... as well as once in 1968, twice in 1972, and once in 1981. 0.o
The USSR had a whole program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. [1] Sadly, some of these experiments went rather wrong, unexpectedly releasing lots of radioactive nasty near populated areas. The US also did this sort of thing from 1961 to 1973, and the program was cancelled in '77. [2]
Here's a timelapse of every nuclear explosion since 1945. It really puts into perspective just how many nukes have gone off for purposes other than to kill people. It's amazing that only two were used for violence.
Arguably most of the nuclear tests were done to prevent war. Each side wanted to show the other they could match and one-up them in nuclear tech. Neither really wanted to ever actually use them to kill people.
Plenty of people on both sides really wanted to use them. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kissinger, being one of them. Fortunately, cooler heads held the launch codes and we all prevailed.
This and a few others. Going through the wired archives you'll find many examples of nuclear false alarms and brinkmanship where the only thing stopping annihilation is an officer ignoring or delaying the order to launch [1][2].
I think a lot of people on both sides were prepared to use them. Fortunately only a very small number of people wanted to use them and were in any position to actually do so.
Other way around. We had the Trinity test, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and then we set off the rest. Unless you meant "preparations" for killing more people with our nuclear weapons, in which case you may be correct.
The latter tests arguably weren't performed to improve the killing capabilities of the bombs but rather to understand the physics and physiological impacts of bomb blasts. Given that it's possible (albeit unlikely) we never see a nuclear weapon used in war again I don't see it as being completely obvious.
I wonder if it will help us communicating with possible extra terrestrial intelligence. If there is some kind of SETI in other world then I guess it would be easier for them to detect nukes explosions than 1936 olympics.
Maybe we'll end up using nukes as kind-of-morse code communication? ;>
There are definitely more than those listed. Vela incident, for instance...
I know that this seems deep into tin-foil-hat territory, but do you recall Chelyabinsk? Lots of evidence to point to it being hit by an AMM (probably Gazelle) with a mini-nuke warhead.
What?! Not what I said - the Chelyabinsk meteor was a large ferric bolide, which isn't the kind of meteor which typically airbursts - that's reserved for less dense material. Many of the videos of it breaking up show an object approaching it at huge velocity from the rear the moment before it breaks apart, with many fragments accelerating relative to the previous speed of the bolide - again, not typical break-up behaviour - that would be the Gazelle, automatically intercepting a high speed object entering highly protected military airspace. The Gazelle operates by detonating a highly directional, shaped, small, nuclear warhead, in order to utterly destroy a re-entering MIRV - their primary purpose.
I would have thought that the detonation of a nuclear weapon near to the meteor (particularly an ABM which typically use "enhanced radiation" warheads) would have made the remnants fairly "hot" due to neutron activation.
I haven't seen any reports that the remnants of the meteor are radioactive?
2) Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs, not uniquely in ABM systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
Fine - it's not definitely the case that this happened, but there's enough information floating about to make it far more than plausible.
"Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs"
"Neutron bomb" is another name for an "enhanced radiation weapon" - basically an H-bomb designed to give off large amounts of neutron radiation. So you would expect anything close to the explosion of such a device (and therefore exposed to a very high neutron flux) to have pretty clear indications that would be easy to test for.
I can't find any reliable sources, so treat this as my own speculation. I heard that there were programs for a while in two big countries with acronyms starting with US that aimed into exploration of causing earthquakes/tsunamis that would hit across the word by using multiple underground nukes and constructive interference.
I would suspect this was more for propaganda effect -- local populations would understand better a threat if it was related to something devastating they actually had experience off.
The US proposed many peaceful uses of nuclear explosives, mostly in the 60s. The catchall term for these proposals was "Project Plowshare" or "Operation Plowshare" [0].
> And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more - Isaiah 2:3-5
This puts me mind of Herzog's fantastic documentary, Lessons Of Darkness [1], about the crews putting out the oil well fires in Kuwait. Also, the Door To Hell [2] in Turkmenistan.
the odd thing about the Herzog film though is that it includes a narration that casts the images into a kind of scifi story unrelated to Kuwait/Iraq, rather than a documentary. The filming is amazing though.
