Posts tagged "H-bomb" | Restricted Data

Posts Tagged ‘H-bomb’

Visions

More nuclear symbolism

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Two small graphical things I wanted to share that came from feedback on a few recent posts.

The first is an explanation, of sorts, of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s very unusual emblem:

UKAEA Coat of Arms

I had ragged on the AEA’s design as being particularly stodgy, but I’ve been corrected. It’s just unduly weighed down by obscure symbolism, as a commentator pointed out. It was, apparently, designed by the Royal College of Arms with the following visual references:

The central shield is black denoting the core of a graphite reactor, with inserted rods of silver uranium.
The inverted triangle shows gold and scarlet bolts of heat and power.
The energy released by splitting the atom is controlled by a pair of red pantheons, which are ferocious heraldic beasts. They are firmly held to the ground by thick golden chains to ensure the energy is firmly controlled.
The pantheons have 13 six-pointed stars and two seven-pointed stars, totalling 92. These represent the 92 natural elements found in creation and also the atomic number of uranium.
The five spikes on the collars signify the atomic number of boron, which was used to shutdown the early reactors.
There are numerous representations of 8 for the atomic number of oxygen, 2 for helium and 1 for hydrogen – suggesting water. The whole gives insights into the four medieval elements of earth, air, fire and water.
The sun represents the power of fusion, and the small shield with the black bird (a martlet) is the Coat of Arms of Lord Rutherford. He is recognised as the founder of nuclear physics.
The steel helmet signifies the arms of a corporate body.
The whole is placed on the earth on which flowers and plants are flourishing normally. [???]
The motto “E minimis – maxima” means; ‘from the smallest, the greatest‘.

I thought that was interesting enough to share. Any resemblance between the “pantheons” and mutated horse-dogs is apparently entirely coincidental. And despite the barren, Moon-like appearance of the “earth,” it is apparently “flourishing normally.” Actually, the above image, painted on the doors of the Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor, is slightly different than the other image of the emblem I had posted, which does have a more flourishing-looking ground cover, as well as a knight’s head.

All of this is a stark contrast from the US Atomic Energy Commission’s emblem, whose symbolism seems to have been, “it’s an atom, stupid.” I hereby promote the AEA’s emblem from “most boring” to “not as boring as I thought,” which leaves the current Department of Energy seal as the “most boring.”

Secondly, I have another cryptic drawing referencing the history of the hydrogen bomb, again by George Gamow. This one has been reproduced here and there, but a friend of mine came across an original version in the Gamow papers at the Library of Congress awhile back, and sent me his photographs of it and its captions. The drawing follows:

The attached caption (written, as always, in Gamow’s amusing handwriting and bad English) was as follows:

A drowing made by G. Gamow (with photographic inserts) which was handing [hanging?] in his office in the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during the dispute about the political necessity of developing an H-bomb and during the early stages of its developement after President Truman sayd: “Yes, go ahead.”

Top left is Comarade Stalin carrying the A-bomb made in the USSR.

Top right is Dr. Robert Oppenheimer who was objecting against H-bomb project on the basis that it is extremely difficult (actually it took less than two years) and will induce USSR to do the same (actually Russians worked on H-bomb when this discussion was taking place).

The coffin with the Harvard University coat of arms belong to ~~Professor~~ Dr. James B. Connant who said that: “H-bomb will be built only over his dead body.”

On the bench below are Dr’s Stan Ulam, Edward Teller, and George Gamow, demonstrating their proposals for making H-bomb. The simbolism of these deviced cannot be explained because AEC classified them as “SECRET”.

The “simbolism” is fairly cryptic. The caption dates it around February 1950, so that might make it even harder to make sense of, as we’re talking about fairly early days when it comes to the final H-bomb design, but I’m not sure how reliable I find that dating. (The H-bomb debate was in late 1949-early 1950, though the caption was obviously written at a much later time.)

