DoD Report On 32 "Nuclear Accidents" 241
natebjones writes "Remember the time the US Air Force accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on a family in South Carolina? [This DoD report lists] that and 31 other nuclear accidents including: nuclear bombs inadvertently falling through bomb bay doors; the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM; the vast dispersal of radioactive debris; and the loss of enriched fissile material and nuclear bombs (which are 'still out there somewhere')."
Pogo on nuclear: (Score:4, Informative)
It ain't so new, and it ain't so clear.
Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
... while "nuclear weapons accident" sounds scary, it almost always involves a malfunction or mistake that can't set off a detonation. It's pretty hard to split an atom, which is why we poured billions into learning how during the Manhattan Project. Tom Clancy's book The Sum of All Fears had a scenario where terrorists acquired an Israeli warhead lost in the desert during the 1973 war. But almost all of the "lost" warheads from USAF are in the ocean, where they can do no harm.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth I'm firmly in the anti-alarmist category and don't make a fuss over silly things that are otherwise labeled a crisis for media consumption.
That said isn't getting weapons grade Pu or U the most difficult part of building a nuclear bomb? I'm not talking about the highly refined Fission-fusion-fission 50Mt or man-portable devices. But given a modest budget and the internets it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a Manhatten-project era nuclear device...assuming you had sufficient quantity of enriched material.
People seem to automatically assume that obscurity (or ocean depth) equals safety. Then you hear about 4 college kids with a budget of 3 grand who design an automated SAR diving robot. I'm not saying MIT will be a nuclear power next week but for all the insane amounts of money we spend doing cavity searches on grandma at the airport...maybe we should consider that eventually another non-dumb terrorist cell will come along.
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Agreed on the first. I wasn't sure what type of fissile material was missing.
However on the second I'm not so sure it's cost prohibitive at this point. Even 100,000's of thousands of man-hours of calculations are childs-play for computers. In particular, the physics and modeling of an implosion device seems a natural fit for the engines of 3D graphics cards...some of which even have a programming language to do almost exactly that.
Going further, shaped-charge explosives are not exceptionally expensive or
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Funny)
i don't think they'll be able to disassemble, they used a proprietary torx-type screw. *that*'ll stop 'em!
Octopuses are very ingenious at unscrewing things. Glowing mega mutant octopuses will rule the world I tell ya!
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Funny)
LISTEN UP! The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
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Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty hard to split an atom, which is why we poured billions into learning how during the Manhattan Project.
True enough that there are way more ways for an accident to not result in a full detonation than to do so. But the above statement is a bit misleading: thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms. (Itself, not difficult. Nature does it every second of every day.) Comparing the probability of an accident yielding a nuclear explosion to the pre-Manhattan odds is dubious.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, well if Nature does it, it must be easy.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, well if Nature does it, it must be easy.
And healthy!
Try our new, 100% natural, splitting uranium body lotion!
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
This conversation reminds me of a conversation I was having with an Amway rep about buying some kind of vitamins or lotion:
"It's all natural, so it's perfectly safe."
"Yeah... well... cyanide is also natural and it's definitely not safe."
The Amway person frowned and walked away. He didn't want to hear any negativity that might pull him out of his good-feeling cult group.
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Oh, well if Nature does it, it must be easy.
You'd think so, yet most /.'ers still haven't gotten laid ;)
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Funny)
Natural selection!
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
"thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms."
Except that it's still not that easy. Its very likely that the mechanisms surrounding the radioactive cores were damaged during the drops, so most will be unusable anyway. Even if they're perfectly preserved, you still have to find them... and considering that the combined efforts of the Air Force and Navy couldn't do so with advanced diving and search technology, good luck with some terrorist group doing so a hundred miles off the coast. And even if they had the unbelievable fortune of finding a device, they'd still have to recover it, and arm it.
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You're assuming that this article is talking about lost (ie, stolen) materials. It's about accidents, so you're arguing the wrong case to start with. And yes, it's more likely that a device will be too damaged to properly explode in an accident, but given enough accidents, odds are pretty good that at least a partial nuclear detonation could occur. Failing that, a blast of the conventional explosives (which has happened) could scatter some rather nasty radioactive material about, possibly in a residentia
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Now depending on the depth of the water it will take either the best diving equipment and divers or a submersible sub / robotic vessel. Were talking millions of dollars to perform this recovery with an experienced crew and no one spilling the beans.