No, not really. You can tell a true story with a narrative film, or a documentary; what Herzog believes is that there is a truth beyond a strictly factual accounting, and he makes movies informed by this belief. There are a variety of techniques, but the most obvious is inserting himself into someone else's story, whether this is talking explicitly about the difficulties of making Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, or the scenes in Grizzly Man where he views Treadwell's death footage and then makes an in-camera judgement about showing it more widely; or basically all of Little Dieter Needs To Fly, wherein he takes Dengler back to Indochina and subjects him to much of the same suffering he experienced in his escape.
This also works in reverse, of course, notably with Fitzcarraldo, where he replicates an insane feat of human ingenuity that wasn't actually part of the real life Fitzcarrald's story.
In any event, all of Herzog's movies are worth viewing from my highly fan-boyish perspective.
> "no radioactivity above background levels was detected at the surface of the ground during post-shot surveys."
the wording on that makes me very suspicious of what was found "under surface of the ground" after they resumed drilling the gas/oil...
Edit: yep. apparently this is Public Relations Speak. The wikipedia for the US plowshare tests do mention that all gas they extracted after using nukes to open way had very high levels of radiation and they could only be used in a few industrial places.
Eric Schlosser's _Command and Control_ is an eye-opening read on this subject. It's hard to fathom how seemingly cavalier the US and USSR were about nuclear explosions in the decades after their invention. Nuclear landmines! Nuclear rifles!
Unfortunately the mere mention of "Nuclear" is a trigger word for most people, which is a tragedy considering that due to all the mistakes that were made in the past we have started to (finally) move to safer ways of using Nuclear Power.
If we were realists about Nuclear energy like other forms of energy, we should have been entering a golden age of Nuclear right about now.
(Not entirely sure if that's because people with serious illness are scared of the work "nuclear", or if it's because the President couldn't pronounce it...)
I don't think there is much "supposedly" about it - Carter was a highly trained nuclear engineer as part of the US Navy nuclear power program under Admiral Rickover. Indeed Carter led a team to help with the NRX reactor accident in Canada.
"The painstaking process required each team member, including Carter, to don protective gear, and be lowered individually into the reactor to disassemble it for minutes at a time. During and after his presidency, Carter indicated that his experience at Chalk River shaped his views on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including his decision not to pursue completion of the neutron bomb."
For modern fast reactors it really is. Nuclear waste paranoia is one of the main things that holds back feasible cheap green energy in the modern world.
You cannot simply brush aside this issue. Even if we have 100% safe reactors, generating waste that is deadly in a thousand years is simply not a good idea, no paranoia involved.
Besides: nuclear had its chance - they blew it because of greed and sloppiness, the usual thing that happens when large organizations deal with complex issues. I am 100% sure that even with novel reactor designs the same "human factor" would generate accidents like we have seen with the old designs.
Greed and sloppiness? Everyone will grant you that in the case of the Soviet nuclear energy program and the result with Chernobyl, but beyond that, there's nothing to support your argument. If anything, the fact that the only significant accident was the result of human error magnified by institutional decision-making is a remarkably positive argument. Modern reactor designs and procedures are radically different than they were back in the 60s. Ignoring the progress of technology and the safety benefits that it results in is an incredibly narrow-minded position. We learn from history in every other field; what supports your conclusion that nuclear power is somehow different?
There's a huge difference between any nuclear power plant and the Hanford Site, which was setup as a wartime production facility. The majority of the river contamination took place in the early years, from 1945 to 1951 when knowledge, technology, and experience was extremely limited at the time compared to today. At the time, they sacrificed environmental concerns for expediency because they had a war to win. Even if they knew exactly what would happen in the years and decades afterwards, I'm fairly certain that the same decision would be made. We're stuck with the cleanup, but there's nothing about the situation that would suggest the possibility of a repeat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power...:
"In 1990, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) ranked the failure of the emergency electricity generators and subsequent failure of the cooling systems of plants in seismically very active regions one of the most likely risks. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) cited this report in 2004. According to Jun Tateno, a former NISA scientist, TEPCO did not react to these warnings and did not respond with any measures.[35]
Filmmaker Adam Curtis mentioned the risks of the type of boiling water reactors cooling systems such as those in Fukushima I,[36] and claimed the risks were known since 1971[37] in a series of documentaries in the BBC in 1992 and advised that PWR type reactors should have been used.
Fukushima had been warned their seawall was insufficient to withstand a powerful tsunami, but the seawall height was not raised in response"
Still no indication of greed, sloppiness, cut-corner mentality and general incompetence?
