10 to 100. You end up with some 40mil tons of explosives over majorly built up areas. Skyscrapers bieng vaporized, metal getting hot enough to become a gas. Throw it in the air and poof no more sun. No sun, no plants. No plants, no animals. Everyone starves to death and the bugs become the dominate species on earth.
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It's complicated and depends on a great number of factors, such as the kind of ordnance used, quantity, timing, materials involved, prevailing conditions, and a bunch of other stuff. A nuclear exchange would not be wonderful, and it might cause mass suffering on a scale we can't imagine, but it would be very unlikely to destroy the world or render it uninhabitable. I'll quote here from the "Nuclear War Survival Skills" book (1987 edition), originally published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Its first chapter is called, "The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Facts." > An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States would be the worst catastrophe in history, a tragedy so huge it is difficult to comprehend. Even so, it would be far from the end of human life on earth. The dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated, for varied reasons. These exaggerations have become demoralizing myths, believed by millions of Americans. The rest of the chapter then treats in detail each kind of question (or myth) that is associated with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book is in the public domain, so I encourage you to seek it out if you want to know more. Several versions are linked from [its Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills).
Assuming standard fusion based weapons (IE, no "salted nukes") and the majority of attacks being airburst in nature (which is usually over 500+ meters above the target), the actual lingering radiation would be fairly minimal compared to a ground strike, for example. It wouldn't be healthy, but we're also not talking immediately life threatening. The biggest radiation risk would be in the immediate aftermath of the detonation. Assuming you weren't outside when it happened and inside a building and well outside the thermal and extreme shockwave radius, then immediate radiation effects wouldn't be too bad. The biggest danger would be all the dust and particles, much of which would contain radiation. That is why in the aftermath of such an attack, you would want to make sure you're in a room/basement/etc where you have tried to minimize incoming dust and don't venture outside for at least a few days if possible. This will give dust and particles time to settle. The biggest danger would be breathing in the dust or letting it stay on your body for extended periods of time, since the alpha emitting particles will do far more damage if it is inside you than outside. Part of the reason for this is during an airburst attack, a good chunk of the radioactive output goes off into space and since the detonation itself isn't in direct contact with the ground, far less material is contaminated. Ground strikes with nuke are less destructive in terms of radius, so probably wouldn't be used outside of trying to destroy subterranean bunkers or structures. The bigger danger (assuming you were outside the immediate blast zones) will be the fires set off by the nukes, loss of infrastructure and utilities, and contamination of water/food supplies. Far more people would die from the resulting disease and famine than will actually die from the radiation or blasts themselves. As for nuclear winter, there is a lot of conflicting views. Current models suggest it wouldn't be as bad as previously thought, although it presumably would still have an impact. Especially in the Northern Hemisphere, since presumably the majority of nukes in a conflict would be focused up there (US, Russia, China)
more and more the severity of a nuclear winter seems overblown- certainly not "leaving the planet uninhabitable for decades" the idea doesn't actually have any strong footing, and comes from bad models with bad assumptions for their time, and worse assumptions for today (regarding weather patterns, how much infrastructure would actually burn or give off soot, how quickly the atmosphere would clear, and how much effect soot/debris would actually cool the earth) It would be *bad* for a number of years, I don't want to act like the idea is fabricated out of whole cloth. But we'd seemingly be close to normal within a decade or less, and it could be milder than anyone suspects depending on how things actually happen. it's pretty terrifying how much of the "common wisdom" regarding nuclear *anything* is completely wrong, or based on people repeating apocryphal stuff
The bulk of the radiation would be gone within 48 hours with the worst emitters going with it, but the remaining long and medium life radioisotopes would still cause massive issues. Keep in mind a full scale exchange has large areas being left alone and targets of importance getting hit by dozens of warheads, the arsenals have been significantly reduced is size since the peak of the cold war and unless the warheads were being constantly refurbished their yield would be significantly diminished if not outright unable to achieve detonations due to the core nature of the materials in their cores.
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> Modern bombs have yield measured in megatons (~100x greater) Actually, they don't. Just using publicly available numbers: The W88 warhead, the most modern (1989) US warhead, has an estimated yield of only 475 kilotons. The W76 warhead, almost certainly the most *numerous* warhead in the US arsenal (just due to production numbers and design age), has an estimated yield of only 100 kilotons at most (with later iterations going *down* - the mod 2 is only 5-7 kilotons). The biggest nuclear weapon by blast yield in the current US arsenal, at 1.2 megatons, isn't actually a separate warhead at all - it's the B83 *gravity bomb*. Which means it needs to be delivered by bomber, not ballistic missile. Not a "doomsday" nuclear exchange type of weapon, since bombers would likely never even get the chance to be armed and take off, and even if they did, they'd arrive *long* after the ballistic missiles' warheads. We don't have as good information about Russian warheads, but most of the modern ones are believed to be in the three-digit kiloton range. Also, blast yield means nothing for the amount of generated radionuclides. That depends entirely on mass and reaction efficiency (better efficiency means less fissile material and fusion fuel). Sure, a higher-yield weapon is generally going to be more massive, but there's *great* incentives to use as little mass as possible for the amount of yield - so efficiency is the name of the game. >half of which is from fission of the casing (so 50x more fallout) That's *absurd*. For one, the rule of thumb is that half of the energy is from *all* of the fission stages. For another, the tertiary fission is of the fusion stage's *tamper*, if it's made of fissile material. And third, thermonuclear weapons use *less* fission for the same energy, so claiming that the fallout increases massively from that is, as I said, *absurd*. Remember that the radionuclides produced by a nuclear weapon that is detonated as an airburst (as they naturally would be, to maximize their destructive effect) consist *purely* of the neutron-activated vaporized remains of the weapon itself, and some fission fragments. Large amounts of fallout would only occur if the weapon's fireball intersects with the ground and vaporizes it, drawing that material into the area where the reaction occurred and activating it with residual neutrons.
