I'm not certain what's the right way to do it but this has to be taken into account.
And as more countries get it, 10 and counting, we're guaranteed to have an exchange at some point. The exchange will at best break the taboo on using nuclear weapons. Or it could lead to a global exchange.
And it only makes sense to get acquire them. Not getting them, or giving up a nuclear project, is dumb geopolitics.
But we dont have a magic wand. So should the US (or any large power) unilaterally give them up?
Of course not! Thats incredibly stupid because the other super power would trample on you.
Should the super powers agree to give them up? It was tried, it failed miserably. Besides, you cant get the top N nuclear powers to give them up because then the N+1 power now is the world's eminent super power.
Even if you got all ten to agree to give them up, nukes aren't that hard for a semi modern state to acquire. Pakistan and N. Korea have them! 1970s India acquired them. That an eleventh country (out of the 50-60 or so that could build one) will acquire them is basically guaranteed.
The list of countries that are turn key capable or renounced a probably successful program is very long.
So no. We're stuck with them. And we'll probably end the world because of them. On the bright side, global warming is a much smaller concern once you accept this.
Also I think the main accident in the article was during research into converting enriched uranium for civilian use.
Note here this expression "safe and reliable", taken from the DoE's founding legislation, is officially re-interpreted to be very, very different from what a normal person would conclude.
Most particularly, "safety" doesn't mean anything about risks to the public or to people handling equipment and materials. It does not mean anything about them not exploding in their warehouse or while hanging in a bomber. It does not mean protecting against release of radioactive materials or contamination of groundwater or ecosystems.
It does not mean keeping people from stealing plutonium or whole weapons. It does not mean keeping bombs from falling out of planes at random (which has happened), or from crews setting them off accidentally or on purpose. It does not mean keeping bombers loaded with them from crashing or missiles with them on top from exploding in their silos (which have both happened).
The only responsibility "safety" places on the DoE is ensuring that, when the button is pushed, the bomb really does go boom.
"Reliability", meanwhile, means only that the boom is as big as it says in the specs.
It probably requires legislation to change these re-interpretations.
Always explode when we desire it/Never explode when we don't desire it.
About 2.5 hours (after sanitizing still-classified material).
What has to be done to make it work "exactly when we want it to go boom" and also "never when we don't want it to go boom" is fascinating.
Some of the other videos from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore are fascinating. One was about "well, how do you generate truly random numbers without leaking those numbers" (the random numbers used as crypto-keys in permissive action links), the answer turned out to be of the order of "use the radioactive decay from inside the warhead itself".
Random numbers are very easy to come by.
I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure tent and cleaned up at a cost of 2-3 billion. Apparently the government had dumped an unknown quantity of high level nuclear waste there in an unlined pit in the dirt in the 40s. This led me to research the history of the area.
After a couple of months I figured out that my house in White Rock was about 3/4 of a mile from the current waste dump for the entire lab, known as TA-53 or MDA-C or something. They were in the process of excavating the three 200 foot deep pits of MDA-C - one for low level nuclear waste, one for transuranic (as they call “high level” these days) and one for classified waste. If I stood on my roof I could see the negative pressure tents surrounding them. My favorite non-classified project which was disposed of there was the “experimental high temperature plutonium reactor”, from the 90s.
The lab has some rather interesting history. There was no concept at all of safely disposing of anything or even recording what they dumped and where until the 60s. The first ever radioactive metal working facility, out on a ridge by the entrance to town (TA 21? 23?) dumped all of their wastewater directly into the canyon untreated. This has recently been cleaned up at a cost of several billion dollars also, and now they are building homes there. The heavy/radioactive metal plumes went down into the earth over 500 feet. In fact, all of the waste from the entire lab used to be dumped into a stream in the middle of town. They cleaned it up, opened it as a park (“Acid Canyon”), then after heavy rains found some barrels they missed which were determined to contain plutonium waste. Oops, cleaned that up some more and now it’s a nature preserve and hiking area. There are still untouched facilities from the 50s where Feynman worked on polonium experiments sitting a few hundred feet from the banks of the Rio Grande.
There was a power plant right on the edge of a native reservation neighboring the lab. According to the federal government, the plume of chromium contamination it left ends exactly on the property line of the lab to the reservation.
Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them.
"The area is an industrial nuclear waste site, not a nature preserve. If you want to learn about prairies and wildlife, there are plenty of other non-contaminated areas in Colorado to visit and learn."
I mean, are they wrong? By all conventional metrics, Los Alamos County is one of the healthiest counties in the country. Obviously there are major confounders, but if it doesn’t readily show in the data maybe zero concern is the right level.
I asked one nuclear chemist what he thought about the new housing developments at TA-21 (or whatever it is), the site of the milling facility. He said "Sure, I'd live there. Well, I'd take my geiger counter".
