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