Looking for some insight into the technical discussions that were happening at this time, I took a gander at Anne Fitzpatrick’s quite detailed thesis on the early history of the H-bomb, “Igniting the Light Elements: The Los ALamos Thermonuclear Weapons Project, 1942-1952,” (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1999), which was issued as LA-13577-T. Fitzpatrick’s work is notable as one of the few H-bomb histories that have been written by a non-participant but also with access to classified information. (The whole thing was, of course, screened for security, and she notes in a few places where she was asked to label things merely as “special” to make them more vague.)

Fitzpatrick notes that Gamow spent a sabbatical year at Los Alamos in 1949-1950, to help with work on the H-bomb, which matches up with his caption above. While there, he seems to have produced a bevy of H-bomb-themed drawings, of which she reproduces three. One shows the complexity of the energy flow problem in a Super, another portrays the hydride bomb (“Elmer”) as “unattractive and clumsy” in comparison with a lower-yield water penetrating fission bomb (“Elsie”/”L.C.”), and the another portrayed Ulam and Teller themselves as the ultimate Super design:

But back to the original, “simbolic” Gamow image. Ulam’s spittoon almost surely references the fact that you’re using forces at a (relative) distance to compress the secondary, right? Whether one does that by hydrodynamic lensing (Ulam’s original proposal) or radiation implosion (the later Teller-Ulam design) doesn’t seem to be distinguishable. On the other hand, Ulam didn’t propose that until 1951, so this might be something else entirely. Fitzpatrick’s thesis doesn’t spell out any additional Ulam proposals that I saw.

Teller’s is much more cryptic. Looking at Fitzpatrick’s thesis, she says that at this time, Teller was championing a device dubbed “Little Edward.” (Oh myyyy.) This was, she says, “a giant, high-yield multi-crit gun device proposed by Teller that was supposed to produce x-radiation to ignite the D-T mixture in the Super.” Could that be the string of beads with the giant Omega in the middle of it? It sounds like an ungainly device, and indeed, it was eventually dropped as being very wasteful and without much guarantee that it would do anything better than other designs on the table.

And lastly, there’s Gamow’s. According to Fitzpatrick, Gamow’s design was known as the “Cat’s Tail.” She says that it was “a variation on the large fission detonator purported to ignite the Super… Gamow theorized that the Cat’s Tail needed less T[ritium] than had been assumed in the ENIAC Super problems, but could not guarantee this.” Since, as far as I know, Gamow’s designs have never been discussed openly (and were not successful), it’s pretty difficult to try and correlate such an image to an actual bomb design.

Presumably there were no cat-driven hydrogen bombs, though having owned a cat, I can see that one might be seriously tempted to exploit some of their malicious energy in this way. I welcome any and all additional interpretations.

Tags: 1940s, 1950s, Bomb design, Graphic design, H-bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, United Kingdom
Posted in Visions | 4 Comments »

Redactions

George Gamow and the atomic bomb

Friday, January 18th, 2013

George Gamow stands out as a colorful physicist among a generation of colorful physicists. He was a known wit, a friend to many of the “golden generation” of physicists, and — on top of all that — was a Russian émigré who had made a dramatic defection from the Soviet Union during a Solvay Conference. He was also a well-known popularizer of science, authoring well over a dozen works of physics aimed at the general public, often illustrated with his own amusing little drawings. He was quite a card: who else adds a scientist’s name to a massively important paper just to make a silly pun?

George Gamow, laughing and smoking, probably ca. the 1950s. Photo from the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

George Gamow, laughing and smoking, probably ca. the 1950s. Photo via the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

(Later in life, he became a very difficult person to be around, on account of his alcoholism. It was this fact that made me a little surprised that there was a free wine bar sponsored in the name of George Gamow at a meeting of the History of Science Society a few years back.)

Gamow’s scientific interests were all over the place — he was completely uninterested in disciplinary boundaries — and he was enormously influential on his peers as a “program builder.”¹ It’s a little-known fact that Edward Teller came up with the idea of using a solid core of plutonium in the implosion design — an intuition he had because of his work with Gamow on the molten, compressed iron core of the Earth.² Gamow’s work on nucleosynthesis and the Big Bang was immensely important to the advancement of cosmological thinking. Incidentally, Gamow did not like the term “Big Bang,” because it sounded too much like nukes. He later even had an excursion into molecular biology.

