Talk:Nuclear and radiation accidents

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Contents 1 Archives 2 Nuclear Accident in Japan 3 A question of copy write violation 4 USS Thresher 5 Apollo 13 / RTG's 6 Sellafield 2004--2005 7 Nuclear accident in Pennsylvania 8 NRC Page 9 Marie Curie 10 nuclear tests!?; everything thrown together indiscriminately 11 Iraq? 12 Explanation of the differences between nuclear and radiation 13 Types and Causes 14 List of nuclear explosions 15 Name change 16 Citation needed 17 Why does France never have problems? 18 Walking Ghost Phase 19 "The Great Whatsit" 20 List of doomsday scenarios 21 External Link (Mine) 22 Disambiguations 23 Undue weight 24 Cleanup tag 25 Demolished Island

[edit] Archives

I've created an archive page for older stuff - this page had exceeded the reccomended 32k length, and the older stuff was a mish-mash without proper indexing and headers. Let's use the index/header system from here forward to keep the page neater, the discussions easier to follow, and the 'pedia more useful. Elde 18:14, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nuclear Accident in Japan

http://www.care2.com/news/member/367830772/425847

[edit] A question of copy write violation

NOTE: This is not a criticism of the action only a clarification.

This comment pertains to an edit preformed by Bobbis on 05/10/05 -“2000s Tidy up Novosiberian entry (reword due to copyvio))”- I would just like to clarify that there was no copy write violation involved in my entries. The Bellona Foundation encourages everyone to reprint or excerpt their articles as long as they credit the source. I contacted the Foundation by email and asked them to review the entries I had made using their resources and this was their reply, “We greatly appreciate wikipedia, and your way of crediting is perfect. Keep up the good work. Best regards Jens Bugge”. He may be contacted at [info@bellona.no]. I would also like to add this is not a case of plagiarism, as I take no credit for the content. The only credit I could claim is finding the entries and relaying them to the community at large.

I understand and applaud the efforts made by Bobbis. Thank you, I support any efforts to create a unique resource as long as the essential content is not altered in a radical manner without good documented proof of the need. I only wish to point out to everyone that Bellona's copy write policy approves of the entries altered or not.

Are Bellona willing to license their material under GFDL which is what Wikipedia uses:

"All contributions to Wikipedia are released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Project:Copyrights for details)."

Also remember to sign your posts with four tildes (~~~~). Evil Monkey∴Hello 00:08, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] USS Thresher

What do you mean by "refit period" for the USS Thresher? That was a brand-new boat on its first voyage? And, by the way, there were a lot of civilians aboard her, not just Navy men. --Sobolewski 04:55, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Read the history of Thresher for a full explanation. Elde 18:11, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Apollo 13 / RTG's

Didn't the return of the Apollo 13 lunar module (designed to be left on the Moon) end up dumping a several-kilogram chunk of plutonium on the Pacific ocean floor near New Zealand? This was my understanding in the past, but I'm having difficulty confirming it. Would this be considered a nuclear accident? Arkuat 01:43, 2004 Jul 18 (UTC)

Check out the book Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger. This book was the basis for Apollo 13, but the bit about the Lunar Module's reactor rod got left out. It does appear in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, in the episode which covers the Apollo 13 failure.

I'd call it a well-averted potential accident, myself, but it's defintely worth including in some list, somewhere.

Anville 17:30, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

What was carried on Apollo 13 was not a reactor rod or lump of plutonium, it was an Radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which creates electricity from the heat given off by the decay. I added Apollo 13 a couple of weeks ago to the list for April 1971. Most of the information on the internet that I've found basically state that no increase in background radiation was found in the Tonga Trench area where it was directed. There is actually very little out there that I could find. It is mentioned in FTETTM. --enceladus 01:25, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

RTG's often use plutonium, but of a different isotope than that which is usable for bombs or reactors or Slotin's accident. Nonetheless it is still chemically poisonous (plutonium of any isotope is the most poisonous substance in industry) and radioactive (it will irradiate you just by being near it). --Sobolewski 04:55, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Slotin's accident involved uranium, not plutonium. Elde 18:11, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Currently, the article says, "The device consisted of two half-spheres of beryllium-covered plutonium, which can be moved together slowly to measure the criticality."

