Radioactive Snails Crawl Up From Beneath 397
slidersv writes "Reuters is reporting discovery of radioactive snails in the area where three hydrogen bombs were lost by US in the 1966. The radioactive creatures crawl up from underground, where authorities suspect deposits of uranium and plutonium may be located."
Re:Holy --deleted-- (Score:5, Informative)
three U.S. hydrogen bombs fell by accident 40 years ago may trigger a new joint U.S.-Spanish clean-up operation, officials said on Wednesday.
The hydrogen bombs fell near the fishing village of Palomares in 1966 after a mid-air collision between a bomber and a refuelling craft, in which seven of 11 crewmen died.
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:1, Informative)
Details -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares [wikipedia.org]
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, you crash a plane containing hydrogen bombs.
Technically, none of the bombs were "lost". The B-52 that crashed (due to a collision with a mid-air refueling tanker) carried 4 B28 1.1 megaton thermonuclear bombs. One of the bombs landed intact in the ocean, another landed intact on land, both were recovered. The parachutes on the other two bombs failed to deploy and their conventional high explosive charges went off when they hit the ground. Thankfully, the safety systems of the bombs prevented a nuclear explosion, but the conventional explosions nevertheless distributed a large quantity of radioactive bomb guts over a wide area (thus the contamination problems mentioned).
P.S. RTFA. UTFI (Use The F'ing Internet).
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:4, Informative)
As reported by wikipedia, there are currently 11 such weapons known to be missing from the United States arsenal. It should be noted that these weapons are not the pitiful 1-5 kiloton weapons that Korea is detonating. It is likely they are 10+ megaton city-killers.
All that being said, I wouldn't worry too much about the situation. Anyone (or anything) with the capability to decipher how to actually set one of these missing weapons off is most likely nothing short of a country. Countries with nuclear weapons aren't something terribly dangerous, due to nuclear deterrance (MAD).
Add to that the fact that the US is unable to find these weapons (Some are presumed destroyed or at least damaged beyond repair)and I find it much less likely these will be a threat than, say, the car that passes by me when I walk to school.
Re:Why were they flying nuclear bombs around in 19 (Score:4, Informative)
As for why it was there, the US had plenty of nukes in western Europe, with the idea that if a war broke out, those bombs would be headed into Russia. Where this particular plane was going I do not know, but it wasn't alone or out of place over Spain.
Re:Why were they flying nuclear bombs around in 19 (Score:3, Informative)
Have you ever seen Dr Strangelove? Of course, it is a comedy, but it is based on a real situation: during cold war, there were constantly dozens of nuclear warheads flying around with the risk of something going wrong. That accident was fortunately in the lower range of possible consequences.
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:5, Informative)
"How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb?"
"Uh, you crash a plane containing hydrogen bombs."
More here: http://www.milnet.com/cdiart.htm [milnet.com]
From the above source: "[the second most serious nuclear weapons accident on record - MILNET]" (it also goes on to describe a similar accident at Thule).
Re:Abdication of responsibility? (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA: The governments have yet to agree on who would pay for a clean up, according to a U.S. embassy spokesman in Spain.
Since 1966, the United States has helped pay for Palomares residents to be checked for signs of radiation poisoning.
Well, at least they are still talking about it. Even though I generally disagree with US foreign policy, in this case, it seems that there's not (yet) much to complain about.
wikipedia is your friend (Score:5, Informative)
The B-52s were performing Airborne Nuclear Alert duty under the code-name "Chrome Dome" where bombers would loiter near points outside of the Soviet Union (see Dr. Strangelove).
During this program a mid-air collision between a B-52 [wikipedia.org] and a KC-135 [wikipedia.org] tanker aircraft occurred during aerial refueling [wikipedia.org] over Palomares [wikipedia.org], Spain on the 17th of January, 1966.
Four megaton-range hydrogen bombs [wikipedia.org] were lost. Two were recovered eventually fairly intact while the other two underwent a minor detonation of the conventional explosives that were an integral part of them. The safety fuses in them prevented a disastrous nuclear detonation. However dispersion of both plutonium and uranium material over several hundred hectares resulted in thousands of tons of contaminated radioactive soil having to be sent back to the USA. The USAF decided this was too expensive to risk again, and it ended that part of the airborne alert program.
There have been several reports of contamination remaining in the area in recent years and currently U.S and Spanish governments have agreed to investigate the need for further clean up, this time sharing the costs.
Interestingly the search efford for the missing bomb out at sea was performed using the Bayesian search theory [wikipedia.org]. Eventually the bomb was recoved with the help of a local fisherman, who then claimed salvage rights from it under the high seas (usually a reward of a few percent of the actual value). But not before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had publicly stated a value of no less than two billion U.S. dollars for it. The Air Force settled out of court.
There's also a bomb off the coast of Georgia (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:2, Informative)
The physics of microwaves.
The wavelength of your average microwave oven is about 1.2mm, so anything smaller than that can stay cool. Microwaves area also unevenly spread throughout the oven so there are areas where your gnat could have flown and not been affected.
Re:Abdication of responsibility? (Score:2, Informative)
This is mere ONE of about 14 other nuke accidents! (Score:3, Informative)
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia
February 12, 1958 Savannah, Georgia
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island, Washington
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean
List does not include the much larger list of fully recovered and contained accidental weapons drops.