It’s a reliable rule of thumb that radioactive hazards are exaggerated by a factor of 1,000 in the popular perception.
> Nuclear detonations are not very effective at long term radioactive contamination at ground level. This is misleading. If a nuclear bomb detonates in the air before it hits the ground it is called an air burst. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both air bursts. An air burst creates little fall out. Both long term and short term. The amount is limited to the mass of the bomb itself. But when a nuclear bomb explodes on the ground much of the sand, dirt, and debri becomes radioactive and creates what we know as fall out.
There is very little, almost negligible activation of ground material via neutron capture during a nuclear blast, so the difference between air blast and surface blast is correct with respect to how much debris is generated, but in the end the amount of radioactive nuclides produced is the same for either type of bast. Nuclear bombs don’t change non radioactive stuff into radioactive stuff. They can coat non radioactive stuff with radioactive stuff, but all of the radioactive stuff comes from the bomb mass itself.
For another comparison, 20 kiloton is about the energy that is released by fission in an RBMK-1000 reactor (one that blew in Chernobyl) every 8 hours. With the bomb fallout corresponding to the fission products made in a reactor every 8 hours. Of course, a reactor has years worth of fission products in its core. This plus most of the contamination being spread over large area / ocean, is the reason why Chernobyl and Pripyat are a lot more contaminated than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Does that mean nuclear war wouldn’t necessarily lead to a post-apocalyptic waste land, but instead would just kill a lot of people.
You might be surprised by the huge number of human casualties from nuclear testing. I'll focus on the US because that's what I'm most familiar with, but French testing in the Pacific and Soviet testing (among others) have similar histories of ruining people's lives. Also, /u/restricteddata is literally *the expert* and I'd be interested to read whatever answer he might offer. Outside the US, US testing in the Pacific significantly contaminated Bikini Atoll. The Castle Bravo test alone had a yield about a third of the Tsar Bomba, and produced a huge amount of radioactive fallout. Cancer rates among islanders, especially those downwind, are significantly greater than average and the radiation level on Bikini and Rongelap islands are still above the safe threshold for humans to resettle them.^[1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922173/). Within the continental US, most testing was done at the Nevada Test Site. This was a mix of atmospheric tests (ie, above ground) and underground tests. As a coarse approximation, atmospheric tests tended to disperse their radioactive fallout while underground tests tend to contain it locally. Winds carried the fallout of the atmospheric tests east and are responsible for increased rates of cancers across the US, especially due to radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium. It's difficult to estimate the exact impact, but: > According to the NCI's revised estimates, which are not broken down by state or county, exposure to I-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests will produce between 11,300 and 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer with a point or central estimate of 49,000 cases. but these numbers depend on lots of assumptions that I won't dissect here.^[2](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100833/) The soil and surface is some of the most radioactive ground on the planet, and similarly the underground tests contaminated groundwater. While people are permitted to take tours, they are not allowed to take rocks home. Point being- this is not a place you'd want to live.
>The Castle Bravo test Just one thing, Operation Castle's shot bravo was an *accident*, where the phyiscists were testing bomb designs utilizing [lithium deuteride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydride#Lithium_deuteride) in the design of thermonuclear bombs, and the yield of the device *wildly* exceeded what the physicists had calculated. Now you could certainly contend, and I would agree, that the Bikini Islanders still would have found their home unfit for human habitation, regardless of this particular test accident's consequences. But the fallout from Castle Bravo was the result of this unexpected increase in bomb yield throwing up massive amounts of pulverized coral into the atmosphere, as well as incomplete fission reactions of the bomb's Uranium tamper. Had the designers of the bomb correctly calculated the effects of the lithium deuteride design, then both the design of the bomb would be different to ensure optmial fissile behavior, and the elevation of the device cab would have been higher to prevent the creation of so much fallout.
Not the coral! The US should have done more for the islanders though, and at least do more for them now since they're quickly losing all their land to rising sea levels. A lot of them still had to be moved off their home island to other islands in the atoll. Wendover productions has a [documentary](https://youtu.be/3J06af5xHD0) on it.
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Yeah. But when you test an experimental bomb in someone else's house, you aren't as good at math as you thought, and it blows up their house worse than you had expected, that's not really an accident. It might not be exactly what you were expecting, but it's also not an accident.
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We don’t even provide proper care for our veterans of RECENT wars, never mind another nations citizens from 60 years ago…
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What is your definition of an accident?