It's not paranoia. There are legitimate concerns about storing nuclear waste. It's not perfect and it is expensive. Wouldn't it be better to be able to skip past these problems onto something without those drawbacks?
Very substantial amounts of nuclear waste already exist.
Stopping making more doesn't make the problem go away (...at least for many thousand years). I'm more optimistic that current waste will be reprocessed or stored safely if nuclear power generation continues than if it all gets quietly forgotten.
A modest proposal would be to slowly depopulate Micronesia and store all our radioactive waste there (we already tested nukes there once anyway). It's either that or let the ocean reclaim the islands over the next 100 years. So we might as well get some cheap energy out of the deal.
You are getting downvoted without explanation here. It's a reasonable thought except for a few things. First of which is our space launch and delivery systems aren't 100% reliable. Even one failure means nuclear debris spread over a wide distance - something that would be very difficult to recover from.
I couldn't find a good document from a quick googling, but this was high on the list: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2013.html 81 launches and 3 failures. I don't particularly like those odds.
Aside from safety, there's another insurmountable obstacle to space disposal: cost. You may not appreciate just how much spent fuel there is. I did the math once. Launch cost per pound, times number of pounds of waste, came out to over $1 trillion. Orders of magnitude away from feasibility, even with advancements in launch technology.
Compared to a golden age of climate change? In the US, political fear-mongering under Carter killed fuel re-processing; even though it's currently less economical, the ability to lower high-level waste to 1/5th current levels is the sort of thing that can shift the analysis compared to long-term storage. Beyond that, Gen-IV reactor designs can be used to close the nuclear fuel cycle while a number of them can also be used to recycle current waste.
In any case, I'm not sure people realize just how little waste has been produced by volume. Even with the once-through fuel cycle, it's a manageable issue. The biggest problem remains NIMBYism and posturing. It might not be a silver bullet, but it's the damn closest to it.
We're already in a golden age of nuclear waste. Due to the same irrational fear and NIMBY attitudes that has held back modern nuclear power we don't have a good way of dealing with our current waste. It's piling up all over the place.
Nuclear energy is hugely susceptible to black swan events, with very serious environmental and monetary consequences. Even the best, safest run facility, in an instance of sabotage, terrorism, conflict, or simple unexpected event (seismic, extreme weather), can turn into a maelstrom of troubles that will endure for thousands of years.
Further the nuclear industry is one with a very poor track record of promises versus delivery. The cheap power, for instance, tends to turn into expensive power when plants need to be refurbished at mind-boggling costs (such as here in Ontario where we've gone from the cheapest power in North America, courtesy of huge hydroelectric benefits, to one of the most expensive because of our nuclear legacy). And the waste issue remains a significant issue.
Nuclear was a great alternative to fossil fuels. It is a very poor alternative to alternatives (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc), and simply increasing energy efficiency.
Thorium reactors do not work reliably (just have a look at those that where actually built). The current designs do not work - we don't even have an idea how to do it right in theory. They absolutely are not less complex and are not in any way safer than any other nuclear reactors.
The big countries had their way with peaceful nuclear technology. Now, the smaller/weak ones are denied their own nuclear research and tech. forced to buy tech from the rich or get sanctioned to oblivion.
I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned Project Orion[1] which involved using atomic bombs to propel a spacecraft.
Seems a little hare-brained to me, but they took it pretty seriously back then. Of course, it was all just theoretical, which might be the reason nobody brought it up in this discussion.
The US also had several plans for using nuclear explosions for non-military purposes:
The project team wanted to blow a path for a railway line through California’s Bristol Mountains; they wanted to use nukes to expand the Panama Canal; and they wanted to use underwater explosions to carve out a harbor in Alaska.
I believe nuclear charges are not only used to stop spill but also to release natural resources. However I did not find a reputable source of information to confirm that.
You might be thinking of the natural gas stimulation experiments performed by the US in the 70s[1]. From that article, "it was found that the three blast cavities had not connected as hoped, and the resulting gas still contained unacceptable levels of radionuclides" so it never went past the experimentation phase.
We quickly realized that bacteria have evolved to eat oil, so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected. I would not expect radiation to improve the situation at all.
Around the time of the Deepwater Horizon accident, I recall that there was some speculation about the ocean floor being fragile and breaking, causing a vast release of oil and methane.