But during World War II, Gamow didn’t work on the atomic bomb, though he continued to work on nuclear physics. One of the most charming letters I’ve found in the archives was written by Gamow to Vannevar Bush on August 12, 1945. You will note, of course, that this comes just three days after the bombing of Nagasaki, and is the same day the Smyth Report was released. In a clear but stylized handwriting, with a touch of refugee’s English, Gamow wrote the following letter to Bush:³

Click image to view PDF.

Aug 12th, 1945
19 Thoreau Drive
Bethesda, Md.

Dear Dr. Bush,

I am writing to you because I think you are the best man to advice me what to do. As you know I was in no way connected with the project of “atomic bomb” developement, while on the other hand, working all my life on nuclear physics, I naturally could not help not thinking about it and have rather clear ideas about the possibilities involved etc. As long as the whole thing remained a supersecret I was naturally trying to hold all my thoughts to myself. However now, when the thing exploded and all the newspapers are full of informations, I wonder where the boundary between what can and what cannot be told should be placed. Thus, for example, in my course of nuclear physics which I am giving in G.W.U. this summer I will have to speak next week about nuclear transformations, thermonuclear reaction, and nuclear chain reactions. Should I entirely avoid mentioning explosive reactions or not?

Again, I am now preparing the new edition of my Book on Nuclear Physics for Oxford Univ. Press. How much could be told in it about this part of the problem? Finally I was recently asked to write a small popular book on Atomic Energy. Must I reject such offer or not?

You understand of course that in all these cases the question is not about the technical details which I do not know, but about broad “purely scientific” point of view. As the matter of fact I do not think I know much more on the subject that the scientists in other countries, as for example in Soviet Russia, know at present, so that such utterings on my part will hardly be of any particular use for the “competitors.” Still, I would not like to do anything in this direction, without first receiving your advice.

Hoping to hear from you soon

Your very truly G Gamow.

Gamow’s concern was not unique to him, though he was a little ahead of the curve when it came to expressing it. He, like most other physicists, quickly saw that nuclear physics was going to become a much more troublesome thing in the age of atomic bombs. One of the biggest concerns at the time, by those inside the bomb project and those not, was that if nuclear physics became a top-secret area, it would severely impact the education of new physicists.

His letter did not go unnoticed; Vannevar Bush wrote him back a careful reply two days later, pointing out that the Smyth Report was released at almost the same time that Gamow’s letter was written, and that one of its explicit purposes was to make that firm line of security visible to folks like Gamow. Bush then offered up this bit of speculation:

I have no doubt that later there will be constituted in some way an official body to determine the proper bounds of scientific discussion, and undoubtedly competent scientists will be present on any such body. How this may possibly be done it is too early to know. However, in the interim there is a guide in the form of a report [the Smyth Report] and after the body is established there will be a place to turn which anyone can use who may be in doubt.

The reality was somewhat more complicated than this, in the end. Policing “the proper bounds of scientific discussion” was ostensibly the role of the Atomic Energy Commission, but they found it quite hard to do such a thing in practice.

Gamow was, in the end, somewhat sucked into the weapons complex. He was a lecturer to US Naval Officers on fission physics just before Operation Crossroads, and later he was involved in the work on the hydrogen bomb, at Los Alamos. While there he drew this rather unusual little drawing celebrating the discovery/invention of the Teller-Ulam design in 1951:⁴

What does it mean? Stanislaw Ulam as a very Bugs-Bunnyish hare, Edward Teller as a tortoise? The most banal and boring interpretation would be that Teller had been working at the H-bomb problem for a long time, and it was Ulam — the relative new-comer — had scooped him.

But I can’t help but wonder if there is more to its imagery than that — Gamow’s pen was famously more quick-witted than that. Perhaps there is meant to be a secret clue as to the differences in their approaches?

