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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the still-glowing-to-this-day dept.

The NYT reports that thousands of visitors converged Saturday on the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb was detonated nearly 70 years ago. Many posed for pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off and were also able to see a steel shell that was created as a backup plan to keep plutonium from spreading during the explosion. "It brought a quick end to World War II, and it ushered in the atomic age," Erin Dorrance said. "So out here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico changed the world 70 years ago." Pete Rosada, a Marine Corps veteran, drove with another military veteran from San Diego to make the tour. Rosada said he previously visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese targets of atomic bombs during World War II after the test at the Trinity Site. "This completes the loop," said Rosado.

Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:51AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @12:51AM (#167274) Journal

    If you ingest or drink radioactive particles that's way worse than to be exposed externally.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:23AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:23AM (#167277) Homepage Journal

    It is chemically similar to calcium. If you ingest it, inhale it, get it into your eyes it will eventually get into your bones, then irradiate your bones.

    I think Uranium gets into your fat but I am unclear.

    Aside from their radioactivity, many heavy metals are also chemically toxic. I strongly suspect that I myself have neurological damage as a result of inhaling mercury vapor when I was a kid.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:30AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:30AM (#167279) Journal

      How did you get exposed to Mercury vapor? especially as a kid.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by KilroySmith on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:38AM

        by KilroySmith (2113) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:38AM (#167282)

        Generally amalgam dental fillings, or perhaps playing with Mercury (not uncommon when I was a kid).

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:30AM

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:30AM (#167292) Homepage Journal

          My first really serious career choice was to be a Chemist - that is, to do Chemistry research as a University Professor. I was quite serious about this.

          My father encouraged it as he had been a chemist at one time.

          Though my mother had no clue about Chemistry, she encouraged it as her father was a surgeon.

          Mom gave me about two ounces of Mercury. She had no clue how dangerous it was. Dad should have known but he never said anything; at the time he was very focussed on his MSEE studies.

          It is quite cool to hold liquid Mercury in the palm of your hand. The way it moves and feels, it is as if it is a living creature. But it is both very dense, yet has a very very low viscosity. Inevitably it spills onto the ground.

          I didn't want it to go to waste so I would suck it out of the carpet with a glass eyedropper but it wasn't really possible to get it all up.

          What leads me to suspect Childhood Mercury Vapor Inhalation Poisoning is that I am diagnosed with a whole bunch of quite serious mental illnesses and neurological conditions, yet I have a bachelor's in Physics, while I didn't complete my PhD I did well in grad school and have been a coder for 27 years. It is uncommon for anyone with Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder to hold a regular job.

          What led me to suspect the Mercury poisoning is that I have trouble regulating my body temperature. Other people who are in the same environment as I am don't experience that.

          --
          Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:53AM

            by frojack (1554) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:53AM (#167309) Journal

            Most outward presentations involve symptoms you don't mention [wikipedia.org], and take significant exposure over a long period.

            Unless you ingested quite a bit of it, or handled it for a long period of time, I doubt it had any affect on you. It is absorbed through the skin, but this takes prolonged exposure.

            I had quite a collection of mercury as a kid, harvested from mercury tilt switches out of thermostats. My 7th grade science teacher gave me a sturdy vial of mercury to help with a science experiment because my collection wasn't sufficient. Nobody seemed to have any concern about mercury at the time. Even though the ill effects of prolonged exposure were well known, short term risks, (which are subtle and manifest over years) were largely ignored back in the 60s.

             

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            • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 07 2015, @04:56PM

              by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 07 2015, @04:56PM (#167498) Homepage Journal

              In a small room, the vapor from just one drop will kill you.

              The symptoms I experience are specifically those of childhood mercury vapor inhalation poisoning.

              The rest of my family experienced neurological symptoms as well.

              --
              Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
              • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @09:32PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @09:32PM (#167602)

                In a small room, the vapor from just one drop will kill you.

                That isn't supported by my experience playing with broken thermometers, nor by toxicology studies [epa.gov]. Experiments sensitive to vibration, like the Michelson-Morley [aip.org], were done by floating apparatus in a substantial (as compared to a single drop) pool of mercury.

