MovieChat Forums > Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (1995) Discussion > I am really going to show my ignorance h...

I am really going to show my ignorance here . . .

posted 15 years ago by childers-3
15 replies | jump to latest

How could we have not destroyed the oceans with all the a-bomb and h-bomb tests done in them? I understand from the T&B video that there have been over 1000 nuclear tests since 1945. Why hasn't radiation poisoning not killed us all by now? What about uranium and plutonium half-lives? Doesn't it take a very very long time for them to dissipate? I am very confused. The movie didn't explain this very well.

"Hey, I should be mad at YOU . . . now turn around."-Bender/Futurama

[–] archosman 15 years ago

Saw a documentary that explained that this year. Basically all of those elements were dispersed or diluted as it traveled through the ocean. The doc went back to the Castle Bravo test sight and they dove into the crater left by the blast. No trace of radiation. Unfortunately the same can't be said of the fallout that landed on the islands.

[–] winterview 15 years ago

And note, even the 'Mike' device at 65 tons, was only 65 tons. The Pacific Ocean is massively large and 65 tons of anything ('cept antimatter) diluted that much is going to be hard to track.

Also, not to glorify the things, but the Stanislaw/Ulam design (for the true H-bombs) is quite clever and highly efficient at 'burning' the nuclear fuel in the explosion.

Also, Dr. Teller pointed out bombs over about 100 megatons really aren't desirable, they just loft the same amount of debris faster, so the impetus to build really big bombs (500 megatons and up) was lost. It doesn't mean, BTW, that if we needed something in that size range, that we could not build one. H-bombs, scale up rather nicely, and the maximum size is probably dictated by your delivery device. The Soviet era 50 megaton device was extrapolated from much smaller designs, and worked as specified in its first and only test.

[–] ErikHai 10 years ago

Also, not to glorify the things, but the Stanislaw/Ulam design (for the true H-bombs) is quite clever and highly efficient at 'burning' the nuclear fuel in the explosion.

This may be true for the fusion elements of these 'devices' - deuterium in Mike, lithium deuteride in the 'dry' devices that weaponized the design, but in almost all of those tested, the majority of the yield actually came from fission of the tamper in the secondary stage.

I know this is quite technical, but the take home point is that most of these devices were exceptionally 'dirty' in terms of fallout. The Tsar Bomba, shown in the film, was actually one of the 'cleanest' H-bombs ever detonated, largely because it used an inert tamper on the secondary and tertiary stages. (Tsar Bomba was a 3 stage design.)

You are correct about the dilution. The oceans are immense, but not infinite. We've done far more damage to them via overfishing and conventional pollution than all the nuclear testing.

[–] vce 14 years ago

The fact that radiation levels were building in the atmosphere was the reason that over 100 countries including the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and (pretty much) immediately stopped testing in the atmosphere in 1963.

[–] BwlBoy 14 years ago

If global warming is a reality then I firmly believe the extensive nuclear testing in 50s and early 60s has made a telling contribution to it.

[–] oyrp70-1 14 years ago

Nuclear weapons testing did not make a significant contribution to global warming. The amount of heat they released, while enormous, is absolutely tiny compared to the amount of heat the sun deposits on the earth every second.

More importantly, nuclear weapons do not emit greenhouse gasses. If they set fire to plants in the area those will release a little, but that does not compare to our burning of fossil fuels.

Nuclear weapons testing did plenty to screw up the earth, but global warming is not part of that.

[–] artisticengineer 14 years ago

Yes. Too much testing above ground testing was occurring and this led to buildup of radiation levels. Though the levels were not hazardous there was justifiable concern they would build up to hazardous levels.

However, most U.S. testing was already underground long before that treaty came into effect (Octobler 1963). Limited aboveground testing could continue as the atmosphere will wash out the pollutants. In fact, limited aboveground testing DID continue through the 1960s and well into the 1970s; by China and France. And, atmospheric radiation levels went steadily down during that period despite those tests.

The U.S. could have continued limited atmospheric testing (nuclear based anti missile defenses and some Plowshare uses), but the Soviets wanted an "all or nothing" agreement. I am not certain why but it seems they would lose less than the United States by going to only underground testing. I question the Kennedy Administration decision to accept a total ban on atmospehric testing. Fortunately, as things turned out (end of Cold War in 1991) these tests were not absolutely required but that was not the basis for their decision.

[–] oyrp70-1 14 years ago

The point that people are dancing around is that the Earth is really really big and if you spread all the radioactive material these bombs produce evenly around the world, no one area gets very polluted.

[–] artisticengineer 14 years ago

No, that is not a proper summation of this discussion.

[–] ErikHai 10 years ago

Actually that is the basic summation. The problem is that the radiation is NOT evenly distributed.

[–] theluckdog 14 years ago

Many of the most significant of the reasons the oceans weren't polluted have already been discussed in the thread, such as the fairly efficient designs of the BIG weapons....which were coincidentally the very ones that were tested in the ocean....and the fact that the oceans are so huge, that even multiple multi-megaton bombs will barely make a measurable rise in radioactivity ocean-wide.

Other reasons are that water itself is very difficult to irradiate...it's the impurities dissolved in the water which become radioactive. While we often think of the ocean as "salt water", there's really not THAT much salt in it. Neither is there an extremely large percentage of other particles floating around in there, compared to something like a muddy river. So the radiation which does get released into the ocean has very little to actually bind to.

The fact that, in the later stages of the multi-megaton tests, the USSR & the USA had started experimenting with making the really big devices as "clean" as possible also helped. (For example, the Tsar Bomb, the biggest ever exploded, was actually the cleanest nuke ever exploded, if you calculate & compare the rest of them size-for-size.)

But most likely the biggest reason that we didn't make much of a pollution impact on the oceans is that just not that many bombs were detonated there. A large percentage of nukes were tested below ground.

[–] Dennis_Cooper 14 years ago

The Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union did FAR more damage to humans and to our environment than all of the nuclear weapons tests combined. It's not well publicized, but even nearly 25 years after the explosion, the fuel from the damaged Chernobyl reactor is still producing high levels of radiation that is only contained by a now decaying concrete structure that was built over it after the accident.

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