If the military which has pretty much unlimited resources cant recover the m
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)
he's referring to the risk in aggregate.
Take a license plate. each place has a 1:39 chance of having A.
a plate with 1 character has a 1:39 of having an A.
as you add more characters the probability of *at least one* character being an A approaches 1.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)
"thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms."
Except that it's still not that easy. Its very likely that the mechanisms surrounding the radioactive cores were damaged during the drops, so most will be unusable anyway...
A fully assembled fission bomb (especially a pure fission bomb) is actually rather dangerous - accidental detonation of the high explosives can create a nuclear explosion on the order of a few hundred tons, quite devastating by any ordinary standard. But it is for this reason that all atomic bombs after the wartime models had features that kept them from being fully assembled before combat use (removable fission cores, or internal motorized in-flight assembly). These early safety features were replaced by others in the later compact "wooden" (no field accessible component) bombs, but those took years to develop.
So the bombs were really pretty safe against any nuclear event, but only because special measures had been taken to ensure it.
The 1950s accidents were all (nearly all?, I haven't checked each one just now, and in some cases there are disputes) WITHOUT the fission core installed so not only was a nuclear explosion impossible, so was significant radioactive contamination.
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The problem with bombs that have laying about for decades is that they decompose and lose some reactivity. They still pose a danger due to the conventional explosives they contain and the radioactive material, but past their shelf life they will not result in a catastrophic explosion and will release their contents relatively slowly.
What would be interesting to see is if the old bombs that have been left around have maintained the perfect symmetry required to properly compress the plutonium and ignite the n
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I'm not so worried about the lost devices as the accidents at the moment that they happen, when accidental detonation should be most likely. (I have to imagine, anyway.) Those devices will be in good firing order, too, since that's their whole point and the point of maintaining them.
What would be interesting to see is if the old bombs that have been left around have maintained the perfect symmetry required to properly compress the plutonium and ignite the nuclear fire; otherwise the ensuing explosion will be weak compared to the optimum yield, if it can occur at all.
Absolutely true and likely. However, a "weak" nuclear blast in an inhabited area would still suck for those involved, and that's the thing to remember. "It could be worse" is well and good, but it often overlooks the fact th
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting little side note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Oklo uranium deposit behaved as a natural nuclear fission reactor in Precambrian times with natural water as neutron moderator.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whereas the leftover warheads from the former USSR........well, they're not lost, I'm sure that former officials in Russia know exactly who they sold them to.
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You think the politicians would keep quiet about catching terrorists with nukes?
You'd be able to hear the screams of "WE WERE RIGHT!!!" from states away.
"where they can do no harm" (Score:2, Insightful)
right, because no one would bother looking for them
you lack imagination. plenty of other people don't lack imagination, and plenty of them mean you harm. so make up for your imagination gap, or you will someday suffer for it
like i said (Score:3, Insightful)
you have no imagination
just because something is difficult or improbable, doesn't mean it won't get done. in fact, it is improbable events, with major implications, that pretty much define the whole game. from politics, to economics, to military campaigns, to history itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory [wikipedia.org]
Re:like i said (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. The situation in Europe was known to be perfectly conductive to a huge war even before Franz got himself shot. There were a lot of incidents happening, any of which could had ignited the poweder keg and started a war, and one of which was pretty much guaranteed to do just that. That it war Franz getting shot that did is, to put it bluntly, completely irrelevant: WWI was caused by opposing alliances and several people actively wanting a war, and using Franz Ferdinand's murder as an excuse to get one.
As for Lehman Brothers collapsing, it should not come as surprise to anyone that a bank that ties a significant amount of its capital into obfuscatingly complex schemes is likely to do just that, altought I suppose it is a bit surprising that the elite didn't bail their buddies out there.
Kid, I've browsed from one side of this Internet to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful equation controlling everything. There's no mystical feather field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple statistical tricks and nonsense.
oh, there's no all-powerful equation? (Score:3, Interesting)
gee, that's funny, since that's part of my point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy [wikipedia.org]
Re:like i said (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, aliens with advanced weaponry might invade the earth tomorrow, and that would be a real game changer. So we need to start working on a counteroffensive NOW!
What you're missing with all your melodrama is that nobody is saying it would be impossible for rogues or terrorists to get a nuclear-capable device. But if it happens, it's not likely to be one that was the object of the largest search effort for a man-made device ever in the history of the world that still failed to find it. And these nukes aren't so special. Your hypothetical terrorists don't need to find these particular devices, because there are easier ways to get their hands on some other nuclear device. Nobody needs to plan specifically for the contingency that some terrorists find this particular nuclear device. They just need to plan for the general contingency that terrorists find some kind of nuclear device. A terrorist finding these particular devices is not a black swan event, because it would be no different from a terrorist getting a nuclear device via more reasonable means. And I don't even think a terrorist finding a nuclear device is a black swan event. Everybody is aware that the risk is there, and everybody is aware that it would be a really big deal. That's why there's a lot of time and effort directed at avoiding that very thing.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Now imagine the impact of that weapon that set off it's high explosives, in mid-air, over a large metropolis
A mid-air impact?
Yeah, for some reason, the Air Force might decide to transport nuclear weapons over a large metropolis, have a release accident, and have the bomb strike another aircraft, which happens to somehow set off the conventional explosives.
Then again, there is a 50-year old nuclear reactor just down the road. 200,000 people live within one mile of it. I still sleep peacefully at night.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now imagine the impact of that weapon that set off it's high explosives, in mid-air, over a large metropolis.
The public knee-jerk panic over anything with the word "nuclear" would be far more dangerous than the actual radiological release. Pu-239 has a long half life, low rate of spontaneous fission and breaks down via alpha decay. It's actually more dangerous with regards to metal toxicity than with regards to radioactivity. You can hold Pu-239 in your hands with no ill effects.
There are much more effective isotopes to use in a dirty bomb than weapons grade plutonium.
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Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. They're much safer than conventional bombs. A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army (throw the bomb in a big pit and blow it up). Apparently, the expanding foam "Great Stuff" was invented to decomission nuclear weapons - you used it to fill the bomb's trigger component. Since the trigger was useless, the weapon was useless.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)
I've used Composition C4 many of times in my Army career. I know first hand that you can drop, bump, hammer, shoot, and light on fire an M112 block of C4 without detonation.
To set off C4, you need a supersonic shockwave and a lot of heat at the same time. About the explosive power in a double overhand knot of 30-grain det cord, or an m6 or m7 blasting cap.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Funny)
I've used Composition C4 many of times in my Army career. I know first hand that you can drop, bump, hammer, shoot, and light on fire an M112 block of C4 without detonation.
First hand?
You dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block?
That sounds like an amazing drinking game.
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Perhaps it should be pointed out: not all at the same time.
But there's a reason Comp B and C4 are used in place of Commercial Dynamite in military settings.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)
But there's a reason Comp B and C4 are used in place of Commercial Dynamite in military settings.
I may as well argue the fine point that the nitro in commercial dynamite seeps and settles and "weeps" and it gives you a terrible headache by touch and perhaps by fumes, unless you rotate/flip the crates every couple months, and there is no freaking way us guys in at the ammo depot are going to successfully accomplish that. Everything else in the bunkers is absolutely zero maintenance, lock the door and walk away until you need it.
Also wood supposedly gets flammable from the seeping nitro, so we'd end up with some re-usable wood pallets being hazardous flammable waste and some being "safe", or so we hope.
They told us that sometimes we'd have to stock commercial dynamite at a depot anyway, because its cheap, but everyone involved hated dealing with it. Thus, maintenance-free RDX-based military dynamite instead.
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I hate to break it to you, but wood is usually flammable.
Worse when soaked with accelerants. Like the difference between keeping a stack of firewood leaning against your house vs keeping a stack of gasoline-soaked firewood leaning against your house.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
You dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block?
No idea for the OP, who's writing sounded like a combat engineer-ish perspective, but for me it was mostly very close second hand. My job at the ammo depot included maintenance of the computerized list of NSNs (essentially a military UPC code) and lot/serial numbers that failed those tests, which we would never issue to troops or transfer/ship, in peacetime are issued to EOD for training, and in wartime would probably be "disposed of" by myself and buddies, although I never got to do that. I knew guys whom were later assigned to the testing labs, but I didn't know them very well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_testing_of_explosives [wikipedia.org]
I would imagine anyone issued demolition explosives whom survived an IED attack or ambush in the sandbox has probably "dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block", and if the safety features failed, I'd have been the guy doing the grunt work for essentially an army style "product recall".
That sounds like an amazing drinking game.
Oh, we drank a lot. What a surprise, that when policy segregates out the illegal-drug users and tobacco smokers, you're left with only the legal drug users, mostly alkies. Seems like every drunk I know is or was in the army or at least the military in general...
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I've used Composition C4 many of times in my Army career. I know first hand that you can drop, bump, hammer, shoot, and light on fire an M112 block of C4 without detonation.
To set off C4, you need a supersonic shockwave and a lot of heat at the same time. About the explosive power in a double overhand knot of 30-grain det cord, or an m6 or m7 blasting cap.
The best part of your post is your name.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
Although C4 is pretty safe in normal handling (the plasticizer desensitizes the RDX to some extent), RDX based explosives can be detonated accidentally. (The Wikipedia article implying that it cannot is incorrect.)
If you read the document you read of several weapons exploding in accidents. The earliest ones all involved Comp B, a TNT/RDX mixture. Later weapons often used the very dangerous and more powerful HMX.
Since the 1970s the U.S. has moved to using a very unusual high explosive, TATB, which genuinely can only be detonated by another detonation shock.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army
I took a lame one week version of that class in the summer of 93. Frankly the decommissioning part is pretty simple, if you can't figure out how to blow stuff up, you've got big problems. The class was mainly how to survive doing that, and some nifty tricks that save lives. Double fusing and double priming, do everything in an excavated pit with only one man in at a time, let EOD handle the rusty/damaged stuff, always test the burn rate of the actual fuse you intend to use, don't lay down your fuse in a big ole coil, fuse so long that if you twist your ankle the medics could haul you out, don't try to do multiple pits at one time (in an effort to avoid dealing with range control, whom seem universally to be a PITA), etc. And a lot of distance safety rules, which boil down to if you're not walking far enough to get sweaty, its probably not safe enough.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
With the exception of hammer and electrical shock, you can pretty much do that to bulk C4 without serious harm. You can also burn it, although the fumes are quite toxic. Note that C-4 is a very specific chemical substance that is a plastic explosive. Its entirely possible that another plastic explosive, say, PETN det cord, is much more sensitive to shock than bulk C-4. From memory, ANFO is harmless in sub-ton quantities without a very hefty booster.
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And a lot of distance safety rules, which boil down to if you're not walking far enough to get sweaty, its probably not safe enough.
Which, in Slashdot terms, means you can pretty much survive any detonation at about ten paces.
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Inside many nuclear bombs is a conventional bomb (or more than one
So nukes are safer than conventional bombs in the sense that:
1) Most nuclear bombs aren't like landmines or "dumb bombs" - they don't just blow up if you sneeze on them the wrong way.
2) If a nuclear bomb doesn't explode properly you are likely to "only" get a "conventional boom" instead of a full nuclear blast. So instead of wiping out an entire city you just blow up a magnitudes smaller a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
FTA: In 1961 a B-52 carrying two 24 megaton nuclear weapons (equivalent to 3,700 “Hiroshima bombs”) broke up in the air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb fell as far as 10,000 feet and sunk into the “waterlogged farmland.” The Air Force dug as deep as 50 feet trying to excavate the weapon, which contained uranium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the Air Force purchased an easement on the land. Reportedly, a Pentagon document stated that five of the bomb’s six safety m
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Some explosives become more unstable with time. Munitions dating from the First World War can still be dangerous.
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You don't understand. It's not enough that the explosive in the trigger explode. They have to explode exactly right, with microsecond precision. Otherwise, they won't force the pit to critical mass correctly and no big boom. By this point, I would expect them to have deteriorated to the point where there's no chance of a nuclear explosion any more.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, the shell and core are normally separated. When the device is "armed", the core is inserted into the center of the shell. To detonate, the explosives around the shell must simultaneously explode, compressing the fissionable material until it reaches critical mass, and then BOOM. That last step takes a lot less time than it seems in reading it.
So, an unarmed nuke has no chance of causing a nuclear explosion. An explosion around the shell would just collapse the shell, which is not catastrophic. The core by itself isn't all that dangerous, except it'll make your hair fall out, give you radiation burns, and you won't live all that long after that. :)
If it's > 50' under ground *AND* the explosives around the shell detonated for some unknown reason, it'd probably make a radioactive area that's already property of the US Gov't. If, for some strange reason, the core had been inserted and the explosives spontaniously blew ... well ... I wouldn't want to be too close to it. :) ... if they never recovered the weapon, how would they know 5 safeties failed? This sounds like a little political posturing.