                Maybe if you were talking about something like dimethylmercury, then that would be a different story. Or, if you heated your drop of mercury to 357C and boiled it to vaporize it all very quickly, stuck your head over it, then inhaled it all at once, even that would be a stretch; maybe let your toddler inhale it all at once, then that would probably be an issue. Sit a few drops of mercury out in a "normal" sized room and the vapor is well under the OSHA safe limits.

      • (Score: 1) by SacredSalt on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:15AM

        by SacredSalt (2772) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:15AM (#167327)

        Mercury was also used in a LOT of interior and exterior paints. I find it pretty obnoxious that this was used in interior paints, and no real thought was given to it. Apparently it had some sort of stabilization property for the paint.

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 07 2015, @10:52AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @10:52AM (#167388) Journal

          Guess it's the "NEW SHINY THING" that hit a whole society and subsequent careless use. We are probably doing the same mistake with nano particles, epoxi and reinforcement materials for polymer products.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:37AM (#167281)

      neurological damage as a result of inhaling mercury vapor when I was a kid.

      Nope. It's from gulping down Richard Feynman's semen in college. Tell us more about The Fine Man, O Great One.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:24AM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:24AM (#167291) Homepage Journal

        One hour each wednesday at 5:00 PM. You could ask any question you wanted - not just physics - provided it was purely conceptual and did not require him to work out any mathematics.

        I understood quantum mechanics well enough to get good grades on my homework but regarded it as delusional because I was so heavily into the Classical Newtonian idea of the Clockwork Universe. Five months of physics x enabled me not only to believe quantum indeterminism, but to gain a deep insight into it. This was mostly the result of discussing the two-slit experiment. (Wikipedia should have an article about it.)

        The clincher for me was that the experiment works with electrons, not just light, and that one could use a very low current so that one could detect the shot noise of individual electrons jumping off the filament. Despite that the interference pattern still forms.

        I'll have more to say later, right now I gotta go find something to eat.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:35AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:35AM (#167293)

          When examined closely enough, the universe can be downright indecisive.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:57AM (#167310)

      > I strongly suspect that I myself have neurological damage as a result of inhaling mercury vapor when I was a kid.

      To be honest, we all suspected it too, but didn't want to say anything.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:02PM (#167414)

        I actually had thought something more akin to the "autism spectrum", but what do I know?

        of course, my employers had once let out on accident that they describe me to others as the really smart guy that is a high functioning autistic because he has quirks, like disagreeing with blind obedience to them and not being motivated by slogans they found on the internet.

        They said it explained why I did not drink with them after work and why I was smarter than them (I couldn't be normal and smart, I suppose). Of course, they did not realize that I do/did not drink with them after work because they generally spoke of others in a negative way even before they started drinking and then expected you to agree or heap on the insults to someone not there to hear it. It seems that perhaps they are not high functioning enough to realize it? I guess not wanting to get drunk with your bosses is the sign of a mental health disorder on top of the daily insubordination of being paid to put up managers who believe that we should work harder so they can afford another vacation to vegas while saying there was no money to provide as an incentive to work the weekend billing at an OT rate that we as salaried employees see no part of--but there might be a bonus in it for us if they win big! So everyone start working hard so the owner can go to vegas!

        All of these things end up with me getting described as being a high-functioning autistic obstacle to their success. It may be that I have mental health issues, but it is because of work, not because I brought them with me to work...

           

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by SacredSalt on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:25AM

    by SacredSalt (2772) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:25AM (#167328)

    Hot particles are always the bigger problem. My main issue with nuclear power is not that it operates on the edge of a serious event continuously -- its that there are always leaks and always water going where you don't want it. Its just not possible to build a vessel to hold it under the heat and other pressures its on forever. Water carves canyons and caves if you give it long enough, and add a mess of heat to the mix and it does it even more effectively. The water coming out of the plants from those releases tends to contain things like radioactive tritium -- which is not so pleasant if it lands in your drinking water. Its nice when the talk about dilution, but dilution doesn't matter if the hot particle gets stuck in an area that causes the chain reaction that leads to cancer or vascular issues in your body!

    For people that think I'm kidding, you would be hard pressed to find a reactor operating in USA today that is 40 years or more old (which would be pretty much all of them) which hasn't had some major release of contaminated water, many of them several million gallons over time). Maybe that is okay if it flows into a river and settles somewhere ... Its generally not so good when it flows into the aquifer that you get all of your drinking water from. That water tends to contain a lot of other radioactive particles as well, but usually in lesser quantity.