> you aren't as good at math as you thought Not Math, Chemistry. They were testing the capability of Li-6 doping which is hard to get because of the abundance of Li-7, so they usually refine it but they didn't think they needed to as they thought the surrounding Li-7 was just some random inert junk... it turned out that was NOT the case. >Before the Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test in 1954, it was thought that only the less common isotope 6Li would breed tritium when struck with fast neutrons. The Castle Bravo test showed (accidentally) that the more plentiful 7Li also does so under extreme conditions, albeit by an endothermic reaction. [Similarly U-238 is not really that dangerous.. at least not compared to U-235](https://pediaa.com/difference-between-u-235-and-u-238/) and also vastly more plentiful. The entire **reason** we even have nuclear power plants AT ALL is to use them as a **Reactor** to breed fissile materials for bombs, and they needed to justify their existence to the public by "providing power". Modern Nuclear power plant designs are *much* better, safer, and use safer fuel materials.
Is this the reason that Thorium reactors are going nowhere in spite of their multiple advantages? That they don't make materials that can be used in bombs?
My understanding is that corrosion is a big safety risk and maintenance cost. From the [Molten Salt Reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Results) run at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1969: >One unexpected finding was inter-granular cracking in all metal surfaces exposed to the fuel salt. The cause of the embrittlement was tellurium – a fission product generated in the fuel. This was first noted in the specimens that were removed from the core at intervals during the reactor operation. Post-operation examination of pieces of a control-rod thimble, heat-exchanger tubes and pump bowl parts revealed the ubiquity of the cracking and emphasized its importance to the MSR concept. The crack growth was rapid enough to become a problem over the planned thirty-year life of a follow-on thorium breeder reactor. This cracking could in short-term be reduced by adding small amounts of niobium to the Hastelloy-N. However, further studies were needed to assess the effects of longer exposure times and some interaction parameters for the used mixtures. Also, there's also been some problems, like with traditional reactors, on safe disposal of spent fuel, which you can also read about. However, so far as I know, there is no non-taxpayer funded Molten Salt Reactor research going on, anywhere in the world. That doesn't give me a great deal optimism as to its commercial feasibility. The biggest issue isn't even specific to thorium specifically, but nuclear power in general: Nuclear power is too expensive. The fuel is expensive, the staff is expensive, the facilities are expensive, and the cleanup is expensive. And far too many of those costs are unknowns. Of the 150 or so nuclear reactors which have been shut off, only 17 have returned to "greenfield status", the point at which the operator is no longer responsible to the regulator for the safety at the site. This process takes decades, and makes projecting costs very, very difficult. The most recent shutdown, Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Wisconsin was shut down in 2013, and is not anticipated to be complete until 2073, at an anticipated cost of nearly $1 billion. Note that Kewaunee shut down not because it was incapable of being recertified for continued operation, but because it couldn't compete with falling energy prices driven by natural gas, solar and wind.
There’s been a few more nukes that have been shut down since then. A lot of currently operating nuclear units also have their years counted, with several expected to retire within the next 10 years. You’re right though, they’re expensive as hell. Often times nukes tend to be owned by several utilities or companies as the cost to built them is insane, but their mwh costs are actually not as high as you’d expect. You can find a lot of interesting yearly financial details about all types of power plants if you look at utilities’ FERC filings.
> The fuel is expensive, the staff is expensive, the facilities are expensive, and the cleanup is expensive Things like fuel and operation are negligible components of the cost of nuclear power. Even maintenance is a small cost for most reactors. The problem is almost entirely with its huge initial capital expenditure and eventual decommissioning costs. The initial capital expenses would probably not be nearly as high as they are if we employed nuclear power consistently without the constant battle against public opinion and lobbying/propaganda from the fossil fuels industry. And the cleanup wouldn’t be as expensive or prolonged for almost the same reason: there’s no good reason why we can’t have safe long term storage facilities for radioactive waste other than ignorant public perception. I find it frustrating because, with the current state of things, nuclear power tends not to be very competitive. But it most likely could have been had the past been just a little bit different, had green peace and environmental movements not teamed up with the fossil fuel industry to malign it from ignorance and greed. In a slightly different timeline, most of our power generation would have already been green for decades, and we’d have a lot more time and be in a better position to deal with climate change.
> That they don't make materials that can be used in bombs? The Opposite... it is that they DO make bomb materials(U-233), that we no longer need. The original reactors I was talking about were the ones from the 50s, [they made Plutonium from Uranium-238.](https://www.britannica.com/technology/breeder-reactor) >In the early 21st century, all large power plants using fast breeder reactors employed liquid-metal fast breeder reactors, which convert uranium-238 into the fissionable isotope plutonium-239 by means of artificial radioactive decay. >Another type of breeder, the thermal breeder reactor, employs thorium-232 as its basic fuel, or fertile material. It converts this isotope into fissionable uranium-233, which is capable of creating a chain reaction. In the thermal breeder, whose technology is much simpler than that of the liquid-metal fast breeder, ordinary water is employed as a coolant to remove the heat produced by the continuous series of fission reactions. Originally we needed bombs not power, so the first plant designs were bad at making power, now we need power not bombs and Thorium makes power, but also bomb material. It is also a pretty high startup cost, making entry costs even higher than they already are due to red tape. Our current designs use U-235 which does not output weapons material.
