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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: 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.