One stab at it: Teller’s Classical Super involved a propagating thermonuclear reaction in a large mass of fusion fuel — you light one end of a deuterium candle, and the thermonuclear “fire” travels along it. Ulam’s compression scheme (which would be translated into radiation implosion in collaboration with Teller) involved trying to ignite the entire fusion fuel mass all at once, more or less. Teller’s approach is a much slower reaction than Ulam’s; this is part of the reason that Teller’s Classical Super wouldn’t work (the fuel cools too quickly and can’t sustain the temperatures needed for fusion). So Ulam is the fast rabbit, Teller is the slow turtle, and in this instance (unlike Aesop), the rabbit wins the race.

Or perhaps it has something to do with the different geometries? Why does the Teller turtle have three rocks? Is the carrot a reference to the relatively long geometry of the Ulam approach, versus the spherical symmetry of the Alarm Clock design? Is the “P” on Ulam’s hat for his native Poland, or something else?

Are there secrets hidden in Gamow’s humor? Might Gamow be having the last laugh?

Notes

Nasser Zakariya, “Making Knowledge Whole: Genres of Synthesis and Grammars of Ignorance,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, No. 5 (November 2012), 432-475. [↩]
Robert Christy usually gets the credit for the solid core. It was Teller’s initial idea, but it was Christy who proved it would work. [↩]
George Gamow to Vannevar Bush (12 August 1945), General Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 227, Box 110, “Security – S-1.” [↩]
This scan comes from the copy reproduced in Peter Galison’s Image and Logic. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Bomb design, Edward Teller, H-bomb, Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush
Posted in Redactions | 7 Comments »

Redactions

In Search of a Bigger Boom

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”¹

Edward Teller looking particularly Strangelovian. Via the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, John Wheeler collection.

Teller was an inventive, creative person when it came to imagining new and previously unheard-of weapons. Not all of his ideas panned out, of course, but he rarely let that stop his enthusiasms for them. He was seemingly always in search of a bigger boom. During the Manhattan Project, he quickly tired of working on the “regular” atomic bomb — it just seemed too easy, a problem of engineering, not physics. From as early as 1942 he became obsessed with the idea of a Super bomb — the hydrogen bomb — a weapon of theoretically endless power.

(One side-effect of this at Los Alamos is that Teller passed much of his assigned work on the atomic bomb off to a subordinate: Klaus Fuchs.)

It took over a decade for the hydrogen bomb to come into existence. The reasons for the delay were technical as well as interpersonal. In short, though, Teller’s initial plan — a bomb where you could just ignite an arbitrarily long candle of fusion fuel — wouldn’t work, but it was hard to show that it wouldn’t work. Shortly after abandoning that idea more or less completely, Teller, with the spur from Stan Ulam, came up with a new design.

The Teller-Ulam design allows you to link bombs to bombs to bomb. John Wheeler apparently dubbed this a “sausage” model, because of all of the links. Ted Taylor recounted that from very early on, it was clear you could have theoretically “an infinite number” of sub-bombs connected to make one giant bomb.

A few selected frames from Chuck Hansen’s diagram about multi-stage hydrogen bombs, from his U.S. Nuclear Weapons: A Secret History. Drawing by Mike Wagnon.

The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated as the so-called “Tsar Bomba” of the Soviet Union. On 1961, it was exploded off the island of Novaya Zemlya, well within the Arctic Circle. It had an explosive equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT (megatons). It was only detonated at half-power — the full-sized version would have been 100 megatons. It is thought to have been a three-stage bomb. By contrast, the the largest US bomb ever detonated was at the Castle BRAVO test in 1954, with 15 megatons yield. It was apparently “only” a two-stage bomb.

The dropping of the Tsar Bomba, 1961: an H-bomb the size of a school bus.

