Nucular Negligence
July 1, 2017 7:46 PM   Subscribe

 
Hey, we have tunnels full of 50 year old nuclear waste set aside for "the future" to deal with that are collapsing, not to mention liquid waste leaking out of tanks toward one of the largest rivers in the US. Our interest in dealing with nuclear products far outstrips our ability to deal with and handle nuclear products.
posted by hippybear at 8:04 PM on July 1, 2017 [13 favorites]


It seems that things have been lax at Los Alamos for some time; I hired an Oracle DBA in the mid-90's who left Los Alamos because a non-negligible amount of plutonium was unaccounted for and she no longer felt comfortable working at a facility where one might misplace enough nuclear material to make multiple warheads.

I'd like to say that the first article has an extraordinarily vivid account of the injuries and agonizing deaths of blue flash victims. With pictures. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.
posted by xyzzy at 8:09 PM on July 1, 2017 [9 favorites]


The Nation had an article (Meet the Private Corporations Building Our Nuclear Arsenal) on the US nuclear weapons cartel last year. And that's just the weapons side of things; there's a significant amount of nuclear material managed by hospitals across the US. The Goiânia accident, which contaminated a few dozen people and killed at least five people, was the result of a mismanaged hospital radiation source.
posted by xyzzy at 9:13 PM on July 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Banner headlines of 2017:

OCEANS WET

COPS SELL DRUGS

NUCLEAR WARHEADS UNSAFE

I just assumed something that sensitive would be handled in-house

The US Government in general and the military in particular have been run primarily for the benefit of big business since at least since WWII and you're surprised about this now?
posted by flabdablet at 9:40 PM on July 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


SLEEP TIGHT EVERYONE!
posted by lalochezia at 9:43 PM on July 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


Stacking up a bunch of plutonium rods to take a selfie with them or something is like the "freak gasoline fight accident" in Zoolander.

It may not be such a bad thing that the lab's work has been slowed down. According to the following article, the U.S. nuclear arsenal "maintenance" program has actually been upgrading the targeting systems of weapons in a way that makes them dramatically more effective, creating an imbalance with Russia's arsenal—

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze; New Zealand Radio interview with one of the authors, Hans M. Kristensen
The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

[...]

Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target.

[...]

Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability—a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces. Tense nuclear postures based on worst-case planning assumptions already pose the possibility of a nuclear response to false warning of attack. The new kill capability created by super-fuzing increases the tension and the risk that US or Russian nuclear forces will be used in response to early warning of an attack—even when an attack has not occurred.

The increased capability of the US submarine force will likely be seen as even more threatening because Russia does not have a functioning space-based infrared early warning system but relies primarily on ground-based early warning radars to detect a US missile attack. Since these radars cannot see over the horizon, Russia has less than half as much early-warning time as the United States. (The United States has about 30 minutes, Russia 15 minutes or less.)

[...]

In all, the entire Russian silo-based forces could potentially be destroyed while leaving the US with 79 percent of its ballistic missile warheads unused.

Even after Russia's silo-based missiles were attacked, the US nuclear firepower remaining would be staggering—and certainly of concern to Russia or any other country worried about a US first strike.

[...]

The Russians have most recently reacted to this ongoing program by publicly displaying and implementing a new and novel sea-based nuclear weapons delivery device as a hedge against US missile defenses.

In particular, Russia is now in the process of testing a 40-ton nuclear-powered underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) that could robotically deliver, across thousands of kilometers, a 100-megaton nuclear warhead against the coastal cities and ports of the United States. The technical details of this bizarre system were released by Putin himself in September 2015—apparently intentionally—and testing began in December 2016. Such actions by the Russian government clearly indicate a grave concern about the unpredictable character of ongoing US missile defense programs.

[...]

We cannot foresee a situation in which a competent and properly informed US president would order a surprise first strike against Russia or China. But our conclusion makes the increased sea-based offensive and defensive capabilities we have described seem all the more bizarre as a strategy for reducing the chances of nuclear war with either Russia or China.
(My emphasis in the last paragraph)

Trump, of course, didn't know what the nuclear triad was or what the U.S. first-strike policy was during the election, declared "Let there be an arms race" during the transition, and as president had to end a call with Putin because he didn't know what the New START treaty was.
posted by XMLicious at 10:15 PM on July 1, 2017 [9 favorites]


Privatization is... bad?

"Run the government like a business" is... bad?
posted by Hiding From Goro at 10:18 PM on July 1, 2017


I just assumed something that sensitive would be handled in-house.

It is, at least in the Navy. There's a reason all the reactors on subs and carriers are operated by military personnel while under way.
posted by Hiding From Goro at 10:19 PM on July 1, 2017


I guess this is one way to move toward nuclear disarmament.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:19 PM on July 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


That we haven't accidentally nuked one of our own cities by this point is just blind, dumb luck. For further reading (and difficulty sleeping for months), Eric Schlosser's Command and Control is essential.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:35 AM on July 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


The anecdote about arranging plutonium rods to make pretty pictures is the most horrifying thing I have read for ages.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:56 AM on July 2, 2017 [11 favorites]


"Run the government like a business" is... bad?

Most large businesses are organized as top-down power structures with centrally planned internal economies and accountability of management to those managed given lip service at best.

It's kind of odd how those most likely to promote the notion that big business is an appropriate model for government are generally also those most likely to declare themselves supporters of freedom and opponents of dictatorial bureaucracies, but I guess that's just what happens when politics is generally held to be a few notches below sewage treatment as a suitable topic for dinnertime conversation.
posted by flabdablet at 2:48 AM on July 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


And as a bonus it's now all under the jurisdiction of Rick Perry.
posted by PenDevil at 4:59 AM on July 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


That plutonium rod photo is just astonishing, it's like the dumb 19 year old boy who stands at the edge of the Grand Canyon joking like he's gonna jump in. Deliberately flirting with death.

I've got a sunburn right now and was reminded of the Slotin incident involving complacency, a screwdriver, and a supercritical amount of radioactive beryillium. "At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a prompt critical reaction and a burst of hard radiation. ... Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol." It's a classic story shared in nuclear physics circles. (The sunburn because when Slotin went to the hospital with his lethal radiation dose, the admitting nurse remarked on his "nice pink skin".)
posted by Nelson at 8:10 AM on July 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Global nuclear weapons: modernization remains the priority (NGO press release)
(Stockholm, 3 July 2017) The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) today launches its annual nuclear forces data, which highlights the current trends and developments in world nuclear arsenals. The data shows that while the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world continues to decline, all of the nuclear weapon-possessing states are in the process of modernizing their nuclear arsenals and will not be prepared to give them up for the foreseeable future.

At the start of 2017 nine states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—possessed approximately 4150 operationally deployed nuclear weapons. If all nuclear warheads are counted, these states together possessed a total of approximately 14 935 nuclear weapons, compared with 15 395 in early 2016 (see table 1).
posted by XMLicious at 2:05 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]




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