Author Topic: Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads  (Read 695 times)

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rangerrebew

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Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads

By Patrick Malone, The Center for Public IntegrityJun. 29, 2017 , 8:00 AM

Technicians at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory settled on what seemed like a surefire way to win praise from their bosses in August 2011: In a hi-tech testing and manufacturing building pivotal to sustaining America’s nuclear arsenal, they gathered eight rods painstakingly crafted out of plutonium, and positioned them side-by-side on a table to photograph how nice they looked.

At many jobs, this would be innocent bragging. But plutonium is the unstable, radioactive, man-made fuel of a nuclear explosion, and it isn’t amenable to showboating. When too much is put in one place, it becomes “critical” and begins to fission uncontrollably, spontaneously sparking a nuclear chain reaction, which releases energy and generates a deadly burst of radiation.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal
« Last Edit: June 29, 2017, 12:32:41 pm by rangerrebew »

Offline Suppressed

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Holy moley...this photo made a cold chill go through me, no joke...

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