We usually talk about the Tsar Bomba as if it represented the absolute biggest boom ever contemplated, and a product of unique Soviet circumstances. We also talk about as if its giant size was completely impractical. Both of these notions are somewhat misleading:

1. The initial estimate for the explosive force of the Super bomb being contemplated during World War II was one equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT. As James Conant wrote to Vannevar Bush in 1944:

It seems that the possibility of inciting a thermonuclear reaction involving heavy hydrogen is somewhat less now than appeared at first sight two years ago. I had an hour’s talk on this subject by the leading theoretical man at [Los Alamos]. The most hopeful procedure is to use tritium (the radioactive isotope of hydrogen made in a pile) as a sort of booster in the reaction, the fission bomb being used as the detonator and the reaction involving the atoms of liquid deuterium being the prime explosive. Such a gadget should produce an explosion equivalent to 100,000,000 tons of TNT.²

Teller was aiming for a Tsar Bomba from the very beginning. Whether they would have supported dropping such a weapon on Hiroshima, were it available, is something worth contemplating.

2. Both the US and the USSR looked into designing 100 megaton warheads that would fit onto ICBMs. The fact that the Tsar Bomba was so large doesn’t mean that such a design had to be so large. (Or that being large necessarily would keep it from being put on the tip of a giant missile.) Neither went forward with these.

A US MK 41 hydrogen bomb.

But remember that the original Tsar Bomba was actually tested at 50 megatons, which was bad enough, right? Both the US and the Soviet Union fielded warheads with maximum yields of 25 megatons. The US Mk-41, of which some 500 were produced, and the Soviet SS-18 Mod 2 missiles were pretty big booms for everyday use. (The qualitative differences between a 50 megaton weapon and a 25 megaton weapon aren’t that large, because the effects are volumetric.)

3. Far larger weapons were contemplated. By who else? Our friend Edward Teller.

In the summer of 1954, representatives from Los Alamos and the new Livermore lab met with the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Operation Castle had just been conducted and had proven two things: 1. very large (10-15 megaton or so), deliverable hydrogen bombs could be produced with dry fusion fuel; 2. Livermore still couldn’t design successful nuclear weapons.

Norris Bradbury, director of Los Alamos, gave the GAC a little rant on the US’s current “philosophy of weapon design.” The problem, Bradbury argued, was that the US had an attitude of “we don’t know what we want to do but want to be able to do anything.” This was, he felt, “no longer relevant or appropriate.” The answer would be to get very definite specifications as to exactly what kinds of weapons would be most useful for military purposes and to just mass produce a lot of them. He figured that the strategic end of the nuclear scale had been pretty much fleshed out — if you can routinely make easily deliverable warheads with a 3 megaton yield, what else do you need? All diversification, he argued, should be on the lower end of the spectrum: tactical nuclear weapons.

Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, 1951. Courtesy of the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

When Teller met with the GAC, he also pushed for smaller bombs, but he thought there was still plenty of room on the high end of the scale. To be fair, Teller was probably feeling somewhat wounded: Livermore’s one H-bomb design at Castle had been a dud, and the AEC had cancelled another one of his designs that was based on the same principle. So he did what only Edward Teller could do: he tried to raise the ante, to be the bold idea man. Cancel my H-bomb? How about this: he proposed a 10,000 megaton design.

Which is to say, a 10 gigaton design. Which is to say, a bomb that would detonate with an explosive power some 670,000 times the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.³

If he was trying to shock the GAC, it worked. From the minutes of the meeting:

Dr. Fisk said he felt the Committee could endorse [Livermore's] small weapon program. He was concerned, however, about Dr. Teller’s 10,000 MT gadget and wondered what fraction of the Laboratory’s effort was being expended on the [deleted]. Mr. Whitman had been shocked by the thought of a 10,000 MT; it would contaminate the earth.⁴

The “deleted” portion above is probably the names of two of the devices proposed — according to Chuck Hansen, these were GNOMON and SUNDIAL. Things that cast shadows.

The Chairman of the GAC at this time, I.I. Rabi, was no Teller fan (he is reported to have said that “it would have been a better world without Teller”), and no fan of big bombs just for the sake of them. His reaction to Teller’s 10 gigaton proposal?

