Atomic Accidents Quotes

“Every unmeasured system is assumed to be critical. It is the same as finding a pistol sitting on a table. Assume that it is cocked and loaded.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“As long as nuclear engineering can strive for new innovations and learn from its history of accidents and mistakes, the benefits that nuclear power can yield for our economy, society, and yes, environment, will come.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“For some reason, a cache of thousands of rusting, leaking poisonous nerve-gas cylinders in Aniston, Alabama, does not scare anyone, but the suggestion of fission products stored a mile underground at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, causes great concern.”
― James Maheffey, Atomic Accidents

“Admiral Hyman Rickover pushed his passion for a nuclear-powered submarine as hard as he could without being formally charged with criminal intent, and he was rewarded with one of the most successful projects in the history of engineering. His finished prototype submarine, the USS Nautilus, was all that he had hoped. First put to sea at 11:00 a.m. on January 17, 1955, she broke every existing record of submersible boat performance, made all anti-submarine tactics obsolete, and never endangered a crew member.”
― James Maheffey, Atomic Accidents

“Care was supposedly taken in the building’s design to ensure that no enriched uranium would ever be in a critical-sized or -shaped container, so no criticality alarms were called for in the license. An accidental criticality of any kind in this facility, run by highly disciplined Japanese laborers, was not a credible scenario.182”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The concept was elegant, very lightweight, appealing to engineers, mechanically complex, expensive, and notoriously subject to random failure.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“After the war was over, the British were very disappointed to learn that all the camaraderie and warm feelings of brotherhood were blown away by the United States Congress Atomic Energy Act of August 1946, forbidding any sharing of atomic secrets with anyone, even close allies.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Just about any country having some physicists and engineers could figure out how to build an A-bomb, but producing the materials for this bomb was where the secrets lay.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Be that as it may, the problem of human squeamishness at having an A-bomb explode overhead could be addressed. Simply explaining to soldiers that a nuclear detonation at 10,000 feet was not the same as having it go off at 1,000 feet was true but insufficient. To the soldiers it was a matter of degree. At the high altitude there would be no ground disturbance. No radioactive dust kicked up into a mushroom cloud, no neutron activation of the ground, and negligible fallout. It was all a function of range. The fission neutrons could not travel that far in air before they decayed into hydrogen gas, and the gamma ray pulse would be short-lived and dissipated in a spherical wave-front with a diameter of four miles when it hit the ground.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Enriched uranium dissolved in water or an organic solvent will become an active nuclear reactor, increasing in power, if a specific “critical mass” is accumulated. The hydrogen in the water or the solvent acts as a moderator, slowing the fission neutrons to an advantageous speed, and even a fairly low U-235 enrichment level, like 3%, will overcome neutron losses by non-productive absorption in the moderator. This has been realized since the earliest days of reactor engineering, and those who work with uranium solutions are quite aware of the possibility.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“A jet engine is basically a large metal tube, mounted with one open end pointing toward the front of the aircraft and the other end at the back. With the plane moving forward, air blows into the front of the tube. An axial compressor spinning at high speed at the front acts as a one-way door, encouraging air to come into the tube while preventing anything from escaping out. In the center of the tube is a continuous explosion of jet fuel mixed with the compressed incoming air. The mixture, burned and heated to the point of violence in the explosion, instead of blowing the airplane to pieces finds a clear path out through the back of the tube. The escaping explosion products create a reactive force, just as would be made by a rocket engine, pushing the engine and the vehicle to which it is attached forward. On its way out, the expanding gases spin a turbine, like a windmill, and it is connected forward to the spinning compressor wheel.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The steadfast rule of working in a high radiation field still applied: use a large force of men with each individual given a small slice of time under hazard.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“A case in point is Castle Bravo, the code name for the first test of a practical H-bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands archipelago. The concept of a nuclear fusion weapon had been resoundingly confirmed on November 1, 1952, with the explosion of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device on what used to be Elugelab Island in the adjacent Enewetak Atoll. That bomb weighed 82 tons, sat in a two-story building, and required an attached cryogenic refrigeration plant and a large Dewar flask filled with a mixture of liquefied deuterium and tritium gases. It erased Elugelab Island with an 11-megaton burst, making an impressive fireball over 3 miles wide, and the test returned a great deal of scientific data concerning pulsed fusion reactions among heavy hydrogen isotopes, but there was no way the thing could be flown over enemy territory and dropped.59”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Harry Daghlian was the first person to die accidentally of acute radiation poisoning.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“By December, the Americans had caught up with the Germans and passed them with a self-sustaining chain reaction. Security was so tight, the Germans did not even know they had been beaten. At the end of the war, their only accomplishment had been the world’s first nuclear reactor accident, caused by water leaking past an inadequate gasket.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Incredible as it seems, the difference between the subcritical neutron population in a uranium mass, making no fission, and supercritical, making wild, increasing fission, is a very small number of available neutrons out of trillions: all it takes is just one neutron.