—wwoods 21:10, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sellafield 2004--2005

The Sellafield spill was discovered in April 2005, but apparently began as long ago as August 2004. How should this be reflected in the listing? (BBC) Myron 09:33, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is this even a accident? Some plumbing leaked, the leakage is contained in a tank, nothing escaped from the building, no one injured. pstudier 21:41, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)

Plant administrators allegedly were forced to upgrade their rating of the event(Carlisle Business Gazette) from Level 0 to Level 3 on the International Nuclear Events Scale [1], which is a "serious incident" rather than an "accident without significant off-site risk". Currently the bulk of the spill has been transferred and awaits conversion to a more manageable form. The plant remains closed, presumably until the leaking pipe can be replaced. Thus at Pstudier's suggestion I will remove the section on the April 19, 2005 spill in a few days unless someone raises an objection. Myron 02:16, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nuclear accident in Pennsylvania

I heard of an accident in PA which I am guessing it was a reactor leak I think it happened in the 50's or early sixties after this accident many dead farm animals were confiscated by the gov after that there was an increse in cancer that could have been connected Dudtz 6:10 PM EST 7/25/05

[edit] NRC Page

The NRC actually maintains a day to day account of all nuclear reports (some accidents like misplaced radioactive material, some drunk operators, some equipment failure, etc.) Now there is already a link to the NRC home page in the article, but it is difficult to navigate to the correct place, and the link in the article is somewhat buried (at least in my mind) compared to its very useful nature. For the United States, it is both more detailed and probably more accurate than this article. However, I dunno if I should add another link in this article, or just switch the old one, and what, if any, steps should be taken with regard to making it stand out more. --Ignignot 19:44, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Marie Curie

Couldn't Marie Curie's death to radiation poisoning be considered to be on this page? I mean, there are already a few scientists' death to experimental accidents and she was one of the first researchers in radiation (2 Nobel Prizes, together with her husband).Jules LT

[edit] nuclear tests!?; everything thrown together indiscriminately

Why in the world does this article list nuclear tests? They weren't accidents, they were intentional tests of weapons. In general, I think the usefulness of this article is greatly diminished because it mixes together so many kinds of incidents. There are those that had significant health effects and those that (like Three Mile Island) didn't. There are military and civilian ones. Everything is just thrown together in chronological order, which basically makes it useless.--Bcrowell 04:35, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Nuclear tests are listed because of a phenomenon known as rainout: ideally, the radioactive plume from a nuclear test will be spread fairly evenly throughout the atmosphere, so no one location gets much. If the plume encounters a rainstorm, though, one area will get almost the entire dose. Rainout events have been some of the deadliest nuclear accidents, but it's almost impossible to prove. --Carnildo 07:02, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Bcrowell. If we have an article for nuclear accidents, nuclear tests should not be listed unless there was an accident during the test. Neither a test nor rain can be properly called an accident, so I suggest starting a new article called List of nuclear tests. --Ignignot 14:36, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Oops! Now that I have actually checked, the article List of nuclear tests already exists, and is quite exstensive. The only tests that should be in both that article and this one should be tests that have an accident. --Ignignot 14:38, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Hi Carnildo -- IMO the logic you use to link nuclear tests to accidents is weak, and it gives the article a very POV flavor of trying to find every possible item to make the list look longer, even if it's not really an accident. The lead doesn't explain why this would fall within the scope of the article, the entries for the tests don't explain the logic for their inclusion, and their inclusion is redundant with List of nuclear tests.--Bcrowell 15:55, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Upon a close reading of the article, and comparing against the List of nuclear tests, I have found that several of the tests mentioned in this article are either listed at different dates (for Apr 26, 1953; Dec 18, 1970) or are not listed at all (for Nov 22, 1955; Dec 9, 1968). Otherwise, all of the nuclear tests are listed, but without any details. If they are removed from this article, there needs to be some sort of merge.

In addition, the entry for July 2, 1956 does not explain why it is a nuclear accident, and the May 1963 entry is unreadable. Also, if nuclear tests are not considered a nuclear accident, then should the intentional destructive atmospheric re-entry of an RTG in a satellite or spacecraft also be considered a nuclear accident? --Ignignot 19:00, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

"Also, if nuclear tests are not considered a nuclear accident, then should the intentional destructive atmospheric re-entry of an RTG in a satellite or spacecraft also be considered a nuclear accident?" I would say no, it shouldn't. If it's planned and intentional, it's not an accident.--Bcrowell 19:47, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Another big category of bogus entries consists of incidents in which U.S. bombers crashed, but no radioactivity was released. An airplane crashing isn't a nuclear accident, and in the cases where the radioactives were not released or were completely recovered, that's a demonstration that the safety precautions worked, not that they failed; I don't see how these qualify as nuclear accidents at all. I've deleted them.--Bcrowell 20:15, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Even after pruning, the article is still 93k. I'm going to split it into two different articles, List of civilian nuclear accidents and List of military nuclear accidents. The issues are completely different, and it's misleading that articles like Nuclear power phase-out are linking to this article, as if it was all about power plant accidents. (In the case of Nuclear power phase-out, I've already changed the wording so it was no longer so misleading.)--Bcrowell 20:24, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Iraq?