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Plus the ground water, which I'm sure would do the right thing and not cross property lines.
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if they never recovered the weapon, how would they know 5 safeties failed?
They recovered part of the weapon. They also recovered an intact second weapon that deployed it's parachute after it we ejected from the aircraft. I'm guessing they determined this in the post accident review by looking at the second weapon.
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What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Pretty much impossible. Even if the explosives had gone off, the force of the impact deformed the explosive charges such that even if they detonate that the bomb won't go nuclear. That's even without considering the 50 years of decay taking out other components.
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:4, Informative)
FTA: In 1961 a B-52 carrying two 24 megaton nuclear weapons (equivalent to 3,700 “Hiroshima bombs”) broke up in the air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb fell as far as 10,000 feet and sunk into the “waterlogged farmland.” The Air Force dug as deep as 50 feet trying to excavate the weapon, which contained uranium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the Air Force purchased an easement on the land. Reportedly, a Pentagon document stated that five of the bomb’s six safety mechanisms had failed; “only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of this 24 megaton device.
What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Zero. The OP is confusing the status of two different weapons. The one that deployed its parachute was recovered intact (but with the safety mechanism failures mentioned). The other broke apart and it was only the thermonuclear secondary stage that was not recovered.
The discrepancy between knowing that "five of the bomb's six safety mechanisms had failed" and reportedly not having recovered said weapon should tip one off that the account for the OP was confused.
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Never.
You're confusing the two bombs. The "five out of six safety mechanisms" (actually five out of approximately twelve arming steps) bomb is the one they recovered, because one of those arming steps caused the bomb's parachute to deploy. The other bomb only had one of the arming steps take place (the "bomb has left the airplane" switch was activated), so the parachute didn't deploy, and the bomb hit the
It's pretty hard to split an atom (Score:2)
That's actually very easy, and happens naturally all the time. Natural decay is what makes radioactive substances radioactive. The hard part is separating out the enriched uranium. Once you do that it's very easy to make a bomb out of it.
Fusing atoms, now that's difficult.
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That's actually very easy, and happens naturally all the time. [...] Fusing atoms, now that's difficult.
Yeah, we all know fusion never happens naturally.
You'd need like a ridiculously hot place.
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That's actually very easy, and happens naturally all the time. Natural decay is what makes radioactive substances radioactive. The hard part is separating out the enriched uranium. Once you do that it's very easy to make a bomb out of it.
My apologies for stating the bleeding obvious here, but "splitting an atom" usually refers to fission, not alpha, beta, or gamma decay. Fission and decay are two very different things.
Yeild (Score:2)
The explosion in San Antonio was around the same as a 500 lb bomb. It shattered windows in town. That was a bunker accident. Other accidents had no explosion of the weapon.
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* How many "accidents" have happened since 1980?
* How bad any of them have been? (not that there is actually a good accident)
* What's happened to the items lost at sea? Are they safe or will their protective casings start to deteriorate after decades?
Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Funny)
That ranks right up with "what could possibly go wrong", and "there's nothing to worry about".
A nuke in the water is still a chunk of radioactive material in a steel casing, just waiting for the casing to rust away.
If the TNT goes pop, then that's all fun and games (assuming the nuke wasn't armed). If the casing is compromised, you have three eyed fish and giant octopuses resulting from the radiation (note: sarcasm). A little extra radiation isn't really all that good for you, me, nor the ecosystem. Hell, looked at what happened to Japan. Just two small nukes, and now you have generations of short people [sciencelinks.jp] with tiny hands,small penises [average-pe...-chart.com], and some weird fantasies [mitchieville.com]. (BTW, the last link is border line NSFW, use at your own risk when the boss isn't looking. :)
I for one welcome our mutant three eyed octopus overlords.
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But almost all of the "lost" warheads from USAF are in the ocean, where they can do no harm.
Well, as other people are already addressing the possibility of a terrorist organization finding and activating the lost warheads I'll just comment on another, even more dangerous, possibility.
Mutant sharks.
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The difficult part is enriching enough uranium which would require large dedicated facilities. Once you have the uranium though, it's not inconceivable for relatively small efforts by certain groups to create a powerful fissile weapon. There's certainly no shortage of talented engineers in the world.