Some diverted material (noit in weapons) was CIA swapped to israel some think.
Enough weapons grade plutonium was mysteriously stolen from the US gov over the decades, according to accurate reports, to build over 20 H bombs.
Re:Abdication of responsibility? (Score:3, Informative)
Spain was not member of NATO in '66. Spain only joined NATO after democratization in '82.
It's like people that think that Hawaii was part of US in time of Pearl Harbor.
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ooops we dropped the nuke... (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty slim, I'd say. The fission reaction will only be started correctly if everything is working right inside the bomb, i.e. it is armed and detonated intentionally. Otherwise, you'll just wind up with an imprompty dirty bomb.
and what effect it would have had... a tsunami perhaps?
Not likely. The energy required to power this event dwarfs even the most powerful nuclear weapon. Maybe if you stick the bomb inside a fault line. But that's a big maybe.
Re:Ooops we dropped the nuke... (Score:3, Informative)
Almost no chance of nuclear explosion. There simply isn't enough fissionable in a bomb to go up unless you set it off in one specific way, requiring timers to set off a series of chain detonators at exactly the right time, sensors to tell the timers when that time is, an altimiter to determine the bomb is at target height and charged batteries to power the whole rig.
Sure, they'll blow up. But we're talking 300lbs of TNT boom, spraying radioactive all over the place.
But say a warhead did go off. We're talking something on the order of a megaton. Odds are there would have been a small surface swell, the wreckage at the bottom would have been blown to pieces, but I doubt that the ship at the surface would have even been damaged by the event. The US did undersea tests to figure out how to use nukes against boats and subs; The effective range wasn't all that great.
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:1, Informative)
Bayesian theory is just the good old probability theory used "right", as Laplace intended. Anti-spam is just a simple application.
Re:Holy fucking shit (Score:3, Informative)
It should also be noted that the thing that separates a 1-5 kiloton weapon from a 10+ megaton city killer is tritium which has a relatively short half-life of ~12 yrs thus after 40 yrs approx. 12.5% of the original tritium is around to create that megaton nuclear event. Thus these bombs are no longer "city-killers". Though the uranium and plutonium primaries should still be usable.
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:3, Informative)
DU isnt regular uranium, learn the science, not the hype. There has been a study done on the effects of DU ammunition. The UNEP report concluded in 2001 and found that the hazards are minimal. The most significant hazard seems to be that someone will pick up a round and keep it in close proximity of their person for an extended period of time.
The interesting thing about the DU 'debate' is that most of the people who have done scientific studies on the DU will say 'it's not particularly dangerous, but there are so many factors involved, we can't be 100% sure' while the anti-DU activists always seem to have absolute certainty about their data despite it being based on shoddy papers by undergrads in unralted fields (geology instead of physics, for instance).
Bottom line is that DU is DEPLETED, and is about as radioactive as common dirt and as hazardous as any other heavy metal, like lead. You wouldn't want to make pipes or plates or silverware out of it, but other than that its simply not as "radioactive" as you make it out to be.
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:5, Informative)
After all, the stuff barely gives off radiation, and what it does emit is alpha particles, so what you really have to worry about is getting it into your system (it can't irradiate you through your skin). And if you do ingest/inhale it, you've got far worse things to worry about than radiation damage - heavy metal poisoning is far more likely.
What I don't get is why DU gets all the bad press, and white phosphorous, lead and napalm don't. Hell, if you want to look at the really nasty stuff left over after a war ends, landmines beat all of the above. Why does it only become "nasty" when it's got the slightest hint of radioactivity? Oh right, because it's that evil nucular stuff, so it must be worse... somehow.
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Radio-Cochlear Overlords (Score:4, Informative)
But it implies learning the science, rather than just believing what you've been told by a different source that the science is.
Depleted Uranium is certainly more radioactive than common dirt. According to the UNEP report which you referenced, and of which a summary can be found on the WHO web site [who.int] Depleted Uranium "is weakly radioactive and a radiation dose from it would be about 60% of that from purified natural uranium with the same mass." It's no use in current reactors, though we've been stockpiling it since the 50's for use in some future reactors which could make use of it. So far, none have, but it's still theoretically possible.
According to a pamphlet the US Army published for its troops back in the early 90's, DU can be relatively safe to handle, if all proper precautions are taken.
Unfortunately, I can't find the pamphlet right now, but, some of the interesting bits from it:
DU radiation is almost completely Alpha, with very little Beta, and no Gamma radiation. What this means is that it's very easy to block the radiation. A good lead-based paint (such as those used over the DU tank armor) is 100% effective. If the paint gets scratched (as tanks tend to do), covering the exposed area with duct tape will be safe enough.
It also recommends treatment for DU wounds, including making sure the wound is completely cleaned, and passing a geiger counter over the area to make sure everything was taken out.
The radiation in this case makes it actually safer, as it makes it easier to find, including areas sprayed with microscopic bits, as it has a tendency to powder if it passes through, say, steel.
The dusting is what makes it particularly dangerous to civilians: it passes through tanks on the battlefield, gets powdered, dissolves in rain, sinks into the ground, contaminates crops, and never goes away.
Uranium, whether depleted or not, is also highly toxic, on the level of arsenic, so it's not good to get into the bloodstream. (Of course, being shot with DU bullets will probably kill you long before you have to worry about it's poisonous effects.)
Re:Beetle-mania (Score:3, Informative)