Dr. Rabi’s reaction was that the talk about this device was an advertising stunt, and not to be taken too seriously.

Don’t listen to Teller, he’s just trying to rile you. Edward Teller: trolling the GAC. A 10,000 megaton weapon, by my estimation, would be powerful enough to set all of New England on fire. Or most of California. Or all of the UK and Ireland. Or all of France. Or all of Germany. Or both North and South Korea. And so on.

“Don’t Fence My Baby In.” Cartoon by Bill Mauldin, Chicago Sun-Times, 1963.

In 1949, Rabi had, along with Enrico Fermi, written up a Minority Annex to the GAC’s report recommending against the creation of the hydrogen bomb. The crux of their argument was thus:

Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.

If that doesn’t apply to a 10,000 megaton bomb, what does it apply to?

Was Teller serious about the 10 gigaton design? I asked a scientist who worked with Teller back in the day and knew him well. His take: “I don’t doubt that Teller was serious about the 10,000 MT bomb. Until the next enthusiasm took over.” In this sense, perhaps Rabi was right: if we don’t encourage him, he’ll move on to something else. Like hydrogen bombs small enough to fit onto submarine-launched missiles, for example.

It’s hard not to wonder what motivates a man to make bigger and bigger and bigger bombs. Was it a genuine feeling that it would increase American or world security? Or was it just ambition? I’m inclined to see it as the latter, personally: a desire to push the envelope, to push for the bigger impact, the biggest boom — even into the territory of the dangerously absurd, the realm of self-parody.

Notes

Robert Serber, The Los Alamos primer: The first lectures on how to build an atomic bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), page 4, fn. 2. [↩]
Letter dated October 20, 1944 from James B. Conant to Vannevar Bush, Subject: Possibilities of a Super Bomb. Vannevar Bush-James B. Conant Files, Records of the Office of Scientific Research & Development, S-1, NARA, Record Group 227, folder 3. Quoted from Chuck Hansen, The swords of Armageddon: U.S. nuclear weapons development since 1945 (Sunnyvale, Calif.: Chukelea Publications, 1995), III-17. [↩]
Actually, if you take the Hiroshima yield to be 15 kilotons, it comes out to a nice round 666,666 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. But the precision there seemed arbitrary and the symbolism seemed distracting, so I’m relegating this to just a footnote. [↩]
Minutes of the Forty-First Meeting of the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July 12-15, 1954, on p. 55. [↩]

Tags: 1950s, Atomic Energy Commission, Bad ideas, Edward Teller, H-bomb, Klaus Fuchs, Manhattan Project, Soviet Union
Posted in Redactions | 21 Comments »

Visions

Enough Fallout for Everyone

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

Nuclear fallout is an incredible thing. As if the initial, prompt effects of a nuclear bomb weren’t bad enough — take that and then spread out a plume of radioactive contamination. The Castle BRAVO accident was the event that really brought this to the public forefront. I mean, the initial effects of 15 megaton explosion are pretty stunning in and of themselves:

But the fallout plume extended for hundreds of miles:

Why yes, you can get this on a coffee mug!

Superimposed on an unfamiliar atoll, it’s hard to get a sense of how long that plume is. Put it on the American Northeast, though, and it’s pretty, well, awesome, in the original sense of the word:

Of course, it’s all about which direction the wind blows, in the end.

And remember… that’s just a single bomb!

Of course, if you’re interested in the more diffuse amounts of radioactivity — more than just the stuff that you know is probably bad for you — the fallout maps get even more interesting. Here’s what the BRAVO fallout did over the next month or so after the detonation:¹

Now, you can’t see the numbers there, but they aren’t high — it’s not the same as being immediately downwind of these things. They’re low numbers… but they’re non-zero. But one of the “special” things about nuclear contaminants is that you can track them for a very long time, and see exactly how one test — or accident — in a remote area is intimately connected to the entire rest of the planet.