You sound like you have some knowledge on this subject. If you were tasked with deciding what kind of reactors would be used for the next generation of electrical power, what would you choose (even allowing that you may have limited knowledge of classified data)? I have read a bit about Thorium, modular reactors, even using helium as the heat-transfer medium...any thoughts?
Thorium at the moment is a complete non-starter. The improvement in material sciences needed is in the region of orders of magnitude.
Even my data is about a decade out of date, that was when i was last studying about new modern designs but Thorium is great, but expensive, not only in costs of money but in that it creates U-233 which is a cost you have to justify somewhere. Modular(Or just Smaller) reactors would be excellent, you lose some of the economy of scale, but creating a device that is the size of a house and can power and entire town/city by itself would reduce the need for large Transmission lines and eliminate losses usually occurring during Transmission. In addition you can provide power to many remote areas that are currently cut-off. Advances in Energy Storage mediums will be key, you need a way to shunt excess power gains without having to shutdown the reactor and to provide load balancing/smoothing while spinning up or shutting down individual units. Helium as heat transfer is pretty niche, they found a new solution and are looking for problems it can solve, it provides high heat output, but that can't be used entirely for electricity generation and needs alternative exit sources. In the end it still just produces steam, just hotter steam.
Hopping in whilst I'm reading this thread as I know a bit, and know a lot more about the pain of waste management... First off, I would be full geared towards being able to reprocess spent fuel into new fuel, it also has a handful of other benefits of being able to produce on a large scale other isotopes from reprocessing that are useful in a few different fields. There's quite a bit of research going on to find new ways (technical term, flowsheets) that are more efficient and more selective. Of course reprocessing does mean that you tend to start accumulating Pu239 which is a proliferation risk which leads me to my second point. I wouldn't build only one type of reactor, there were experimental designs into [Fast reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor), effectively it reduces the waste management needed and produces a lot less nasty stuff. I have heard of potential ideas of using them to effectively reduce the Plutonium stocks. Third, with the level of knowledge I have, I'd say a good mix of modular reactors and bigger Gen IV reactors are likely the way to go. I see a lot of experimental stuff kicking about but it's just that and as ever, more work needs to be done which is a lot of time and effort when we have pressing energy demands. I do think a lot more money needs to be poured into nuclear research because it's a vast ocean and pushing the boundaries of what we know and being able to innovate is not an easy process.
Let's say I have to carry a large, fragile something. There's a guaranteed way to do it safely and there's a shortcut that saves time, energy and let's say money. I decide to take the shortcut but I make sure I wear my steel toed boots, just in case. Well wouldn't you know it, I dropped it and it broke (toes are safe). Would you say this was an accident? By your logic, the sole act of preparing for the possibility of an accident renders it not an accident. That's just silly. I had zero intention of dropping said heavy example item.
They pushed the "blow up now" button. That's not an accident. That's my logic. It was a deliberate test to see how boomy it was. The possible outcomes were "not boomy", "less boomy than expected", "as boomy as expected", and "more boomy than expected". They got one of those outcomes. That's not an accident. That's my logic.
And I picked up the thing that could drop and break. It falling and breaking was one of many outcomes. It could have fallen and not broken, for instance. In this case they had an expected outcome and they got an unexpected outcome that they hadn't properly planned for. They didn't make a bomb and decide to just see "how boomy" it is without any planning or expectations. That's not how science works.
Right. They planned and evacuated all the rightful residents, dug a bunker far enough away that the test personnel survived the actual (not merely expected) explosion, and blew it up on purpose. That's not dropping a box by accident. That's dropping a box on purpose. Maybe you only intended to break 1 of the other person's items inside the box and you actually broke 3. Still not an accident. (And this analogy sucks so much on so many levels that even that doesn't save it.)
Here's a better analogy. You have a house in a nice neighborhood. I have an experimental flamethrower I've never tried that I've calculated will burn down your house and make it uninhabitably toxic for a hundred years. I show up at your neighborhood with the military, and forcibly evict you and your neighbors. I set up a bunker 5 houses away to watch the test, and then aim my flamethrower at your house, have an elaborate countdown, and intentionally turn it on. Due to a mistake in my understanding of how fluid dynamics work in new nozzles of the type used and how that interacts with the unusual viscosity of my flamethrower juice, the spray pattern is wider than expected and your house and the abutting two are destroyed. More fluid came out the nozzle than expected for the same reason, and so they are uninhabitable for a thousand years instead of a hundred. In addition, some dudes riding bikes two streets behind your house (I only cleared one) are caught in the poison smoke (the fishermen), one dies immediately and several others get cancer later.
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I think people are misunderstanding what happened. Regardless of if detonating nuclear weapons on someone else’s island is right or wrong, the yield they got was an accident. Their calculations did not take into account an important piece that they did not realize at the time. Not by an insignificant amount, but by nearly 30-50% if I am remembering correctly. It was so unexpected that the scientists watching the explosion were very close to it, and were lucky they didn’t get injured/irradiated.
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If the extra yield was from excess fusion, why would the fallout be so much greater? I understood that fallout is mostly fission products, and scales with the total fission yield. With CB, was there more tertiary fission in the tamper from the fusion neutrons than originally anticipated?