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Technically, I believe the gun-type fission weapon design [wikipedia.org] is vulnerable to accidental detonation. Of course, the U.S. only produced a few of these before switching over to the much safer and more powerful implosive design, usually implemented nowadays as a fusion boosted design, [wikipedia.org] often with multiple stages. [wikipedia.org]
Of course, as I noted, the gun-type fission weapon was only produced for a short time in the 1940s and early 50s by the U.S., and was the only design used in South Africa's nuclear program (run from the 6
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Simply spraying radioactive bits and pieces over a wide area (basically all of the stories in TFA) is pretty bad on its own.
"Pretty bad" being a whole lot less bad than a fission bomb due to the limits on how many people can be affected and how badly they can be affected.
You should fix the summary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You should fix the summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Three people at a test reactor is sad but pretty small potatoes compared to the Scorpion, Thresher, and the six Russian/Soviet subs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_nuclear_submarines [wikipedia.org]
Re:You should fix the summary (Score:4, Informative)
Soviet boats have had reactor failures, but the US boats were doomed by other causes. The Scorpion was likely sunk by either a torpedo malfunction, or trash disposal device malfunction which caused massive flooding. In the Thresher's case, it was faulty welds on piping which caused flooding and shorted out the electrical system. With the loss of electrical power, the reactor shut down... as designed... to prevent a nuclear accident. Ironically, this is what doomed the crew. With no power, they couldn't surface. But in the cases of both US boats, the reactors operated precisely as planned in both accidents. They aren't "nuclear accidents". In neither boat was the reactor a cause.
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No. The emergency high pressure air system doesn't require power to work.
Unfortunately, the Thresher's system didn't have adequate provision for drying out the air pumped into the high pressure air system tanks. So when they tried an emergency blow, the small amount of water in the HP air froze up and prevented the air fro
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Nailed to the ceiling is a serious understatement. In 4 milliseconds, the reactor went critical, vaporized all the water around it, and sent a shock wave out which (among other things) sent a control rod through the operator and impaled him in the ceiling. I wonder what killed him. It was probably being instantly cooked alive by the steam, rather than the fact that he had a control rod run through his body which left him dangling in non-gravitational respective positions.
A
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Another nuclear accident not involving US weapons was the failed Soviet spy satellite Cosmos 954 [nrcan.gc.ca] which smeared a nuclear reactor core over a large part of northern Canada in 1978.
This was one of a family of satellites. Several reactor cores are still up in orbit, for now...
And yes, these are true reactors not just RTGs.
Ignorant conclusion at end of article (Score:5, Insightful)
The conclusion at the end was pretty ignorant.
This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place. It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an "accident."
Nuclear deterrence / M.A.D. theory has never been proposed as a way to prevent "A" individual nuclear detonation, so the article claiming that they've somehow proven it is not exactly insightful. However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
Re:Ignorant conclusion at end of article (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it was. Recitation of ancient news is merely a "bitch piece".
"Oh, lookee da bad nukes!" Oh. lookee the clueless fuck who didn't live through the Cold War...
The nuclear deterrent worked, and instead of large conventional wars of the "massive bloodbath" (WWI, WWII) variety the Cold War had few casualties (by comparison) and was fought by proxy in expendable countries.
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However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
Well, it's been successful so far. And I'm not sure that having two polities build enough weapons to destroy civilization several times over and trigger a mass extinction in the space of thirty minutes as part of a dispute over property distribution counts as reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
ICBMs don't have retro rockets. (Score:5, Interesting)
" the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM;" You use retro rockets to de orbit. ICBMs don't go into orbit they use a ballistic trajectory.
I would like to know more details about that little comment.
Frankly this is a big so what. None of the listed accidents are new and I think they are all in the Wikipedia and have been listed for years.
They left out the Titan II explosion in the 80s that blew a multi mega warhead a good distance from the silo and caused the Air Force to retire the Titan II.
Hey on the bright side in the 50s and 60s every major US city was ringed with Nike SAM sites and some of them had nuclear warheads on them. They have all been retired for a good long while.
This is so not news it is at best a badly written history lesson. Actually it is nothing but political diatribe on how evil nuclear weapons are. Frankly this should be pushed to the politics page or just not on Slashdot since it tells us nothing new. Heck the freaking learning channel covered this a few years ago.
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You can still find old Nike sites around Oahu. They are overgrown with vegetation and you hardly know you are in one until you notice a bunker door or a series of berms.