What? No lost sources in Iraq? I can't believe it, it was all over the news in Europe. 145.254.67.7 19:14, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explanation of the differences between nuclear and radiation

I have noticed that someone has removed the text which explains the difference between a nuclear and a plain radiation accident. I think that this text is vital to allow a person who is not a specialist to understand the difference. So I am returning it to the page.Cadmium 11:08, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Types and Causes

I think we need some differentiation between Types of Incidents, and Causes. At the moment, the heading "Types of Accident" includes both types and causes, however as far as I can see all causes boil down to Human Error anyway! I think the article loses it's way around this point.

Types of Incidents are:

• Reactor meltdown (e.g. Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, Windscale)
• Criticality (Incidents where criticality occurs when not expected, will often also result in vocational overexposure)
• Vocational Overexposure (Incidents where people working with radioactive materials in controlled environments receive abnormally high exposure)
• Leakage (radiation and / or radioactive material outside areas where such radiation / material is normally encountered)
• Reactor Scram (which I guess mostly don't get reported if the problem doesn't get any worse)
• Medical mis-Exposure (Where radiation therapy dosing is incorrect)

Root Causes may be:

• Human Error
• Bad Planning / Design (see Human Error)
• Equipment failure (see Bad planning / Design)
• Maintenance failure (see Human Error)
• Inappropriate or incorrect procedures (see Human Error)

Can anyone see an intermediate cause that isn't going to come back to human error at some point in the design, manufacturing, maintenance or operation of the system in which the incident occurs?

DMcMPO11AAUK/Talk/Contribs 01:34, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of nuclear explosions

Right now Wikipedia doesn't seem to have an article "List of nuclear explosions". A good start would be this site:

http://www.ga.gov.au/oracle/nukexp_form.jsp

It seems to contain all known nuclear explosions. --Abdull 23:17, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name change

This article does not seem to be a "list". Looking in the history, it used to be a list, but the entries were moved into three new lists. Since it is no longer a list and there is no article on nuclear and/or radiation accidents, perhaps its name should be changed to "nuclear and radiation accidents". -- Kjkolb 03:39, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Moved article to Nuclear and radiation accidents Petri Krohn 22:55, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citation needed

Citation needed for "bird snatches radium from windowsill" story. ▫ UrbaneLegend ^talk 09:50, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why does France never have problems?

Something is wrong. The USA has problems. The UK has problems. Russia has problems. France has none. True or suppresion?

Germany also has none, so what? ;-) I guess they've simply just started late enough so that the problems were known and could be avoided.

Germany had many problems and nuclear and radiation incidents, they're just not listed here. Same with France. One problem might be that fewer and fewer people use printed sources. There are list by the governments, in books published after the Harrisburg and Chernobyl accidents.

(Sidenote: Reshuffeling information sometimes seems to be a POV activity here and on related lists, articles and talk pages, making it harder to find some information, if at all) -- Gwyndon 09:43, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

If you're talking about the decision to split the article into civilian and military nuclear accidents and so on, before we did it this article was just a tiny bit of text and a huge freaking list. It was unusable as anything but a list. Now at least something can be said about the accidents in general and what response there has been.

I also find it extremely unlikely that France and Germany have had no nuclear accidents, but I suspect this is more the result of the English-centric article. If there are any lists for other countries that are readable, preferably online, please list them here so we can incorporate them. --Ignignot 15:22, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

France's most serious nuclear accident happened in November 1992. Three workers were contaminated after entering a nuclear particle accelerator in Forbach without protective clothing. Executives were jailed in 1993 for failing to take proper safety measures. --DV8 2XL 15:33, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Ummm.. That's a Van De Graaf type electron accelerator. [2] Why do you think it's a nuclear accident? — Omegatron 15:27, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Greenpeace has a list, which includes 20 French accidents. Considering the source, I'm sure it's overblown and sensationalistic, but at least it can be assumed to be exhaustive. :-) — Omegatron 19:00, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I take that back, actually. (The "exhaustive" part.) That page is meant to show one accident per day of the year, I guess? So it doesn't list a lot of things, including France's worst disaster: On 1980-03-13, there was annealing of graphite in La Hague reactor, causing the core to overheat? No radiation was released and it is considered INES 4 due to the damage to the core. Though another source says the silo fire at La Hague was the worst accident at the plant itself. That was on 1981-01-08 and is considered INES 3. I am making a list and will put anything here if it meets the criteria. — Omegatron 15:21, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Walking Ghost Phase

Acute radiation poisoning, 100% fatality after 7 days (LD 100/7). An exposure this high leads to spontaneous symptoms after 5 to 30 minutes. After powerful fatigue and immediate nausea caused by direct activation of chemical receptors in the brain by the irradiation, there is a period of several days of comparative well-being, called the latent (or "walking ghost") phase. After that, cell death in the gastric and intestinal tissue, causing massive diarrhea, intestinal bleeding and loss of water, leads to water-electrolyte imbalance. Death sets in with delirium and coma due to breakdown of circulation. Death is inevitable; the only treatment that can be offered is pain therapy.