Los Alamos is higher elevation than surrounding areas, on top of sandy soil that drains to the Rio Grande. I'd be more concerned about the health impacts on the people in the watershed. Los Alamos County has one of the highest per capita incomes and education levels in the country (I believe it has the highest percentage of PhDs), and pretty much everyone there works for the Labs, either as scientists or support staff. I'd me more concerned about the health impact on neighboring communities such as San Ildefonso Pueblo, which is quite the opposite - one of the lowest income and education levels in the country. Santa Fe is also a short distance down the river. The reservations there have indeed raised concerns about the impact of pollution on them, such as the aforementioned battle over chromium contamination.
You can solve a lot of health problems by just screening people frequently... including offsetting pretty serious pollution.
That, and the developments that get built near Superfund sites or old industrial sites. Most of a nearby town's residential areas were built on property that once had Industrial Revolution-era refineries and mills on them, back when waste was regularly just buried or dumped in streams and rivers. To this day you're warned not to eat shellfish and fish caught in the bay because of heavy metal contamination from that era. Tons of people still eat them anyway.
Can't say I'm surprised to learn that the same mindset gets applied to old nuclear waste dumps, too.
https://unmpress.com/books/making-real-killing/9780826327987
In later years when the city was no longer secret, the excuse was mostly the lazy one of "we've always done it this way."
Ever use a Geiger counter to see how safe it is around your living space?
Another fun thing, the open hiking area by my house had a sign warning that one might encounter one of dozens of types of undetonated ordinance from the 50s and 60s when they used it as a test bombing range.
There were many very healthy looking elderly people walking around the neighborhood each day, so it can't be that deadly. I actually became very ill while living there (I developed adult onset type 1 diabetes), but I don't believe it had anything to do with the area.
Hell, the article even went on to say that workers at the facility even came up with a euphemism for orders that ignored basic safety protocols, they called them "Bubba said" orders.
And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating.
Right, those Bubba said order are from a different lab, not the "profit motive" Los Alamos one.
And how exactly did they convince those employees to keep working? The employees are not making extra for not following rules, do people really just not care about their lives?
(I don't for a second believe someone working in a nuclear lab would be unaware of criticality, so ignorance can't be the explanation.)
> When this exodus was in turn noticed in Washington, officials there concluded the privately-run lab was not adequately protecting its workers from a radiation disaster.
Excellent response from those engineers.
Naval Nuclear Power has it's issues, yet it is so safe that we have almost no incidents. That's because things like this don't happen there due to the culture of safety.
That said, this is about production rather than operation, but the overall communities are relatively small and aligned.
Radioactivity is already a mysterious and fascinating and alluring phenomenon, and somehow radioactive things not looking particularly dangerous only adds to that effect.
There's something strange about ionizing radiation: it's extremely dangerous, yet we have never evolved the ability to detect it and have no intuition for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=Th....
And whenever he is required to do something, disaster occurs. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwV24Bskyw>
> There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a 10.7-percent decrease from 5,333 in 2019.
We should diligently work to reduce work injuries, especially fatal ones. It appears that LANL is a safer workplace than average and its three criticality-accident fatalities in 80 years are not a significant contributor to its overall workplace accident risk.
However, it sounds like the lab's safety staff left en masse because they felt they didn't the power to make changes to improve things. That suggests that too much power rests with management and not enough with rank-and-file workers, and that is a situation that tends to result in safety risks, because those fall disproportionately on rank-and-file workers in every workplace.`
That was my thinking too. The poster child for humane avoidance of suffering.
Should I bring high purity plutonium samples together?
|
V
Do you want to die a horrible radiated death taught in textbooks for decades?
| |
V V
No. Yes
| |
V V
Then don’t you’re fired.
Honestly this is utter madness.
Surely one of the most critical core components of America's entire nuclear deterrent should be government owned and run?
What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En...
I used to work at NREL.
I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
From reading the article you would think it's the wild west out there, but it actually has one of the most rigidly enforced safety cultures i know of among scientists. Being categorically prohibited from using machine tools as a scientist, for instance, is one of the things keeping me away from working there (if you need something made it goes into queue and machinists get to it on their own time). It wouldn't be surprising if the people actually manufacturing pits etc are effectively employees of a different organization.
First - They need a VR/AR training system that shows danger levels visually, audibly, and via any other sense that make the user instinctively aware of what they're getting themselves into. In training, they should go through all the ways you can die, just like pilots do in simulators.
Second - There needs to be new safety gear that is an interactive, networked, set of sensors to detect radiation all the way from alpha through fast neutrons, and gives immediate feedback anytime things start to go south to the user. It should also warn everyone immediately in a criticality event.
Think of it like you would the explosive gas detectors that coal miners use, but more powerful/integrated into the network.