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The heat and initial nuclear radiation portions of the event were over in about 60 seconds, but the bomb effects continued to develop for 6.3 minutes. The rapidly expanding fireball created a large vacuum in midair, and as the heat dissipated, air from the surrounding territory started to be sucked in. The blast thus blew air both ways: first outward, a pause, then inward, back toward ground zero. This effect is called the “afterwind.” Meanwhile, the residual heated air rose in a strong updraft, like a hot-air balloon. Solid material on the ground, now pounded to dust, was drawn up into the rising column, making a dirt-cloud. In thirty seconds, the cloud reached a height of three miles. When the ever-rising cloud reached an altitude where its density matched that of the surrounding air, at the base of the stratosphere, the cloud started to spread out horizontally. The sight of this feature became an icon, a dreaded emblem of the atomic age—the mushroom cloud.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The first thing hit by this airwave was the ground directly underneath the bomb, or “ground zero.” This was a hard thump, and it resulted in an earthquake-like shock energy traveling outward through the ground. The total energy from the detonation was thus distributed as 50 percent blast and shock, 35 percent thermal radiation, 10 percent residual nuclear radiation, and 5 percent initial nuclear radiation. The scientists had not been wrong in predicting small damage due to nuclear radiation, but they had been way off in considering the damage done directly and indirectly by the intense thermal energy.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The burns that injured many survivors of the A-bombs were not caused by gamma or beta rays, but by light.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The World War II bombs, the only nuclear devices ever used as weapons so far, were airbursts, detonated at about 1,900 feet above the ground.31 The air surrounding the bomb instantly heated to incandescence. This feature is called “the fireball.” This rapidly expanding sphere translated a percentage of the thermal energy into blast energy, or a destructive wave of compressed air moving outward at high speed, capable of knocking over concrete buildings.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“After Hiroshima was annihilated on August 6, 1945, the Japanese knew better what was going on, and a commando raid on the F-31 “Fat Man” implosion weapon assembly hut on Tinian was organized immediately.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Radium dial watches were still being made until 1963, when finally they were banned in the State of New York.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Radium has nearly absolute body burden, or a tendency to stay in the metabolism forever, and there are few ways it can escape the biological systems. Its radiations cover a wide spectrum, from alpha to gamma, with unusually energetic rays, and it targets many essential organs. It destroys everything around it, so quickly that cancer doesn’t even have time to develop.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day. By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Young women were hired to do the meticulous manual work of applying the paint, as male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful. The workers were paid generously, at $20 to $25 per week, when office work was paying $15 a week at most. By 1925, there were about 120 radium-dial factories in the United States alone, employing more than 2,000 women.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“By 1870 there were competing formulae, and luminous paints were selling briskly. Most used strontium carbonate or strontium thiosulphate. It had been found, probably accidentally, that strontium compounds would seem to store sunlight and would then give it back after the sun went down. We now know this phenomenon as a “forbidden energy-state transition” in a singlet ground-state electron orbital. The strontium, like everything else, absorbs and then returns a light photon that hits it, but in this case the return is delayed. The strontium atom, excited to a higher energy state by the absorption of light, “decays,” as if it were radioactive, reflecting the light back with a half-life of about 25 minutes. After four hours of glowing, the strontium compound needs to be re-charged with light.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“The gamma ray, yet another form of nuclear radiation, is an electromagnetic wave similar to ultraviolet light or x-rays, only it is far more energetic. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can penetrate your car door, go clean through your body, and out the other side, leaving an ionized trail of molecular corruption in its path. It is the product of a rearrangement or settling of the structure of an atomic nucleus, and it naturally occurs often when a nucleus is traumatized by having just emitted an alpha or a beta particle. Gamma rays can be deadly to living cells, but, unlike the clumsy alpha particle, they can enter and leave without losing all their energy in your flesh. It’s the difference between being hit with a full-metal-jacketed .223 or a 12-gauge dumdum. Both hurt.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“Alpha radiation consists of a large clump of nuclear particles, or nucleons, and it represents a sudden, radical crumbling of an atomic nucleus, just happening out of the blue. The resulting alpha particle is a helium-4 nucleus, complete, and when hurled at anything solid it can cause damage on a sub-atomic level. The beta “ray” or “particle” (either term is correct) is actually an electron or its evil twin, the positron, banished from a nucleus and hurtling outward at high speed. It is the result of the sudden, unpredictable change of a neutron into a proton or a proton into a neutron down inside an atomic nucleus. This decay event also completely changes the atom’s identity, its chemical properties, and its place in the hallowed Periodic Table of the Elements. Meanwhile, the traveling beta particle, while much lighter than the alpha particle, is still an “ionizing” radiation. If it is a particularly energetic beta example (they come in all strengths), it can hit an atom that’s looking the other way with enough force to blow its upper electrons out of orbit, break up molecular bonds, and bounce things around, causing the matter in its way to heat up. On”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima

“An x-ray machine was not necessary to take a cross-sectional picture of his teeth. They would light up a photographic plate with their own radiation output.”
― James Mahaffey, Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima