When testing atom bombs in the '50s

[shraby]

they were doing above ground tests I believe in Nevada. What is the status of the ground where all the testing was done? Wouldn't it be a "hot" area, highly contaminated with radiation?
That island where they tested still isn't habitable.

[prodigal_green]

1. poison

same in Utah.

I read a book back in the 1980s called "The Day They Bombed Utah" which tracks a lot of the health problems suffered by folks who lived/worked in the area.

The book claims that John Wayne and several of the cast and crew of one of his movies died of the same cancer, caused by radioactive particles kicked up during the filming of a western.

[Bridget Burke]

12. Not a western--"The Conqueror" was the story of Genghis Khan

Starring John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Dick Powell and the Mexican star Pedro Armendariz. All as Mongols?

It was shot in Utah, "about a hundred miles downwind of the Nevada Test site". All the stars died of cancer--except for Armendariz, who shot himself rather than die slowly. This article says about 91 cast & crew members were probably victims of the radiation exposure.

www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/06.11.98/scoop-9823.html

And, by all reports, the movie was one of the turkeys of all time.

[prodigal_green]

14. Thanks for the correction and link! n/t

[htuttle]

15. Correct

Worst. Movie. Ever.

John Wayne's attempt to portray Genghis Khan is one of the great tragedies of film history, however. Even Leonard Pinth-Garnell couldn't stomach that performance.

[dflprincess]

2. This really doesn't mean anything - but it's a story I love to tell

About 20 years ago a friend and I took a cross country road trip. We were somewhere between Las Vegas and Reno and were passing a large empty area surrounded by high fences. We spotted a sign that warned people to keep out - it had been a bomb testing area. Always looking for the odd photo op we hopped out of the car, set the timer on the camera and posed by the sign...It was the only picture from the whole trip that didn't turn out - it was over exposed...Coincidence no doubt - if there was any real problem the whole roll of film would no doubt have been ruined.

[Massacure]

3. Some areas are probably safe to be in by now.

Some others won't be. It depends on how many bombs were blown up and where the winds took the radiation.

How far can the wind take the radiation anyways?

[Strelnikov_]

4. As Katherine Says To Al . . .

you don't want to know.

[shraby]

5. Depends on how windy the day when

they tested, but they tested a lot of them back then. Also, after the above ground testing was banned they did some underground testing. One just a few months ago..which I believe was against a treaty.

[Strelnikov_]

6. As I Remember, Both The USSR and US Quit Above Ground . .

testing when adverse levels of an isotope (iodine-131?) were found to be widely distributed as a result of these tests.

"Radioactive fallout from 1950s above-ground nuclear weapons testing spread farther than researchers previously realized and most increased cancer rates in the United States, according to a scientific report. "

http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/03/01/nuclear.fallout/

[DrBB]

7. There's a National Geographic from the period

...that's worth reading. 1952 or thereabouts. We had a copy of it where I used to live on the Cape with some other musicians. Amazing thing: a description of an A-test in Nevada. Glowing, gape-jawed enthusiasm as the reporter sat with the troops during the blast, then charged in with 'em (they were practicing tactical maneuvers with a-weapons), right up to the ground-zero blast point. Followed by equally glowing (no pun intended) descriptions of the mushroom cloud as it drifted off east over six or seven breadbasket states while slowly dissipating. At that point, they still thought you could fight a war with this stuff in pretty much the conventional way.

Which brings us back to your question. I'm no expert, but I do know that the radioactive products of A-bombs are very different, and much less long-lived, from those of H-bombs. And H-bombs were not above-ground tested in Nevada--they used Bikini atoll in the Pacific, before going to underground testing. It was the discovery, after the initial H-tests, that stuff like strontium-90 just wasn't going to go away for tens of thousands of years that convinced the Kennedy admin to quietly drop most of its civil defense efforts, including those nifty PSAs we used to see about how to build your own bomb shelter. They realized none of that stuff was going to do much good.

For that matter, consider: Hiroshima had one of these bombs dropped on it, but it has been rebuilt and is still inhabited, yes?

on edit: added that bit about above-ground H-testing for clarification.

[Massacure]

9. I remember hearing something about how when the U.S.

Detonated Trinity - the first ever A-bomb that it turned the desert sand into glass.

They were expecting to fight a war on glass?

[hunter]

8. I have relatives who participated in above ground testing.

One of them was in a trench very close to "ground zero."

Mostly nobody knew how dangerous it was.

[Kong]

10. Oh .....

You could walk over most of the Nevada Test Site and not suffer any problems at all. The real pollution from our end of the cold war isn't at the test sites, its at the materials production facilities. If you want to know where the really bad stuff is ask the folks around the Hanford site in south east Washington or the Savannah River Site near Agusta, SC (and N. Agusta, Georgia). Then there was the Rocky Flats site (home of the assembly of 'triggers' for the bombs) just out side of Denver.

These are the really bad sites, not the test sites. Oh, and when it came to testing the worst of the pollution wasn't ground contamination in Nevada. We blew up a couple of the big ones in the water, and it was the biggest mistake we ever made. What it gave was radioactive steam, injected immediately into the atomosphere and instantly available, full strength you might say, to rain down, litterly, on everyone downwind.

Don't worry about the Nevada test site, worry about being near one of the hundres and hundres of production sites that peppered the nation. Virtually every state was effected and some small towns you'd have never suspected.

[treepig]

11. very shaky information, scientifically speaking, but here's some info:

Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths

By Peter Eisler, USA TODAY


AP file
Soldiers watch a nuclear bomb test in Nevada in 1952.



WASHINGTON — Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers — and possibly many more — also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests. The study shows that far more fallout than previously known reached the USA from nuclear tests in the former Soviet Union and on several Pacific islands used for U.S. and British exercises. It also finds that fallout from scores of U.S. trials at the Nevada Test Site spread substantial amounts of radioactivity across broad swaths of the country. When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 escaped exposure, the study says.

Read more below



http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/02/28/usat-nuke.htm

[Enraged_Ape]

13. You can actually tour the Trinity site (1st A-bomb test) twice a year

Once in April and once in October.

They say the background radiation is ten times that of normal, but supposedly not too bad if you only spend about an hour there. Less radiation than you'd get from a coast-to-coast airline trip.

At least that's what the government says. They say a lot of things.

http://www.atomictourist.com/trinity.htm

[Xithras]

16. Visitable, yes. Habitable, no.

I have a geek co-worker that has a weird fascination with visiting old military sites. He's visited the Titan Missile Museum, the Trinity Test Site, Doom Town (Nevada Test Site), and a number of other old nuclear sites. Most sites will irradiate you with 1-5mR an hour. Since the average American picks up 80-100mR a year anyway from natural sources, short visits into these areas wont hurt you one bit. Habitability is a different story, as a little math shows that a home built on the Trinity site would be exposed to 8760mR a year, a level guaranteed to kill you.

He brought me back a nice lump of Trinitite though...it's a pretty green, only slightly radioactive, and it's a great conversation piece when I want to chase someone out of my office :)

[treepig]

20. do you have (easy-to-understand) information on the cumulative

effects of radiation?

and how such factors should be factored into making determinations of levels "guaranteed to kill you?"

first, it is not exactly clear what numerical level of radiation is guaranteed to kill you, possibly because "The lethal exposure for humans is not well known due to a lack of data and an unwillingness for individuals to volunteer as prospective subjects for such a study."

the website abovely quoted, namely:

http://resources.yesican.yorku.ca/trek/radiation/final/data_rad_exposure.html

then provides an estimate for the lethal dose for humans to be 2.50 - 4.00 Sv (1 Sv = mrem). despite this uncertainty, the 87.60 Sv level you mention at the test site is well above this level so on the surface you appear justified in making this claim.

however, if the effects of radiation exposure simply accumulate over time, the 100 mrem you cite as background radiation suggests that we should all die between the ages of 25 and 40 (because that's when we'd exceed the "lethal dose"). since many of us have miraculously survived past those ages, simply accumulating exposure in a linear fashion cannot be the correct approach to use. instead it is the acute dose that will kill you if you are exposed all at one time. since the test site exposure of 0.01-0.05 sV/hr is well below the lethal threshold of 2.5-4.0 sV, it's not surprising that visitors can survive.

indeed, the cellular damage resulting from radiation exposure is repaired on a "real-time" basis (unless the threshold is exceeded, then repair is unlikely to occur at all, and you'll die of acute radiation sickness). so, if you consider the exposure for a whole day (although cellular damage is repaired much quicker, we'll use this length of time as a worst case scenario), the "acute" maximum exposure at the test site would be between 0.24 and 1.2 Sv - somewhat/considerably below the lethal dose. consequently, people could probably live at the test site and be just fine (i'll bet animals flourish there, as much as they can considering it's the "barren" desert, much like they do in the chernobyl exclusion zone).

[ArkDem]

17. Bikini Atoll....people live there

http://www.bikiniatoll.com/

[diamond14]

18. American land is STILL toxic, and the island is GONE...(PHOTOS)

The costs to POISON OURSELVES was only written up ONCE...and the military went crazy....here's the cost of poisoning ourselves (and it's not included in pentagoon budgets, separated out as DOE, VA, Interior, and other Federal agencies to make it look much smaller)...

Atomic Audit
http://www.brookings.org/press/books/atomic.htm

"Since 1945, the United States has manufactured and deployed more than 70,000 nuclear weapons........As early as 1950, nuclear weapons were considered relatively inexpensive— providing "a bigger bang for a buck"—and were thoroughly integrated into U.S. forces on that basis. Yet this assumption was never validated. Indeed, for more than fifty years scant attention has been paid to the enormous costs of this effort—more than $5 trillion thus far—and its short and long-term consequences for the nation.

a few photos from Atomic Audit....
http://www.brookings.org/fp/projects/nucwcost/photos.htm




Troops participating in exercises at "Camp Desert Rock" (the Nevada Test Site) observe the formation of a mushroom cloud following the detonation of the Dog test on November 1, 1951. This test involved a 21 kiloton device dropped from a B-50 bomber. The device exploded at a height of 1,417 feet (432 meters).


The same scene, moments later

Credit: Defense Special Weapons Agency

here's where the pentagoon REMOVED an island just for fun....


The mushroom cloud formed by the "Mike" test of an experimental thermonuclear device rises above Enewetak Atoll, November 1, 1952. The "Mike" device used liquid deuterium and required extensive cryogenic cooling equipment. It weighed 164,000 pounds (74,546 kilograms) and had a yield of 10.4 megatons.


The above photograph shows five of forty named islands comprising Enewetak Atoll before the "Mike" test (the gray areas surrounding the islands are coral reefs). The test completely vaporized the island of Elugelab as well as portions of Sanil and Teiter (below), leaving a crater 164 feet (50 meters) deep and 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) wide.



Credit: U.S. Air Force

[ShaneGR]

19. The underwater testing in the Pacific did far more longtime damage

There is a movie called "The Atomic Bomb Movie" that covers all of the American and some of the Russian testing. It's available on DVD Anyways, the underwater testing caused terrible underwater and above ground contamination. Although you have to dig a foot beneath the surface now to register on a geiger counter, many of the plantlife and animal life still show the affects even 50 years later. Fish deformities, barren coral reafs, dead islands, etc. Part of the problem was the first test underwater, where the US underestimated the increased yield of an underwater explosion. Literally, the test takers almost blew themselves up from over 2 miles away. The shockwaves caused tidal wave like conditions in dozens of locations.