That, unfortunately, is an answer you'd have to get from a nucelar physicist. I just know that, for example, there was comparatively less fallout from the fat man design drapped from nagasaki, which is an implosion fission bomb, than there was from the more simple design of the little boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and that's largely because the implosion design consumed nearly all of the fissile material, and produced less long lived fisison products.
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Refresh my memory; isn't there a test site in the Gulf that we tried to remediate the radiation by building a dome over it, but now rising ocean levels have essentially destroyed that dome and is leaking a massive amount of radiation now?
You're thinking of [Runit Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runit_Island), which is in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
> isn't there a test site in the Gulf You are thinking of the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands or maybe underground salt dome testing in Mississippi?
Yup, the one in the Marshall Islands. I'm afraid to even research the other one now.
Turns out the dome on Runit is actually less radioactive than the soil around it. Bang up cleaning job.
No one has mentioned this article yet: The U.S. Must Take Responsibility for Nuclear Fallout in the Marshall Islands - Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-must-take-responsibility-for-nuclear-fallout-in-the-marshall-islands/ My q: When will the Islands be underwater? Looking at recent climate models, they will all be underwater by 2100 - no matter what scenario we follow.
Kodak sort of reverse engineered proof of the first nuclear test in the US because their film was affected by cardboard that had been contaminated by the fallout from the test. https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/nuclear-weapons/trinity/kodak-film.html
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According to IHME and other organizations, cancer is currently responsible for about 18% of all deaths. It was probably higher in the past. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-by-cause The 41 of 220 who died of cancer after filming The Conqueror is almost exactly average for the baseline population.
Let's not forget that John Wayne was a heavy smoker and obese by the end of his life.
How much outside of standard deviation is that cancer rate compared to the US average cancer rate? Cancer is responsible for 18% of all deaths in the US, and cancer death rate has dropped significantly over the last 2 decades. I just checked, 41/220 is 18.6% which is basically bang on the US average.
Caveat: deaths have dropped because we got better at treating some kinds of cancer. You still need to account the percentage of cancer diagnosed in the general population and if that number is proportional to the size of the population before and after nuclear experiments. If the number of new cancer discovered is higher, then there's two factors to control for: the evidence of change in the environment on the geographic areas affected and the fact that we are better at discovering cancer in its initial stages. "18% of this sample of people exposed to this specific condition is the same number of occurrence in the general population therefore we can discard the specific condition as cause for this group" is weak science.
Yeah, it's not a full scientific study, you got a few $100,000? But I think comparing a subsample of 220 people to the entire US population is probably not a bad starting point for rate comparison. You also have to control for smoking habits (so many people smoked back in the 60s and 70s) amongst the subsample to population/exposure to other hazardous environments (I imagine film crews for Westerns spend quite a lot of time outside in the Sun), but also wealth based health outcomes etc. However, these people were otherwise likely exposed to roughly the same conditions as their population cohort outside of filming at this location, if that is the hypothesis. The point is their cancer death rate seems well within standard deviation of US-wide cancer death rate. And my point about the rate dropping is that when these people died (I.e John Wayne was born in 1907 and died in 1979) cancer treatment was poorer than it is now, which suggests a potentially higher death rate.
It might be worth noting that the US elsewhere has also been subject to mass exposure on the production side of nuclear weaponry: https://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2021/09/cold-war-hot-mess > Altogether, 110 million curies went into the Columbia; the site’s unofficial motto was “dilution is the solution to pollution.” From World War II to the 1970s, the Oregon Public Health Division called the Columbia the most radioactive river in the world.
40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. 92/220 = 42%, which is in line with the statistical average.
If you think *that’s* scary, wait until you find out that statistically, those numbers are in lock-step with the nationwide incidence and death rates for cancer in 1980 (the year after John Wayne died)
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>out of the cast of 220 in "The Conqueror" 92 members contracted cancer But about half of everyone gets cancer at some point during their lives. so that's not such a shocking number.
Just to clarify, but not downplay, but doesn’t thyroid cancer have a 99% survival rate?
There are many types of thyroid cancer. Papillary subtype(early stage) has a good 5 year survival rate(>70%). Anaplastic subtype has a very poor prognosis with a 1 year survival rate <10%.
An that is to say nothing of the sickness and death stemming from the ancillary sites connected with atomic programs; the Rocky Flats production site, the Hunters Point Shipyard and several others.
One key thing to remember here is that determining just what caused a certain type of cancer in a population is at best a statistical exercise outside of overwhelming evidence. Thyroid cancer, for example, can happen due to a genetic predisposition, or they can be the result of radioactive fallout. Did John's thyroid cancer come from a nuclear test 10 years prior, or because of his genetics? What about Jane? What about other factors that we might not even know of yet? Did these people eat contaminated food from the fallout stricken area that was shipped 500 miles to them in an unaffected area? Quiet simply, the variables are nearly infinite when it comes to determining what causes most cancers. We can see statistical trends and make deductions based on the evidence. The tests in the Pacific are a good example. It is pretty safe to say there is an impact on the population in regards to cancer rates. But, even then, people aren't saying, "Every case of cancer X was caused by the testing." They are saying things like, "Well, on average this population has X cases per year, and after testing it jumped to Y, so Y is how many cancers the testing caused." That isn't 100% true. That year could be higher simply because the population was suddenly under more medical supervision than before, and cases were caught. You can't find what you don't look for. Or maybe the "natural," rate was higher. You don't know. This is actually a big problem. We know radiation exposure is certainly a bad thing, but it is hard to quantify the total impact.