There should be very strict rules about the access of the data gathered, to ensure people feel it won't be abused for normal office politics, etc.
Third - A management system that catches the failures in safety, and discusses them, and a rate of zero failures/year is obviously unobtainable, and should also be unacceptable. There are always mistakes, they need to be caught.
Fourth - Everyone who works in criticality related materials should be required to have a will, advanced medical directives, and recorded preferences about euthanasia signed and witnessed, to stress the ultimate danger.
Fifth - Psych screenings (One would hope they do this, but probably not)
Sixth - Review these things every 5 years.
When I last looked into this–having been surprised to see the tour buses at Livermore bearing LLC identifiers, government sites don't usually have those--there was something about the lost plutonium having been an accounting issue versus physical misplacement. I don't see that on Wikipedia anymore, so not sure.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/LOS-ALAMOS-Plutonium-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...
If you're talking about management, the Sandia Labs have have always been private. From 1948 to the 1990s they were run by AT&T. After that it was Lockheed-Martin and now NTESS.
But the facility itself is owned by the US government, as are all the National Labs. The model is called GOCO (Government-Owned/Contractor Operated).
The article you're referring to is about a spinoff facility.
Uh, good.
I would feel better about nuclear technology if it didn't keep showing up as a potential story for The Simpsons to use.
I'd expect the opposite tbh. More dangerous dust inhalation in the explosives plant.
Why? And exactly how do you mean that?
Is the safety track record of private industry worse than that of eg non-profit or state owned industry.
Private sector hospitals, which are arguably the closest direct analog with public sector counterparts, have higher rates of workplace injury than public sector hospitals. By comparison private teachers have lower rates, but work with less at risk populations etc.
PS: Reports of illness are noticeably higher in the public sector, but that likely relates to differences in PTO etc.
You can always ensure the profitable accident level stays above this with steeper penalties from regulation though.
Designing things that verify previous steps before acting on the next step is a great way to do it.
To paraphrase my dad: "there's the right way, the wrong way and the Army [0] way."
> Designing things that verify previous steps before acting on the next step is a great way to do it.
In Japanese industry, this is called "poka yoke" [1]. It is very common in the auto industry (Toyota made it real popular).
Notes:
0 - one could replace Army with Navy, Marines or Air Force with no loss of truthiness.
"In 2005, shortly before the profit-making firms wrested majority control of the laboratory from the University of California, the lab's "nuclear criticality safety program did not meet many of the" nuclear industry's standards, according to a DOE report in 2008."
The lab just doesn't have a culture of safety, it has nothing to do with profit. The profit motive was mentioned in the Japanese lab, not Los Alamos.
For example, I worked in a not-for-profit research facility. The top line managers were govt but the vast majority of workers were for-profit contractors. There was about a 9:1 contractor to civil servant ratio. On paper, it was a govt run facility but in practice, the for-profit culture dominated.
Same reason we investigate air and rail incidents much more than we investigate most car crashes.
But you aren't going to get a Chernobyl-style disaster from a criticality accident in a glovebox; Chernobyl happened inside a containment vessel that harnessed 3 gigawatts of thermal energy in normal operation, along with massive quantities of graphite moderator which caught fire and distributed radioactive material all across Europe.
Also, Los Alamos has a population of 13'200; the nearest city is 93 km away with about 930'000. Those people are very important but evacuating Los Alamos would not be nearly as difficult as evaluating Pripyat (population 49'360) — unless strict official controls on information dissemination delayed the news until it was too late, anyway.
Basically I think people are worried about nuclear fuel processing not because of its real dangers (which are significant but of a smaller order of magnitude than the dangers of fertilizer shipping, pesticide manufacture, and inadequate building codes in earthquake zones) but because of a well-justified belief that the government lies about them, along with the well-documented fact that nuclear energy was originally developed for mass killing.
We used to make fun of some of the videos giving them titles like "rattlesnakes are not your friend" or "you and your fire extinguisher" and the most entertaining "do not look into laser with remaining eye". People in Colorado are very outdoorsy, and unfortunately, rattlesnake bites were not that uncommon as there were lots of rattlesnake dens on the campus.
TL;DR - the workforce at the national labs tends to be highly educated and trained.
"Average workplace" probably isn't the appropriate comparison.
Some industries (like construction) probably wouldn't be a good comparison. By contrast, the article states LANL had more incidents than all other 23 DOE combined.
> Los Alamos's managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards
> it hasn't produced a usable new warhead core in at least six years
I want to believe that the situation is as simple as replacing some stubborn lab managers and putting a new training program in place, but who the hell shuts down operations for six years just to preserve the bro culture? I don't buy it. Bureaucracies demand contradictions all the time, though, and they never run out of surprise at the real world's failure to abide by their contradictory requirements.
> PF-4 is also the only place where existing cores removed randomly from the arsenal can be painstakingly tested
The fact that the lab has unique duties presents a unique opportunity for such a tangle to happen.
It's much worse than that. Put simply, at this late juncture, it's fucking outrageous that it happened at all!
When Harry Daghlian died from a criticality accident that occurred in August 1945 he wasn't the first to be in such an accident but he was the first fatality—and he should have been the last: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian
This accident occurred some 66 years later:
• So what the hell were these irresponsible turkeys trying to prove?
• Why weren't they trained to the extent of developing a negative Pavlovian response at even the thought of carrying out such a dangerous and risky operation?
• Where were the well-established procedures that began with Daghlian's death in 1945 and why weren't they in place and operational at the time?
• What the fuck were the nuclear safety officers doing at the time?
• And what the fuck were their bosses doing to let occupational work conditions have or reach the potential where it was even feasible for such an accident to happen let alone the fact that it did?
The fact that this accident occurred should have had heads rolling all the way from the lab across to the top of DOE because it is the responsibility of everybody in that chain of command to ensure that operating procedures are such that an accident of this kind could never happen. (Such work and operational procedures associated with it should be treated and modeled as a critical system and analyzed as such.)
Incidentally, I've worked in the nuclear industry albeit (very fortunately) never at the level of ever having to handle Pu under those conditions, nevertheless I've sufficient knowledge of regulations to know that what happened here was well outside the bounds of all normal procedures and operations.
Simply, it just shouldn't have been possible for this to happen—and even if through some force majeure—Act of God—that it was possible and that it was likely to happen then the fact that 'interlock procedures' didn't automatically drop into place as a default backup protection tells me something has seriously gone wrong with the administration of this Los Alamos lab.
But somewhat like quantum suicide, it may be the type of experiment where even a tiny chance of the corner case is still a complete turn-off. Your insides slowly liquifying seems to be one of the worst ways--possibly the worst way--to meet your end.
EDIT: In retrospect, if you're the Los Alamos version of the Hold-my-beer type--judging by the article and especially the photo, such people apparently exist--I suppose it might not be a complete turn-off. (I'm imagining the guy handing his beer and a bullet to his buddy, instructing to give him one or the other depending on the outcome.)
No one gets to play with that much radioactive stuff without all sorts of safety briefings. If you were that depressed then your co-workers would notice and would turn you in.
But you might raise some red flags if your workplace notices you doing calculations to calculate criticality experiments next to calculations of human radiation dose levels and lethality.
It would seem a little unethical to fire someone after they fried themselves & thereby performed a great service, making the next generation of techs much more likely to keep themselves both in the gene pool & lifelong contributors to scientific knowledge through their career.
Consider those fried persons & object lessons to be sort of the “Leeroy Jenkins” of their profession.
The supercritical state must be reached very quickly (with explosives) to get city-destroying power levels out of a few kilograms of plutonium. But getting enough power out of a few kg of supercritical plutonium to kill someone standing nearby is easy to do even accidentally.
* Reflecting neutrons (as in the demon core incidents)
* Bringing too much fissile material together in the same place (the cause of other accidents, the "little boy" nuclear weapon)
* Compressing a subcritical mass of fissile material with explosives such that the increased density makes it critical (most nuclear weapons)
This explains the difference between the two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality
The idea that bringing a few bars of plutonium next to each other for a photo could result in a criticality event is completely bogus.
The real issue of course, is that you want people at a facility that handles plutonium to adhere very strictly to procedures. If you don't freak out when they take some selfies, next day they'll do something else. And one day, one of these things will be stupid and lots of people will get hurt.
The demon core incident(s), the Cecil Kelley criticality incident, and others don't involve explosives. Just read through the wikipedia list[0], and you'll see that causes included dropping a tungsten brick, an unexpected pool of water, and a human torso all acting as neutron reflectors and causing unexpected criticality.
Like, dissolved plutonium solutions have to be one of the most wickedly, unexpectedly dangerous things out there, because pouring them from one container into another, stirring them vigorously, or standing too close to them can all cause them to go from "safe" to "deadly".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc...
Without documentation, and as GP mentioned, you can scour the site as much as you want... and easily miss a single buried barrel of god-knows-what, that only the guy who tossed it off the truck knows was there (if even they knew), until it finally rusts through or is punctured.
Ironically, leaking or unsealed waste sites are probably safer, because it pervades the environment, is more easily detectable, and doesn't have sudden failure modes.
With that said, I'm not sure it call all be attributed to a profit motive. The article also states that this lab was historically the best funded and generally considered above scrutiny, which led to a culture of arrogance.
> [...] the threshold most people are comfortable risking their lives for a job for [...]
This suggests that employers with a reputation for danger would have higher labour costs.
How much of a problem was it before we started mining uranium and putting it into glass? That was only 100-200 years ago, I think?
Regardless, it's clear that radiation was not enough of an evolutionary "problem" for our bodies to evolve to cope with it, beyond whatever we get from the sun. But that's just the thing! We are so used to our bodies mostly doing the right thing in response to various dangers: bitter is poison, cold is frostbite/hypothermia, burning pain is fire/burns, nausea/disgust is disease, thirst is dehydration, etc.
Ionizing radiation is weird because it literally destroys our tissues, but does so indirectly by destroying our DNA (as far as I understand anyway), but we never had any evolutionary reason to be able to "feel" our DNA being destroyed, so we evolved neither the ability to detect it happening nor the ability to see or detect radiation in the environment.
I suspect that many industrial chemicals and poisons in a similar category, e.g. many poisons are either neutral or sweet-smelling/tasting. But radiation is especially weird and scary because it's such an unfamiliar phenomenon to begin with, unlike poison which most humans seems to understand instinctively.
Which still exists.
Note that this is heavy disputed, with estimates going from under 100 to the hundreds of thousands.
> There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer.[2][3][4] However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to have occurred due to the disaster's long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe. Such numbers are based on the heavily contested Linear no-threshold model.
I think the under-100 numbers are just from the direct effects, disregarding the excess deaths among the "liquidators" and other people exposed to radioactivity after the accident.
I was more thinking of industrial accidents, for example.
In any case, when given the right incentives, profit seeking companies are excellent at promoting safety.
Similarly, bureaucrats working for organisations without a profit-motive don't magically follow the same preferences we might dream up in our armchairs. They also need to be given the right incentives.
If anything public sector industries are far far larger in terms of scale, so it's likely that 1 single public disaster trumps many private ones. However, private sector has shown time and time again that it can create huge issues, for example take the forever chemicals inside you right now that you didn't consent to having inside you.
I want to believe private and corporate is better. It's hard for me.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...
On the one hand, it's a lot of radiation, but on the other hand, that's a very long time to live. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
A very slightly worse school will likely have a much bigger effect on your kids life expectancy.
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fus...
But I would not believe that’s full disclosure. The EPA has a vested interest in finalizing superfund cleanups successfully. As far as I know, there is no oversight or third party auditing.
https://semspub.epa.gov/work/08/1985514.pdf
discusses the surface and groundwater monitoring of the downgradient plume samples and flowcharts the technical evaluation process without (that I saw on a cursory glance through) providing the raw data.
You should be able to request the raw data (Government data, freedom of infomation, etc) and chase up what it means or ask around your nearest university | friend in radiology | medicine, etc.
Not all 'radiation' is harmful, it has to be either ingested (and strong enough | toxic enough to cause health issues) or rise in concentration (outgassing of radon | other gases into enclosed basement spaces.
Currently they are monitoring the traces in downstream groundwater and staing that radiological isotopes are present (as expected) but ever downgrading (as they do).
Judgement of personal risk in that area should be made on the basis of degree of exposure to the area groundwater and its current state as time goes on.
"The area is an industrial nuclear waste site, not a nature preserve. If you want to learn about prairies and wildlife, there are plenty of other non-contaminated areas in Colorado to visit and learn."
My opinion is that they are intentionally deceiving the unwitting public when they call a place like this a nature preserve and put trails on it. If it was called so and so former nuclear waste site people would make the decision to hike elsewhere. Just call it what it is, fence it off from the public, and move on. Same with the neighborhood.
That does remind me of the incident where a technician dropped a socket off a wrench and quite nearly detonated a 9 megaton bomb in Arkansas.
Many safety rules can be summed up as “don’t be a dumbass” but trying to proceduralize that can be difficult.
It’s part of the reason nuclear stuff is so expensive - you have to work to rule every single time.
For a value of "destroy" equal to "detectable increase in cancer risk" maybe.
I remember the official reasons for attacking Iraq back then being obvious bullshit. But that might have just been a function of living in Germany where the media was against the war (because the German public was a against the war), so the media would give that impression anyway.
Never forget, Thomas Friedman was the most rabid invasion advocate at the NYT.
Never doubt that all of these people, and Colin Powell, knew all about Hans Blix's reports.
Sure, but I don't see how that relates to the topic at hand? This constraint exists for all organisations. As do budget constraints.
These types of contracts are often selected for lowest bidder. I know of one such example where the contractor was pressed during the bid process about how they could be so competitive with their quote. The retort was to the effect of "Our secret is we do more with less." Unless there really is a vast difference in capability of the competing contractors, this naturally puts downward pressure on just doing less (in the form of following certain requirements).
For a substance that needs to be ingested in high doses for an average human (even a small child) over an extended period of time, what's the harm of having a contaminated park?