And, in fact, nearly everyone born during the era of atmospheric nuclear testing had some tiny bits of fallout in their bones — you can even use it to determine how old a set of teeth are, to a very high degree of accuracy, by measuring their fallout content. (And before you think atmospheric testing is a matter of ancient history, remember that France and China both tested atmospheric nuclear weapons long after the Limited Test Ban Treaty! The last atmospheric test, by China, was in 1980!)

The same sorts of maps are used to show the dispersion of radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactors when accidents occur. I find these things sort of hypnotizing. Here are four “frames” from a simulation run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on their ARAC computer showing the dispersion of radioactivity after the Chernobyl accident in 1986:²

Pretty incredible, no? Now, the odds are that there are lots of other contaminants that, could we track them, would show similar world-wide effects. Nuclear may not be unique in the fact that it has global reach — though the concentrations of radioactivity are far higher than you’d find anywhere else — but it may be unique that you can always measure it.

Yesterday I saw a new set of plots predicting the dispersion of Caesium-137 after the Fukushima accident from 2011. These are just models, not based on measurements; and all models have their issues, as the modelers at the Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Environnement Atmosphérique (CEREA) who produced these plots acknowledge.

Here is their map for Cs-137 deposition after Fukushima. I’m not sure what the numbers really mean, health-wise, but the long reach of the accident is dramatic:

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Fukushima-Daichii accident by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source)

Compare with Chernobyl. (Warning: the scales of these two images are different, so the colors don’t map onto the same values. This is kind of annoying and makes it hard to compare them, though it illustrates well the local effects of Chernobyl as compared to Fukushima.)

Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Chernobyl accident, by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source)

Lastly, they have an amazing animated map showing the plume as it expands across the Pacific. It’s about 5MB in size, and a Flash SWF, so I’m just going to link to it here. But you must check it out — it’s hypnotic, strangely beautiful, and disturbing. Here is a very stop-motion GIF version derived from their map, just to give you an incentive to see the real thing, which is much more impressive:

There’s plenty of fallout for everyone — well enough to go around. No need to be stingy. And nearly seven decades into the nuclear age, there’s a little bit of fallout in everyone, too.

Update: The CEREA site seems to be struggling a bit. Here’s a locally-hosted version of the full animation. I’ll remove this when CEREA gets up and running again…

Notes

Image from “Nature of Radioactive Fall-Out and Its Effects on Man, Part 1,” Hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Joint Subcommittee on Radiation (May 27-29 and June 3, 1957), on 169. [↩]
These images are courtesy of the DOE Digital Archive. [↩]

Tags: 1980s, 2010s, Accidents, H-bomb, Nuclear fallout, Nuclear power, Nuclear testing
Posted in Visions | 9 Comments »

Meditations

Please Do Not Smoke Next to the H-bomb

Monday, July 9th, 2012

Some sage advice, plucked from the archive, to brighten your Monday morning.

I was poking around DOE’s OpenNet site last week, as I am wont to do, and I stumbled across a fair number of documents from 1959 labeled as a “Special Weapons Retrofit Orders.”

These are basically instructions on how to make some sort of mechanical changes. So on this one, for example, the part that needs alteration is a caster — that is, a wheel:

Pretty run of the mill… until you see that the caster is mounted to a 10 megaton H-bomb. (That’s what the “special” is meant to tell you.)

…all of which makes it a bit more surreal. (That’s a Mark 21/Mark 36 casing there, for those who are keeping track at home.) I can see the importance of fixing these things — imagine if you were the one stuck with the H-bomb that had a squeaky wheel, or one that was always pulling to the right. That kind of thing gets sooo annoying.

But also, check out the ”safety precautions”:

Be sure that no open flame, lighted cigarette, or other spark potential is present when the bomb is uncovered and opened or when cleaning and/or stenciling operations are being performed.

Don’t smoke near the H-bomb, please… it’s bad for your health. Also, always remember to wear rubber gloves.

Tags: 1950s, Bad ideas, H-bomb, Special
Posted in Meditations | 4 Comments »

Restricted Data