So the answer to "into what" would be to collapse into the oil-filled voids within the floor.
It's just something I heard on the news when this was news. Maybe it was complete nonsense. Sorry if I offended anyone with my comment!
There aren't any oil-filled voids within the ocean floor. Oil and gas is contained in pourous rock, but the oil-containing rock is mostly solid. In the Deepwater Horizon case, it was also more than five kilometers below the ocean floor, so in other words very far underground.
I have heard the same speculations you refer to in the news, but I think they instead refered to the topmost portion of the well being destroyed, creating cracks in the top of the shaft of the well and allowing oil to leak in all directions. I am not a geologist, so I don't know how plausible these worries were.
I note that the FDA didn't find a problem with food safety (http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencie...) the Wikipedia page references an unreliable Vice/MotherJones article. Not finding much on its side effects from research though. Do you have some additional pointers?
I was mostly using Google Scholar to look for peer reviewed work with the keywords 'corexit toxicity' There are a about a dozen papers on the first page, of the ones I could read without jumping various firewalls the conclusions tended toward 'less toxic' than 'more toxic'. Would love to see a meta analysis too but didn't dig one up.
Obviously, but what does that comment have to do with anything? So corexit is harmful. My gp was talking about nuclear explosions and bacteria, not corexit.
The grandparent also said, "so it wasn't quite as big of an environmental disaster as first expected." The comment about corexit would appear to refer to that part.
You could argue that it was or wasn't as big of a disaster as expected, but the corexit comment was certainly relevant regardless.
When I saw the date and the location of Uzbekistan, I thought it was related to the huge earthquake (7.5) of 1966 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. But it looks like the bomb was exploded in September but the earthquake was in April.
Suddenly the scenes in the movie Hellfighters (1968) (starring John Wayne) don't seem so dangerous or exciting. Somebody should do a reboot, but using a nuclear bomb instead of TNT.
(Although in terms of safety I suppose I'd much rather be on team nuclear than team TNT. But Hollywood can add the requisite tension and danger.)
This whole article is about how a controlled explosion was the best strategy against a big fire, and then you rock up and chime in with "actually controlled explosions are the best strategy against big fires".
Duh! That's what the article was talking about!
It's like everyone was talking about how the sky is blue, and you come along as say "actually the sky is blue".
HN doesn't tolerate jokes well because they are usually a disruption to the conversation. If you want to make a joke here you can, but you have to ask yourself whether the joke is lame and a distraction or original and funny enough to derail the conversation momentarily. If your joke gets downvoted into oblivion that's a sign that people feel it's the former.
I generally feel that jokes on HN are acceptable if they are contained within an otherwise useful comment. If you make a comment just to make a joke that's what's not acceptable.
I doubt that anyone was offended. But you will find a very strong negative reaction to jokes in the comments. I think there is a (very wise) desire to avoid a reddit type culture that rewards extended jokes and similar things.
This may well be the community for you, but just be aware that a lot of people are justifiably frightened of what can happen to online communities.
I think a good rule of thumb would be 'would be a waste of someone's time to read this comment'. People value the possibility that we can learn valuable things on Hacker News, but that becomes impossible if you have to wade through layers and layers of pointless jokes.
Not intending to be unwelcoming, but I think it can be a surprise.
> 'would be a waste of someone's time to read this comment'
That's not a good example to use for jokes because people can justify lighthearted humor as an improvement to their day. Having fun is healthy for you, and whatnot.
I think a better way to deal with it is to say that there's a time and place for comedy and HN is not usually that place.
The problem is that some vague reference to a shitty movie isn't fun. There's no witticism in his comment is there? He's effectively saying "this situation can be related to one in a movie".
But I viewed the parallels as interesting and thought others might be interested as well. In the future I'll be sure to make my comments dead pan serious without any humor.
You've been here for almost a year. Have you read the guidelines for HN? Specifically "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
In general, comments in this community move the discussion forward. I'd argue that your original comment added nothing to the discussion and was not intended to, which was the reason I downvoted it.
The USSR had a whole program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), called Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. [1] Sadly, some of these experiments went rather wrong, unexpectedly releasing lots of radioactive nasty near populated areas. The US also did this sort of thing from 1961 to 1973, and the program was cancelled in '77. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare