"What the HELL were we thinking!"

A recent post at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog has a link to a video showing every nuclear explosion from 1945, When only the US had nukes, to 1998, when India and Pakistan bought into the madness. About 3 minutes into the video, you see flashes representing nuclear detonations going off one right after the other.

Check out the comments section, they address several issues, including the ongoing debate over whether the US dropping the bomb in WWII was justified.

Can you see me? Am I glowing?

:cry:

No wonder there's so much cancer.

The human portion of background radioactivity is a negligible part of the whole, as is its contribution to radiation induced cancer rates.

Did you see the nearly constant testing on the US West Coast? People sat out and watched a lot of that live, without protection, for many years. A lot was above-ground testing. The West Coast was blinking like a Christmas tree in that animation!

that he showed at the end? Talk about fouling our own nest. And what reasoning made them have to detonate 1000+? Why do I suspect they just like to see stuff "blowed up."

Are you glowing out there in LA?

...doses. (They used to spray swimming pools full of kids with DDT too.) However, in the greater scheme of things, our human contribution remains only a small blip in the overall background radiation levels.

And as simple numbers in a ledger, chemical pollutants do more damage every year than the cumulative outcome of every single above ground test.

There's no denying that we WERE stupid in exploding all those bombs just for funsies, but at least in part, it was data obtained from those tests which made that stupidity clear to us, and also made viable the argument against using nuclear explosives for mining and civil engineering.


I think much of the fear of the nuclear boogieman is down to our quantifying the potential dangers before the technology became ubiquitous and essential.

Over time, we've learned to live with the downside of "essential" coal and petrochemical fuels. Thus we find it easy to rationalise continuing to stumble along with them until a totally risk free alternative shows up. After all, it's not like the bad old days when you couldn't see the sun for coal smoke and every surface was black with coal dust and cinders, it's so much better now.

That "so much better" is still worse than an anual Chernobyl scale event, doesn't seem to penetrate with people wanting a perfect solution.

We know, at least in principle, what needs to be done to safely manage (and even reduce to near zero) the waste stream from nuclear energy. Even after 200 years we have absolutely no idea what to do with the waste from coal and hydrocarbons except pile it up or let it disperse into the environment, even though we know exactly what damage it is doing.

And yet nuclear waste is the ultimate boogieman, but coal waste is just the price of civilisation.

I've done extensive reading on this subject for years, ever since I heard the story linked below.

Boogieman my lily white ass... we clearly don't know the half of it. Your theories may hold true in "whole Earth" terms, I'm not talking averages here. I'm talking hundreds of nuclear explosions... the one I site here was an "intentional accident" and I'm willing to be this wasn't the only one. But governments aren't real big on letting the citezenry know when they have been exposed to off-the-chart levels of contamination. Please note this article is from MIT.

http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N30/nuke.30w.html

:woohoo:

:sarcasm: