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I don't know if the third guy, Yokokawa, is still alive or not (I'd guess not, given the dosage and the time since it happened, but I've never been able to find any details beyond that he was recovered enough to be discharged from hospital after a couple of months) but I've always found it incredible that just the fact of him being 3 or 4m meters further away than the other two was by itself enough to save him from having bits of his body more-or-less immediately start to melt off.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:02
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Negrostrike posted:
Nomen est omen right there.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:16
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We just covered criticality accidents in my dosimetry course last week and this incident was mentioned. No pictures though.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:21
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When I did contract work at a nuclear lab, the site training taught us which of the klaxons meant "gather in designated area", and which meant "run". My favourite phrase from the training was "unfavorable geometry", I think.
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Nov 30, 2016 01:41
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Subjunctive posted:When I did contract work at a nuclear lab, the site training taught us which of the klaxons meant "gather in designated area", and which meant "run". Do you have any sources/samples of these? It's something I find super interesting but googling "nuclear klaxons" or "nuclear sirens" doesn't really give you a lot of specificity or different alarms, just the generic air raid/tornado siren.
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Nov 30, 2016 03:07
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Subjunctive posted:
I thought it was 'dangerous geometry', which is an even cooler turn of phrase.
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Nov 30, 2016 04:02
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13Pandora13 posted:Do you have any sources/samples of these? It's something I find super interesting but googling "nuclear klaxons" or "nuclear sirens" doesn't really give you a lot of specificity or different alarms, just the generic air raid/tornado siren. We got paper handouts, but I've lost mine in the intervening decade. It was at PNNL if that helps find it. The Lone Badger posted:I thought it was 'dangerous geometry', which is an even cooler turn of phrase. I think the big book of nuclear accidents uses "unfavorable", and the scientists at the lab did, but I wouldn't be shocked to discover that there were different phrasings around.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:50
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xpost from the OSHA thread:Mak0rz posted:For those not familiar with dimethylmercury here's some classic OSHA thread reading material: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn I've read this article a few times, but it's always surprising to me just how bad things got for her. gently caress Mercury. quote:Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled one or two drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex gloved hand. One or two drops fucks you up that badly, so god only knows what this poor son of a bitch went through: quote:In 1972, a 28-year-old chemist in Czechoslovakia had suffered the same symptoms as Wetterhahn after synthesizing 6 kg of the compound. 
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Nov 30, 2016 16:41
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I think a lot of it depends on how much of the stuff you get on you
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Nov 30, 2016 17:12
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Nth Doctor posted:xpost from the OSHA thread: Just because he made 6kgs of it doesn't mean he ingested/absorbed 6kgs.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:02
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Pharnakes posted:Just because he made 6kgs of it doesn't mean he ingested/absorbed 6kgs. You'd think just swimming in that would be quicker than being eaten away from the inside.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:47
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Not sure if this was posted before but really worth a read. http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a18616/an-oral-history-of-the-space-shuttle-challenger-disaster/
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Nov 30, 2016 20:17
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I was in Japan at the time of the Tokaimura incident and the details of managerial callousness and incompetence were horrifying. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but I swear details emerged at some point that they were using a hotplate to heat the uranium solution. It was also revealed at the time that homeless day-labourers were picked up each morning to work at nuclear reactors and when they had exceeded the safe length of time to be exposed to radiation, they were bussed to another site to continue working.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:19
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There's homeless people in Japan?
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Nov 30, 2016 20:52
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slinkimalinki posted:I was in Japan at the time of the Tokaimura incident and the details of managerial callousness and incompetence were horrifying. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but I swear details emerged at some point that they were using a hotplate to heat the uranium solution. Cacafuego posted:There's homeless people in Japan? Well not anymore. Hopefully now a couple of them are super heroes or something instead of just dying of radiation poisoning.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:00
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Cacafuego posted:There's homeless people in Japan? Well, fewer of them after that, I assume.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:01
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Cacafuego posted:There's homeless people in Japan? No, they flew them in from the US.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:10
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I used to work on a nuclear waste cleanup plant. Some of the radiation maps for the high-level waste facility showed up to 300,000 Rads/hr (3,000 Gy) in the black cells.  Those were projections, but based on multiple decades of waste characterization so probably pretty decent projections.A place of no honor indeed. Edit: Not an operating plant. But hopefully one day it will operate. TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 21:54 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 21:50
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If reactor and criticality accidents interest you I cannot recommend Atomic Accidents enough https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns He hits the obvious highlights of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima but also spends a ton of time on stuff like the experimental sodium reactors and some of the destructive testing done out in Idaho. And the criticality accidents worldwide. The author does a great job of getting into the weeds of how these failures happened without it ever getting dry. While some of the accidents are the result of mind boggling stupidity, most are more akin to plane crashes in which 4-5 small failures combine in manner that no one foresaw.
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Dec 1, 2016 05:13
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slinkimalinki posted:I was in Japan at the time of the Tokaimura incident and the details of managerial callousness and incompetence were horrifying. It's not mentioned in the wikipedia article but I swear details emerged at some point that they were using a hotplate to heat the uranium solution. There's something missing in this story. I know for a fact that Japan has a central dose register, so, even if the reporting wasn't real-time, you'd only be able to go one reporting period before the regulator put the ban-hammer on you. Maybe they were just hiring day laborers, and working them to their entirely safe annual dose limit.
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Dec 1, 2016 10:07
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Groda posted:Maybe they were just hiring day laborers, and working them to their entirely safe annual dose limit. Isn't that the standard practice during refueling outages at US plants, too? Load up the roadwhores on dose and let permanent plant staff coast.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:32
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Groda posted:There's something missing in this story. I know for a fact that Japan has a central dose register, so, even if the reporting wasn't real-time, you'd only be able to go one reporting period before the regulator put the ban-hammer on you. I will admit to not having the slightest idea how a dose register works, however if you don't think the Japanese weren't lying to fantastical extremes about anything and everything relating to these kinds of gently caress ups I don't know what to say. I worked for a media company in Japan when Fukushima occured. We were given a 'leaked' document with 'true' radiation levels near Fukushima which had obviously been produced to encourage news staff to stay there longer and go more often than they would otherwise. My coworkers were very happy when they got the secret news that actually everyone would have very minimal radiation exposure. Which is not to say everyone's skin is now peeling off, but it was obviously someone's attempt to manipulate people in a way which they knew was inappropriate and when it comes to these kinds of accidents that's very chilling.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:05
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Cacafuego posted:There's homeless people in Japan? Yeah and it's not a very easy place to be homeless in. They're ignored on a level that makes how the US treats homeless people seem compassionate, which is unnerving in and of itself. I don't know what to pick and choose from this article but it's a good read http://www.utne.com/community/homelessness-in-japan-zm0z15fzsau
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Dec 1, 2016 21:48
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Epiphyte posted:If reactor and criticality accidents interest you I cannot recommend Atomic Accidents enough Command and Control is another really good book about Nuclear Accidents and terrifying issues. It covers the Cold War and on handling of nuclear weapons, and there's some poo poo in there that leads to some sleepless nights. http://thebulletin.org/accidents-will-happen-excerpt-command-and-control Command and Control posted:A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about 20 miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for 10 minutes—long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster. Command and Control posted:Less than a month later, Walter Gregg and his son, Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs. Gregg was inside the house, sewing, and her daughters, Helen and Frances, aged six and nine, were playing outdoors with a nine-year-old cousin. The Mark 6 had a variable yield of anywhere from 8 to 160 kilotons, depending on the type of nuclear core that was used. The bomb that landed in the yard didn’t contain a core. But the high explosives went off when the weapon hit the ground, digging a crater about 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep. The blast wave and flying debris knocked the doors off the Gregg house, blew out the windows, collapsed the roof, riddled the walls with holes, destroyed the new Chevrolet parked in the driveway, killed half a dozen chickens, and sent the family to the hospital with minor injuries. Antioch has a new favorite as of 21:58 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 21:55
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I am really glad the Greggs got out of that in one piece.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:20
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Please tell me they were actually compensated well for that and it wasn't one of those cases of the military denying wrongdoing to avoid bad press
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Dec 1, 2016 22:31
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Aesop Poprock posted:Please tell me they were actually compensated well for that and it wasn't one of those cases of the military denying wrongdoing to avoid bad press "The United States Air Force (USAF) was sued by the family of the victims, who received US$54,000, equivalent to $443,647 in 2015.[2][3]"
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Dec 1, 2016 22:38
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crashquote:In 2013, information released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed a single switch out of four (not six) prevented detonation.[11][]
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Dec 1, 2016 23:20