You have relatively infrequent exposure, and you likely don't eat / drink from the area. That's a helluva lot safer than living in a "less-polluted" industrial site, but where you could build up toxic exposure over time.
Based on my experiences with how our children behave when they're playing in parks, I much prefer the thought of parks not being contaminated!
Small kids typically come home from parks dirty. Heck, small kids come away from pretty much anything dirty :)
Nuclear labs kill the people inside them at worst. Bio labs ... Well there's a reason why I think covid was the worst lab accident in human history.
In a previous job in a hazardous facility, I’ve had very senior managers sit me down to tell me I don’t want to get the reputation for slowing things down by enforcing safety rules. I’m personally glad I’ve moved on with my career.
Because "Covid 19 was engineered in a lab, then released" is nothing but a conspiracy theory.
And that reason likely has to do more with the fact that you're not a virologist nor someone who has a deep understanding of virus evolution and how Sars-CoV2 does what it does.
Without a non virologist investigating what happened there this is the same level of believability as cops clearing themselves of wrong doing in an afternoon.
Nuclear in general is very over regulated and over safety conscious. This leads to many pointless or overly cautious rules, which slow things down and lead to people ignoring ALL the rules, including th important ones.
I don’t think that claim can hold water in an area that 1) has the severity of this particular industry and 2) the org in question was written about because they have documented instances of very bad practices.
If it’s not sarcasm, do you think the Pu risks are overblown?
The article demonstrates a culture a LALN that doesn’t seem to do so, while the other DOE sites seem to do a better job.
The photo in this article shows a few small sticks of plutonium. They are not in contact with each other. They are not surrounded by neutron reflecting materials. The chance of criticality in that configuration was insignificant.
Of course, any journalist worth his salt will make it look like we very nearly avoided an Armageddon.
I stand by my statement: the danger in that situation was not the plutonium configuration itself, but the attitude towards safety of the workers. In that immediate instance the chance of a criticality excursion was close to nil, but if not reprimanded, those workers could have done something much more dangerous next time.
For context, modern warheads use 3kg, much less than the demon core, and the pit that you link to the guy holding is likely a hollow shell of plutonium that is then covered in steel or beryllium. The pit itself is usually ~5cm, but would be closer to 3cm if it were solid Pu.
Like, assuming that the sharpie in the controversial image is a normal one, each of the top row cylinders are approximately 6 inches long and 1 inch diameter cylinders, meaning that the top cylinders are each 1.5kg of Pu, so that image probably has like 10kg+ of Pu, almost double what was in the demon core and 3-4x what's in a modern warhead (and I think I'm generally being conservative in those estimates, so it could well be closer to 15kg!)
And modeling exactly where that point is is difficult, hence the rules and restrictions.
The reaction of those involved lends much more credence to the “stop being idiots and clean this up Homer” reading.
Yes, but that somewhere is an epsilon below the demon core. How do I know? All nuclear bombs have a core, that's more or less the size of the Demon Core. They don't go critical until they need to.
Here [1] is a photo of scientist holding a plutonium pit with nothing but gloved hands. He is smiling. He does not look like someone thinking that the likelihood of a criticality event is all that high.
Now take another look at the few sticks of plutonium in the photo. Draw your own conclusions.
[1] https://lajicarita.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/cmrr-is-no-more-...
There are probably multiple facets to this story as the article alludes to: a government funded private lab raking in the big bucks and government trying to rein them in a bit with this violation in an overly punitive way. Rendering then useless so production goes elsewhere...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile...
Reminders that things need quantification are often helpful to prevent people getting worked up over nothing or ignore important issues.
Without knowledge of the numbers saying "There's radioactivity!" should just cause a shrug.
What do you mean by "dangerous"? Because having sex with your wife is dangerous in that it increases the risk of heart attack. Some dangers are negligible increases that are worth the risk. A 0.00001% increased risk of lung cancer is negligible compared to things like air pollution from living in a city.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_fr...
There's already a fair bit in our water.
The surface layers down for a few feet are highly unlikely to have any waste (assuming the US can do a rehab properly) and the actual radiation risk is likely to be far far less than hiking in totally "natural" granite ridges where radon gases pool daily until breezes clear them out.
I take it then you are also in favour of fencing off all the red areas in the USofA radon risk map also?
It would seem to be inconsistent if you were not in favour.
https://www.nationalradondefense.com/radon-information/radon...
I said that if an explosion similar to the Chelyabinsk meteor happened there I'd need _extreme_ proof that it wasn't a nuclear explosion.
Even if there was a case where a bidder is non-profit, I can't fathom how they would bid on a project with the intent to be in the red. Maybe there are more exotic ways to run a lab, but it seems like the choice is to either figure out how to work with a profit motive or be a primarily civil servant lab.
The govt can sometimes try a "best value" award instead of low bidder, but that tends to make lawyers skittish because it opens up avenues for the losing bidders to protest the award.
Yes, exactly. Budget constraints exist for all organisations.
Profit isn't usually a big part of any budget.
Ok, but budget directly influence profit, no?
Do you have a proposed solution? How would one mitigate the "low bid" incentive?
My experience is that it creates an incentive to often create excessively low bids (to the point of not being profitable) in order to ensure a company gets a contract. And then ensure their "budget/profit" is made up by either a) cutting corners to reduce overhead or b) making change orders to increase revenue.
One solution is additional oversight, but it's not clear to me that is a feasible option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of...
Having read the article I am no wiser as to whether or not the risk is greater or lesser than a +0.001% risk of lung cancer.
My point is that we had a fenced off area where they did a bunch of bad stuff, leaked open containers of radioactive waste were left open and leaking for decades. We then went in, removed the top 3 feet of soil and replaced it with fill, and then removed the fences put trails all around and signs and advertising to call it a nature preserve. I argue that every action after and including the removal of the fencing wasn't value add to our society as a whole and shouldn't have been done. Clean it up, leave it fenced off and leave it called what it is, a nuclear waste dump that was partially cleaned up.
Of course it is important that those risks are within their control, not imposed on them by mismanagement or lack of information.
Whether or not anyone is willing to take on additional risk also misses the point. Suppose I find people who are willing to live on an aquifer that is polluted by industrial waste because it's cheap land. Does that fact make it okay for the factory in your local area to disregard EPA regulations? I say no, because you have a codified right to certain standards of clean water. It's the same with safe job sites. You'll be able to find people on construction sites willing to work unsafe conditions; that doesn't alleviate their employer from legal responsibility.
What the article is demonstrating is the inability of LANL to implement the proper mitigations, whether those are engineered, administrative, or protective equipment.
I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. What's right and wrong determines what the laws should be; the laws can't determine what's right and what's wrong. We have to determine what's right and what's wrong independently of the laws in order to figure out how they should be changed. Factories poisoning people was wrong before the EPA existed, is still wrong where the EPA doesn't have jurisdiction, and would still be wrong if the EPA allowed it.
OP said a lab accident. This could have been from an animal sample.
Everyone seems to conflate lab leak with lab manufacture (or jump further to purposeful leak).
There is no proof that it was or was not a lab leak, engineered or not, intentional or not. Whatever evidence there was has been destroyed.
I did not.
If you want some theory, then : The Wuhan Virology Institute database has been taken offline in September 2019. And investment was made in aeration systems. French intelligence agencies have been mandated to investigate in autumn 2019. (The October 2019 Wuhan military sports games would have been a good occasion.) Then, in January 2020, the passengers list for a military plane from Wuhan to France didn't match.
Those are facts too, the theory part is the way I put them together. (Could have been a coincidence of course.)
P.S.: Also relevant to the article here is the relationship between the French nuclear program and the Wuhan lab. (Both need pretty extreme safety, so I guess it's not surprising how the know-how from the former resulted in the latter !)
The guy who ran the big forklift in the lumber section was a bit of a cowboy. At the start of the night there would be a big pile of lumber, and he had to sort it and get it on the shelves. We couldn’t really run two lifts at the same time due to aisle width, so he did the job solo, and ran the equipment fast to get it done in time.
Start of shift one evening an upper manager came down and said they reviewed security camera footage, that he was driving too fast, and needed to be more careful. But how do I get it done in time, he said? She emitted the verbal equivalent of a shrug, and left.
Because, of course, she doesn’t want him to be slower, she wanted him to be more careful. To be on record as having issued a warning, so that if something happened, her ass would be covered. She couldn’t solve the problem but she could certainly apportion blame beforehand.
A formative experience for 19 year old me.
It’s worse when it’s low probability but high severity risks. Sometimes something that is critical but low probability is more easily conflated with not being a legitimate risk. I dog think it’s telling that the article made it seem like the entire safety team quit en-masse
Also:
“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.” ― Frédéric BastiatForgive me, but the tone of this comes across like talking to someone from the sovereign citizen movement. Maybe you don't think workers have the right to a safe workplace, but the majority of US society does and has passed laws to ensure it. People don't believe in workers rights because there are laws; there are laws because people believe in workers rights.
It's worth discussing if you think the law is wrong, but outright dismissing it as if it doesn't exist is a strange take. I hope for your sake you aren't a supervisor.
So if I understand your position, it's that workers should not be guaranteed a safe workplace. You point out deaths, but overlook the other non-lethal incidents. So assume their bad practices lead to a criticality event that subjected other employees to radiation exposure. Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that lead to the risk. Is that ok in your opinion as long as the number of workplace injuries is below a threshold? Is your stance that the employer can just hand wave away any responsibility by essentially telling the employee "Welp, at least you're not working in a steel mill." By contrast, worker safety regulations define workers safety in this case on a radiation dose basis, irrespective of what goes on in a steel mill. I would say that's a much more objective measure of managing worker risk.
The main point I'm making is that your comparison to the aggregate average workplace injury rate is the wrong perspective. The way organizations like OSHA look at employers is by comparing similar industries. So the safety record of a chemical processing plant isn't compared to something like a pharmacy because the nature of the risks are different. The article clearly states that LANL has a much worse safety record to comparable facilities. I agree that safety regulations can go too far, but you're selecting the wrong benchmark and using it to justify erosion away employee rights with a fairly subjective and arbitrary definition of what is determined reasonable risk.
You say, "Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that [led] to the risk." To the extent that that's true, that's not okay under any circumstances, even if OSHA approves it, and even if they're working in a country with no equivalent of OSHA. But it's important that the risk in question is really a risk that is either important to them or would be important to them if they knew what someone else knows.
I don't think most people assume laws create rights (at least, those of the inalienable variety) but they create a framework to protect those rights. That framework is what allows people to objectively determine the safety of workplace and are relevant. In the case of something like OSHA, that framework gives the employee grounds to rebalance the power dynamic with management in terms of understanding and mitigating that risk. Sometimes I think HN is so skewed towards tech that many are unable to understand that people in other jobs don't necessarily have the same leverage with their employers. Laws help ensure they are still protected.
And the fact, at LANL, that the safety team left en masse when the management wouldn't let them implement what they considered to be proper safety measures, suggests that the employees in question were in a good position to not only understand but also reject the risk.
In general, line workers are the ones whose incentives are best aligned with safety, since they're usually the ones who die (or, as you pointed out, suffer serious injuries). Sometimes they make bad decisions (as seems to have happened in this case) and sometimes they lack the information necessary — often, as you point out, because they're being lied to. Sometimes regulation helps improve that situation (it has been very useful in extorting MSDSes from material suppliers, for example) but I think much more often it results in the sort of time-wasting box-checking exercise referenced in the other comment, motivated by management ass-covering, not real safety improvements.
Usually, what improves workplace safety is decentralization of control (devolution of decision-making power down to line workers), freedom of information, high-quality coworkers, and an overall workplace culture that values safety and, as I said at the beginning of the thread, ceaselessly seeks ways to improve it. And if that makes me sound like a "sovereign citizen", so be it — even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
For the record, I've only experienced a significant workplace injury once, and the resulting disability was small enough I don't notice it most days, though the scar is obvious. I got fired for it.
>"Probably in this case the line employees are, on the most part, better informed than the management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33067293"
For instance, I would not consider 2 days of training "highly trained". I believe it's true that the LANL area has one of the highest concentrations of PhDs, but I don't necessarily think that translates to being informed about all the risks. A PhD often means a lot of knowledge, but in a very narrow field. Sometimes, that level of education can be a detriment if it fosters a false sense of general ability. I've had many experiences of Masters and PhD chemists and engineers who felt, "Hey, I'm smart. I've written some cool VBA macros. I'm sure I can program this thing. It's just software." Smash-cut to hazardous releases that cause people to have to shelter in place or firefighters being called. They were subject matter experts in one area, but not smart enough to recognize their own ignorance outside their specialty. It didn't matter that they were experts in their field or front-line workers. I also think it's wild to me that your takeaway from the article is that blatantly disregarding best practices is acceptable. It's a bit of a jump to look at the evidence in the article and assume it must be okay, 'cause, you know, they're first line employees so they must know what they're doing so best practices need not apply. As someone who used to work in safety-critical software, it scares me when I read about this same cavalier SV attitude pervading into safety-critical design like autonomous vehicles.[1] Which relates to,
>"In general, line workers are the ones whose incentives are best aligned with safety"
I think we agree that their incentives are aligned. I think where we disagree is that people on the front lines aren't always acting as rational agents. I don't think they are because of a host of competing incentives and cognitive biases. Major catastrophes bear this out. Good examples are the Challenger or Columbia disasters at NASA. To your point, there was disagreement between management and front-line employees regarding the risk. Both groups were wrong because of these biases. We just aren't wired to estimate low probability events well, especially when there are less abstract competing risks like budget and schedule. That's why NASA created a separate safety arm that was distinct from the production workers. They felt it was necessary to get an objective assessment. Note this lack of impartial judgement is also a finding in [1].
I don't disagree that there's a lot of unhelpful safety theater. But there's also an awful lot of push back against safety that's borne out of a combination of ignorance and arrogance.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/ntsb-investigation-into-deadly-ube...