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If SAM meant surface-to-air missile, then I suspect the sites may have been reactivated after 9/11. It's just speculation, but that would be the logical knee-jerk reaction. Then again, common sense is anything but common, so maybe not.
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Retrorockets are not necessarily for de-orbiting. They simply fire forwards, slowing to vehicle. There are conventional aircraft and even land vehicles with retro rockets.
Re:ICBMs don't have retro rockets. (Score:5, Informative)
I had worked with the guy that did that back in 1964. I had TDY duty there in 1963 to assist in posturing the missiles initially.
What actually happened was that a modification to the communications panels required shutting down the comm gear. He use a screwdriver (instead of a fuse puller) to pop out the fuse and inadvertently shorted the V++ to chassis ground. This in itself did not do anything really bad, however there was a malfunction in the on-board computer that caused a branch in the software to blow the retro-rockets.
When the missile dropped off "strategic alert" the launch crew (located 20 miles away in an underground capsule) asked them to check on the guidance package. They illuminated the launch tube via the collimator port and saw that the warhead and the guidance package was gone... having fallen to the bottom of the launch tube.
Now about the retro-rockets... The range of a minute man is probably still classified but say that it is (as an example only) 5000 nautical miles... but say that the particular target you want to hit is only 4000 miles from the launch facility so as the final stage ( 3rd stage of the three rockets) passes over the proper location then the retro-rockets fire cause the warhead and the on-board computer to detach from the third stage and free fall ( actually it is more of a large parabolic curve from near space to either detonate as an air burst as it approaches nearer the Earth (most damaging) or to continue its flight and detonate at the ground level on impact(most contamination).
The accuracy in which the warhead can contact the target is astounding... even though my description of it sounds like it is trying to hit a basket in center field with a baseball being thrown... more likely is you can determine whether you want to hit the near side of the basket or the far side!
This is based on my working knowledge from the 60's... of course, a great deal has changed in the last 50 years with the merves (multiple entry - reentry vehicle)- means numerous warheads, and the "penetration aids" dropped to confuse the enemy as to which is the real warhead and which are radar look-a-like reflections.
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We swung the angles with theodolites which were highly accurate transits. Shooting Polaris (north star) and making the "current date & time" adjustments gave us a true north reference.
We would then transfer those angles down through a tube in the silo and finally transfer the angles to a first surface mirror (has no parallax) for internal references within the silo.
This was so if the weather was bad we would not have to work outside but use one of the two mirrors for reference. We had two mirrors so if
"Nuclear Accidents" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Nuclear Accidents" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Nuclear Accidents" (Score:5, Informative)
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
PALs are not intended to prevent launch without Presidential authority, PALs are intended to prevent weapons that fall into unauthorized hands from being used. Which is why the USAF kept PALs active on gravity bombs and disabled them on the silos and why the Army used them on their AFAPs - and why USN SSBN's never had them in the first place.
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Or a Star Trek self destruct sequence.
"Code zero zero zero. Destruct. Zero."
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Auto-destruct [memory-alpha.org]
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Re:"Nuclear Accidents" (Score:5, Informative)
Not really nuclear accidents. Nuke Weapons have a ridiculous amount of safeguards and settings needed to happen to actually go off. So it is impossible for a true nuclear weapon accidents. Maybe call em' accidents that involved nuclear weapons. any other phrase is alarmism
Yeah, British nukes were protected with "Bike Locks"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7097101.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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That is true now of our weapons. There was a time when an accident leading to detonation was all too easy. Which is why the pits were stored separately from the weapons until it was time to launch them. (for example: one early missile design detonated when the fuel ran out... Which guaranteed a detonation in the event the electronic fuse failed. So, a fire could easily lead to a detonation, if the missile had previously been armed).
I wouldn't be so certain that nuclear weapons designed by other count
Biggest Accident (Score:3, Funny)
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Would Samantha Mathis be the hot chick that you were thinking of?
I'd actually forgotten about that movie. Why did you have to bring it up?
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The movie was Broken Arrow. I'm not happy to have been reminded of it...
To paraphrase Robert McNamara (Score:2)
...from the documentary The Fog of War, the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons means there WILL be an accidental discharge eventually. And, he should know. His entire life was a mistake.
Good documentary on the subject (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh boy. (Score:4, Funny)
and by "chile" I meant "chilean food", not "chilli"
Wow, you must have been really hungary.