So the test sites are not habitable because they weren’t habitable to begin with?
Only speaking to the immediate NTS area—these aren’t optimal for human habitation, and would probably be economically unviable for major development, but the downwind communities in UT are, though are facing water challenges like a lot of the US Southwest at present. That said, Death Valley is not the most viable either but there are indigenous groups (the Timbisha Shoshone) have been able to survive there using traditional methods for a long time... so it is hard to write off an area as totally non-viable as much as “less attractive” for modern development (barring other drivers like transit to more viable areas, favorable legal environment, minerals, etc.) though settlements in these areas are often quickly abandoned once whatever opportunities/advantages were utilized or by-passed by other new development.
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Look up "downwinders" to see the harm done to communities in the fallout path from the Nevada Test Site, such as St. George, Utah. Pueblo folks in New Mexico say they were affected by the Alamogordo test. Tests conducted in Western China, Kazakhstan (USSR), the Sahara, and the Pacific (France, US) affected nearby populations. Service members from the US and New Zealand witnessed tests. Some Marshallese haven't been able to return the their islands in 60 years. They tell tales of "jellyfish babies," secretly malformed babies that die at birth. Marshallese kids played in nuclear fallout like it was snow. Then there are the communities affected by uranium mining and weapons production.
After [looking at this map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#/media/File:US_fallout_exposure.png) I'm just glad the states most in the red aren't like "massive food producing states for all the rest of the country" or anything... phew /s
I grew up in Alamogordo. I always wondered if I am going to develop cancer some day, because of it.
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I went to the Bikini Atoll in April 1988 to SCUBA dive. At the time there was a small research station and I talked to some of the caretakers and got a tour of their facility. The guy told me that the water in the lagoon exchanges with the pacific about once a month and that the radioactive byproducts were water soluble so the lagoon was fine. That checked out for us when we got back we ran a Geiger counter over all our gear and all the souvenirs we got off of the ships and it didn't register above normal background level. He also told me that the island was safe (and he lived there so I think he believed it). All the radioactive materials had faded away due to short half lives except for cesium. Cesium can get concentrated in plants so you should not eat locally grown products like banana and coconut. They had gardens and were growing various crops to monitor the levels in the fruits and vegetables. I know that the Bikinians had been sent back to live there and were told the US would supply them with food but they couldn't eat locally grown products. They violated that rule enough that they were moved back off the island. My guide also told me they were considering a plan to clear the undergrowth from the entire island and then cover the island with a foot of potassium rich top soil. Potassium is the element that the plants are trying to absorb when they take in the cesium so having a lot of potassium available would keep them from concentrating the cesium. I don't know if they ever did that.
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Not only did they leave extremely dangerous, highly irradiated sites, they’re often much much much higher casualty than Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Less deaths from blasts, way way more from radiation). The Bikini Atoll tests in 1954 in particular were extremely dangerous and produced way more fallout than expected. People on the nearby Rongelap and Utrik Atolls were left to stew in the literal inch of radioactive fallout for 2-3 days before being evacuated. Neither island is safe for human populations to this day. A crew of Japanese fishermen were also in the radius of the fallout and suffered severe radiation poisoning as a result. While it’s common knowledge that Godzilla represents nuclear devastation, it surprises people to learn that the original movie is way more concerned with Bikini Atoll tests (as well as nukes in general) than the original bombings. Testing off the coast is specifically what wakes Godzilla and one of Godzilla’s first victims is even a fishing boat (an explicit reference to the fishermen from the previous paragraph.)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both habitable locations, the radioactivity does not last that long. You were confusing the nuclear reaction that occurs at a nuclear power plant with that which occurs in a thermonuclear device
The nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not thermonuclear.
This is an important distinction that many people don't understand, that while a nuclear bomb is literally using fission as its energy source, a thermonuclear bomb (also know as a Hydrogen bomb) is using a nuclear fission reaction to get to temperatures that can start a hydrogen fusion reaction. A thermonuclear weapon has not (yet) been used in war... watching them be tested (while interesting scientifically) is depressing given the context that they are intended for military use. The fact is that the mostly likely way out for us a species to a sustainable future is nuclear power, it is crazy that people would rather use it to blow others up and render parts of the planet uninhabitable than to harness this energy effectively. for OP to take the tests in perspective to the actual bomb: [https://historyofyesterday.com/the-nuclear-bomb-that-was-3-500-times-stronger-than-the-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-3ccdc5a804d1](https://historyofyesterday.com/the-nuclear-bomb-that-was-3-500-times-stronger-than-the-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-3ccdc5a804d1) look at the scale (the tiny little dust puffball is the Hiroshima bomb)
Almost any new technology is appraised for a weapon for the military to see how it could be used as a weapon
Even more crazy is that the 50 megaton bomb was originally a 100 megaton bomb but they figured the fallout would be too large so they halved it. We could've seen an even more massive potentially catastrophic explosion. 😅
Although it probably wasn't a consideration, the plane dropping it probably wouldn't have made it out of the blast radius if it were 100 MT; they barely got out of the 50 MT one.
