OT:Working lifespan of a nuclear bomb ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Er no. its not worrying at all.

[Tim+]

Tim

[GB]

That's interesting, and I am not going to attempt to critique what he says (especially as he does not give his calculations). I suspect strongly that he is overly laid back about what happens if Plutonium gets into the food chain, but I can't prove it.

[Tim Streater]

Unlikely to be currents at a depth of 30,000 ft. And the ocean already contains 4,000,000,000 tons of uranium.

[dennis]

Uranium wouldn't be a problem. Plutonium might as it is toxic. You couldn't dump waste until it had been stored for a few half lives.

[The Natural Philosopher]

he isn't. he actually said (he died a year ago) that its not something that the body actually takes up by and large/

[The Natural Philosopher]

So is uranium.

Why not?

[Martin Brown]

He is right though. Ralph Naders calculations are intended to panic the population rather than to inform and the same calculation for a bucket of water would show that used carefully you could drown hundreds of people in it using a carefully designed jig to immerse mouth and nose.

ISTR The campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide did the calculation. You can make water seem a really scary chemical if you try hard enough.

It was certainly true in the 1990's that no-one in the UPPu club had actually died of anything other than natural causes unrelated to their nuclear activities. I expect that by now a few that worked on the early refining of plutonium have died of cancer but they would be over 90. They were carefully monitored and the sensitivity of modern ultratrace analytical instruments kept pace with their declining Pu load.

Early wet chemistry work on it was particularly frought as the alpha emissions made glassware go brittle and stronger solutions of some isotopes would boil under their own radioactivity.

[Brian Gaff]

No in my book any explosion is one too many as presumably the fissionable material would be distributed over quite an area in any case.

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Sounds a bit over engineered then, as the whole point these days is to make a big bang not need to be heavy.

I'm expecting to see the use of battlefield nukes real soon now in the middle east as indiscriminate killing seems to be the trend these days. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not sure those guys have got tactical nukes.

In any case what they want and need is a WWI style mass slaughter to reduce the population to one whose political religious and economic aspirations stand some chance of being satisfied.

[Bob Martin]

I was stationed at RAF Marham in the early 60s when the Valiants were there. The nuclear warheads were stored in an underground bunker, and once a month a USAF Hercules would bring 1-3 serviced warheads and take some away. I was a part of the squad which was tasked with isolating the area should anything untoward happen.

[john james]

Only Israel does.

Didn?t happen with the Iran/Iraq war that is the only one that got close to that.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well then it will be back to traditional genocide, rape and pillage using swords I suppose.

Coming to a town near you..

[michael adams]

This chap was actually injected with plutonium without his knowledge as an experiment, to test its suspected toxicity

He was 58 at the time and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Fortunately both prognoses proved incorrect and he lived for another

21 years.

michael adams

...

[newshound]

They looked very hard for a long time: $10M in 1958 money. ISTR they were concentrating on a swampy region, very difficult to search. Not sure what depth it was found in.

[GB]

On the other hand, from the Albert Stevens WP article:

The mastermind behind this human experiment with plutonium was Dr. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton, a Manhattan Project doctor in charge of the human experiments in California.[6] Hamilton had been experimenting on people (including himself) since the 1930s at Berkeley. He was working with other Manhattan Project doctors to perform toxicity studies on plutonium. It was Hamilton who had begun the 1944 tracer experiments on rats. The opportunity to select a human patient was relatively easy: Hamilton was not only a physicist assigned to U.C. Berkeley, he was "professor of experimental medicine and radiology" at U.C. San Francisco."[1] Hamilton eventually succumbed to the radiation that he explored for most of his adult life: * he died of leukemia at the age of

49.*

[tony sayer]

LOL! I had one of the news girls at the local radio station really wetting herself on that one till she found out;(..

Didn't get any favours at the Xmas party that year;!>

>

[Jethro_uk]

Didn't Richard Feynman suffer radiation related illnesses ?

[Johny B Good]

I remember reading a short story in a Sci-Fi anthology nearly fifty years ago using the same plot. If the story was simply a retelling of the movie (I couldn't find any references to an original story as most such movies are based upon), it differed in a major way at the end in that instead of the ending inspired by Ray Bradbury's "Kalaidoscope" it had a more comedic ending.

The two crew members in the control room realised, just in time to abandon ship in the escape capsule, that Bomb #20 would detonate once it had finished quoting verses from the Book of Genesis. They escaped "By the skin of their teeth" and survived, drifting in space to await rescue.

As far as I can recall, there wasn't any of Bradbury's "Kalaidoscope nonsense to ruin the ending in the version I read all those many years ago. I'm now feeling a sense of frustration at failing to find any reference to the 'original' story with, imho, the better ending.