[edit] "The Great Whatsit"

(Not the most appropriate place to ask, but what the heck..)

The classic noir film Kiss Me Deadly revolves around the smuggling of a breadbox-sized lead container containing a man-made radioactive substance so powerful that when the lid is opened it emits a blinding light. A split-second exposure to the substance causes skin burns, while exposure for more than several seconds causes combustion. The film ends dramatically when a women opens the box (wouldn't listen!) and quickly bursts into flames, burning down the entire house in a matter of moments. Are there any materials that actually behave like this, or is this simply dramatic license? (The substance also makes an eerie screaming noise, but thats not real, right? ^_^ ) --RevWaldo 04:07, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

To me that sounds like dramatic license. It is noramlly the case that skin burns take hours/days to appear. If you read the IAEA reports on the men who have entered the irradation rooms of food / medical equipment irradation plants, then you will see how many of these people lived for weeks after getting doses of about 10 Gy. The burn marks took days to appear fully.Cadmium 08:12, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

That's dramatic license, all right. A radioisotope with an activity rate high enough to emit heat of that order would have a very short half-life; it would lose most of its potency in hours. Also, it would melt its way out of a container of lead (or most any other metal.) --ChrisWinter 23:23, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Bingo. If it's energy was really from decay heat of the magnitude that could burn down a house (I'm thinking China Syndrome level) then it wouldn't matter weather you put it in a lead box or a picnic basket. The point of decay heat is that nothing in the universe can stop it. It's possible that such a substance exists, but it's not possible that it's in a hand-held size. -Theanphibian ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:34, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of doomsday scenarios

Could use votes to save this article, thanks MapleTree 22:31, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External Link (Mine)

I have a list of nuclear accidents, which differs in some ways from the ones presented. I'm not supposed to link to it, since there is a conflict of interest. All the claims are referenced, which makes it very easy for an independent researcher to verify. A great many of the sources of info about military accidents are actually just secondary sources based on one primary source (a document the DOD released in the mid-80's). This page is the result of a research project of mine that digs up other primary sources, beyond the DOD article (which is also referenced).

If somebody added this external link, I think it would strengthen the verifiable information in the article.

http://www.luvnpeas.org/understand/nukes.html

Bsharvy 15:54, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguations

Hey, I'm sure I went a little too far with all of the main page links and "for" such and such, but I wanted to just throw them out there as I fixed the link to the list of accidents so that I could bring attention to it and ppl could agree on which is the best solution. I personally think we should have the statement at the beginning of the article, b/c these pages really are difficult to navigate and I think it will help people out a lot.

Either way, I think that either the link for main articles in the accidents section should be deleted or the "for" statement at the top of the page should be deleted. Let's decide.theanphibian 15:48, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Undue weight

The article itself is biased. Where's the List of coal power plant accidents? — Omegatron 19:01, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

My goodness, do you pro-nuclear people really feel as persecuted as you sound? I really hope not. The obvious solution to the absence of a particular article is to start writing it. -- Johnfos 21:40, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Pro-nuclear? Persecuted? — Omegatron 01:11, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Here is a list of wind power accidents, for instance, including fatalities and injuries to workers and the public, and environmental and property damage: http://www.caithnesshost.co.uk/CWIF/fullaccidents.pdf Should we create an article for it? — Omegatron 21:58, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes! Maybe we can calculate a fatality per Kwh for nuclear or wind, or would that be original research? Paul Studier (talk) 20:07, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

We don't need to. I've been casually researching this for a few weeks now, and there are several sources for fatalities/TW-yr and so on that we can cite. Wind looks very bad, and nuclear looks very good, but the numbers from one to the next source disagree wildly (one includes deaths from coal pollution while another just looks at occupational deaths, etc.) I wrote about this a little in Wind_power#Safety. — Omegatron 16:31, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's a not-so-reliable source: [www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1986389/posts] — Omegatron 01:25, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

And another: [3] — Omegatron 13:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup tag

I'll assist when and if I can find the time, but this article is frankly a mess. It is all over the map, mainly due to its over-generalized and unprofessional terminology. The structure and flow are nearly non-existent, and the hodge-podge of subtopics make it appear as though the article has been cobbled together by people who only have faint technical knowledge. This is simply not a good quality encyclopedia article. --24.28.6.209 01:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Demolished Island

I heard that a hydrogen bomb was detonated on a Pacific island, and that the island went under water. Is this true? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.227.247.2 (talk) 00:21, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Bikini Atoll? — Omegatron 21:59, 30 December 2007 (UTC)