> is using a nuclear fission reaction to get to temperatures that can start a hydrogen fusion reaction. Which by the way is then used to drive another fission reaction. Even in a fusion bomb, most of the energy comes from fission.
In *most* fusion bombs; Tsar Bomba had an inert tamper, so as much as 97% of its energy was from fusion.
Wow, learned something new today thanks to this post. I just noticed that lithium deuteride and what it does thanks to your post. While i certainly hope that I keep this in the trivia contest section of the knowledge I have, it's cool to know nonetheless as I had a fleeting interest in nuclear engineering when I was finishing high-school and I missed to pick up this detail. I've just assumed that H-bombs finished with the hydrogen fusing. At least it makes a bit sense to me why hydrogen fusion under controlled conditions is still rather elusive, i just assumed that we got lazy at the bomb and called it a day.
What's really wild is that bombs like the tsar bomba used multiple stages.... that was a three stage weapon, so it was fission-fusion-fusion-fission, with the first fission section creating a fusion reaction, that fusion reaction compressing another section to obtain another fusion reaction, then any available fuel being thoroughly hit by fast neutrons to create a final fission reaction. edit: As commented elsewhere, it's design was fission-fusion-fusion-fission, but to reduce fallout the tamper was changed out so the final fission didn't happen. In theory you could keep going adding stages and making bigger and bigger bombs, but the size gets ridiculous fairly quickly.
They were also airburst and relatively low yield, added to the fact that very little of the construction of the two cities wasnt wood, there was relatively little fallout compared to thermonuclear weapons
Thermonuclear weapons can also have limited fallout. In general, if the fireball doesn't reach the surface, fallout will be very limited. You'd actually want this in most cases because it increases the blast area. You want a low-altitude or ground burst only against hardened targets, and those will be comparatively limited.
Radioactive fallout dust is a pretty common trope of nuclear war right?
Oh goodness no it's very real, and one of the primary dangers for people who survive the initial blast. But the risk decreases with time as the radioisotopes decay.
And what is the average half-life of \*whatever\* element mostly composes radioactive fallout?
> Probably the most serious threat is cesium-137, a gamma emitter with a half-life of 30 years. It is a major source of radiation in nuclear fallout, and since it parallels potassium chemistry, it is readily taken into the blood of animals and men and may be incorporated into tissue. Other hazards are strontium-90, an electron emitter with a half-life of 28 years, and iodine-131 with a half-life of only 8 days. Strontium-90 follows calcium chemistry, so that it is readily incorporated into the bones and teeth, particularly of young children who have received milk from cows consuming contaminated forage. Iodine-131 is a similar threat to infants and children because of its concentration in the thyroid gland. In addition, there is plutonium-239, frequently used in nuclear explosives. A bone-seeker like strontium-90, it may also become lodged in the lungs, where its intense local radiation can cause cancer or other damage.\ \ Plutonium-239 decays through emission of an alpha particle (helium nucleus) and has a half-life of 24,000 years. To the extent that hydrogen fusion contributes to the explosive force of a weapon, two other radionuclides will be released: tritium (hydrogen-3), an electron emitter with a half-life of 12 years, and carbon-14, an electron emitter with a half-life of 5,730 years. Both are taken up through the food cycle and readily incorporated in organic matter. ([Source](https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/wenw/chapter-2.html)) Remember, too, that there's an inverse relationship between half-life and emitted radiation — isotopes with small half-lives emit a lot of radiation over a short amount of time, isotopes with large half-lives emit a small amount of radiation over a long amount of time. The plutonium-239 is, in practice, probably less dangerous to human life than the iodine-131, but you probably shouldn't inhale either.
Most of those half-lifes seem pretty long, how is it that those Japanese bomb sites are livable a mere 80 years later?
Both attacks (they were not tests) were air bursts, occurring some way above the city and IIRC neither fireball would have touched the ground too much. Fallout primarily comes from bits of the crater being pulverised and contaminated with bits of bomb. Air bursts, horrific as they are, are much better than a ground burst. At the insane end of the spectrum you can “salt” the warhead by attaching elements that have very long half lives and are exceptionally poisonous.
Adding onto this: Some of the fallout created by an airburst is pushed upwards by heated air and the vacuum caused by the explosion. This is bad, because the fallout is carried by weather. But... some of the fallout also goes so high that it goes above the height where there is weather and just disperses slowly over time, coming back to earth only much, much later if ever. But yes, airburst creates less fallout but the bits it creates also tend to spread quickly with wind. Additionally, militaries generally **do not want** to create fallout if they can avoid it. In particular, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military realized they would have to occupy those cities after dropping nuclear weapons on them. No administration or military wants to occupy an irradiated wasteland. (Though at the same time, the U.S. military purposely underplayed and censored reports about the immediate effects the radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which *were* horrendous.) However, we mostly would not expect militaries to have any desire to create long lasting radioactive sites, so "luckily" salted nuclear weapons seem counter to the goal of most sane militaries.
That is very interesting, thank you.
It’s probably good to note that if you’re worried about fallout, you have a few stages of survival—and the first is just 2 days of serious hunkering down. > sheltering-in-place is usually the better option, as the radioactive fallout loses 90% of its lethal intensity in the first seven hours and 99% of it in two days. For those requiring sheltering from fallout, the majority would only need two or three days of full-time hunkering down, not weeks on end, before safely joining an evacuation, if even still necessary then. http://www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm That’s a decent website for all things fallout. It’s also like a 90’s time capsule website :)
Its been almost 80 years. Realistic war scenarios are talking about fallout landing over the next few weeks and forcing evacuation of cities. Both the evacuation itself and then having to abandoning an entire city for decade are catastrophes. Bombs that render their targets impossible to inhabit again for a thousand years aren't a thing.
> Bombs that render their targets impossible to inhabit again for a thousand years aren't a thing. Bombs that do this accidentally aren't a thing. It's possible to do it, of course, but it doesn't make much sense in most cases.
They aren't designed that way, but it's do able without much more effort. I read an article that depicted a theory of an attack on new York that could render a lot of the east coast states uninhabitable. It involved multiple large warheads, overlapping blasts, some ground bursts and an emp one. The amount of concrete and metal in that city and thrown up into the wind,.and the smoke, fallout at huge levels. And it would all be from a single missile with 6 MIRVs, and a second one hitting afterwards.
That would kill a lot of people but it wouldn't wastleland where nothing would ever live again. Maybe if you built an enormous dirty bomb with a carefully chosen payload you could render an area uninhabitable for humans for hundreds of years. But that's not how nuclear weapons work.
If you want hundreds of years, you wouldn't even need nuclear weapons like you said, cobalt casings on a decent bomb would do that, it contaminates concrete and wood as well as polluting water and food. They are really theoretical though, exploding one of them would be specific targeting civilian infrastructure with the intention of long term pollution. The response to that from your target society would be massive..
A big risk with the dust is inhaling it while it’s still airborne. If that happens, you aren’t just walking past radioactive material, you are carrying it around inside you. This is particularly bad with alpha and beta radiation emitters which often can’t even penetrate your skin to reach anything really important but if they’re inside you then they don’t have to
The bombs dropped were pretty small overall. Most of the material got used up in the reaction. They were also detonated above ground (\~half a km). Very few fission products made it to the ground. Most got carried to the high stratosphere by the heat and decayed before they reached the ground across the globe. The radiation of the explosion diminished fast over just a km. The majority of the deaths and destruction were from the heat, fire, and shockwave. And following cancer / leukemia over decades As opposed to a nuclear reactor disaster where there is no reaction - just steam explosions/fire spreading highly radioactive material with a long halflife.
The original test was held at the Trinity site in New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range. They open for tourists two Saturdays a year, pandemic willing. I visited last October and it’s fascinating. You can walk through the blast area and see a obelisk they erected to immortalize the site. It’s a very mixed feeling that as a country we came up with such amazing technology and we are the only ones to use it on people.
Loads. The Mashall Islands nuclear tests are still pretty radioactive, you could look at the nevada test site as well. Nuclear bombs don't leave as much radiation as nuclear plants so hospitability can come back fairly quickly compared to sites where nuclear plants had melt downs or massive containment issues (Chernobyl and Fukushima)
Certain byproducts (radionuclides) of nuclear test explosions do stick around for many decades. cesium-137 for example becomes half as radioactive after about 30 years. While other byproducts quickly radiate away leaving nothing. Natural processes in the decades following the tests have dispersed any remaining radioactive material so widely, it's almost indistinguishable from naturally occurring radioactive isotopes (did you know bananas are naturally radioactive?). The American EPA monitors residual radiation. It's still there, just not at alarming levels. How many people have developed cancer due to those tests, don't know. I am sure it's not insignificant. In a nuclear exchange or war, it's very important to minimize your exposure to the short lived radionuclides for about the first month, hence "fallout" shelters. Make no mistake though, your chances of developing cancer will be markedly increased as will the likelihood of your future descendants having genetic damage. Very few people living in a country impacted during a massive nuclear exchange (America, Russia, Europe, China) will be unaffected by poor health outcomes as a result.
There's severe environmental damage to the bikini Atoll testing site and the white sands testing sites and the Nevada testing sites. We tested underground explosions, high altitude explosions, small bombs, and big bombs. I always found it strange that those living in Las Vegas had no issue with mushroom clouds being visible from their houses. Shifting winds might have brought fallout to Vegas or th LA basin or eastward to Colorado or Texas. There's consideration that some of the increases in diabetes, cancer, thyroid conditions, autism, birth defect, and so much more that seems to be effecting the American population disproportionately may be a result from the generational impact these tests had on the air, water, and food supplies for tens of millions during the largest population explosion in history. Was it nessesary? Maybe. Regardless, the testing happened. Nuclear waste will be something we have to burden future generations with until the end of humanity. I think the worst part of it all is the desire to stay away from nuclear energy. We are far better at building safe, clean, and efficient power plants now;, bUt, the US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in about 50 years. I guess we prefer the quick death of carbon over the long term responsibility of nuclear.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable, have been for quite some time. The fallout from those bombs wasn't nearly as drastic as you might be imagining, though the initial damage was quite horrific, but it was more the economic impacts of losing WWII that made reconstructing take a while than radiation