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Aesop Poprock posted:Yeah and it's not a very easy place to be homeless in. They're ignored on a level that makes how the US treats homeless people seem compassionate, which is unnerving in and of itself. I don't know what to pick and choose from this article but it's a good read There's really two classes of homeless people in Japan. There's actual, you know, American style hobos like in that article but then there's also a whole class of people I'll call, I guess, "functionally homeless". One of the things that really ostracizes Japan's actual homeless people is how accessible amenities are in Japan if you have even a small amount of money. Beds, food, showers, laundry, all that kind of stuff is really accessible in metropolitan Japan, mainly because there are a bunch of insane young salarymen who are desperately clawing at the corporate ladder and some of them might only sleep at their home/apartment a couple nights a week, so in response you have a ton of convenience industry everywhere. Japan is also extremely superficial about dumb things. If you are homeless and you manage to have a few sets of OK looking clothes you can basically get away with infinite amounts of dumb poo poo you normally couldn't get away with. Japan's huge binge drinking issue means that sleeping on a bench in nice clothes is considered a thing that a young man would be able to get away with but a homeless man wouldn't, for instance. It's also pretty easy to get a job in Japan that pays enough money for you to live but not enough for you to have a place to live because the housing prices are insanely high. So you get this class of guys who aren't really homeless, they just don't have a place to live. They still can sleep in safe places (hourly hotels or coffin hotels usually, but a lot of public baths dont give a gently caress if you sleep in them either), buy food, take showers and baths (because public bathing is a thing and it's cheap). In the US these people would be absolutely be on a one way fucktrain to shitsville, but in Japan things are different. The huge downside to this is that "real" homeless people are even more marginalized because they are relatively uncommon, and because of this the amount of services for homeless people are extremely few and barely used.
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Dec 2, 2016 03:00
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Isn't there also a huge stigma attached to applying for any kind of government help or am I remembering that incorrectly? I could have sworn that I read something like that in regards to working single mothers having trouble with finding affordable child care services, and that it pretty much applied to anything that isn't a pension.
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Dec 2, 2016 10:07
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Antioch posted:
drat, the baby boomers were right. People really were tougher back then. e: for content, I noticed one of those little historical signs on the road a couple months ago on my way home from the airport and looked it up when I got home: Orlando Sentinel posted:Capt. Wendell Campbell Jr. struggled mightily to right his flaming B-52 bomber, but his skills were limited as a novice pilot on only his third training mission. Cacafuego has a new favorite as of 18:31 on Dec 2, 2016 |
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Dec 2, 2016 18:13
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Holy poo poo! I just moved to NC last year. This absolutely blows me away (ha) that we came so close to an accidental nuclear rearrangement of this area.
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Dec 2, 2016 18:32
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Fortunately implosion-type nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to accidentally detonate. That's why there are so many stories of "oops a bomb accidentally fell off the plane" and nothing happened.
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Dec 2, 2016 19:31
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Henker posted:Fortunately implosion-type nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to accidentally detonate. That's why there are so many stories of "oops a bomb accidentally fell off the plane" and nothing happened. How many civilians have died as a result of military accidents that seem to happen so frequently? How many incidents are documented? I assume civilian deaths decreased when we weren't at war (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc). ie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_(1998) etc, etc I'm sure there are plenty more military accidents costing lives (aside from training accidents) that are as a result of error (like the airmen/whatever the navy term for an airman is that get sucked into air intakes) or showing off (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_B-52_crash)
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Dec 2, 2016 20:02
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I was explicitly talking about accidents involving nuclear weapons.
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Dec 2, 2016 22:12
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Henker posted:I was explicitly talking about accidents involving nuclear weapons. Can't be that many outside that one time a dude dropped a core or something and killed himself and a few people. Unless we're gonna count people dying from cancer because the government let them live on irradiated land/water supplies/whatever.
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Dec 3, 2016 01:38
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In a few days it will be the 70th anniversary of the Winecoff Hotel fire, the deadliest in American history and mostly forgotten these days. It was December 7th 1946 in Atlanta, the beautiful Winecoff Hotel was packed with high school students from around Georgia due to the annual YMCA Youth Assembly.. The Winecoff was one of the most luxurious hotels in the city and many of these people were probably excited to be in the "big city" for the first time. It was around 3 AM when a bellhop discovered a small fire in a third floor hallway. It shouldn't be a problem though,right? After all, look at this hotel ad "Absolutely Fireproof"  Well, that's technically true, the building itself is fireproof for the most part. Unfortunately the interior was most certainly not fireproof. But since it was "Fireproof" there hadn't been such silly things like "sprinklers", "fire doors", or "fire escapes" installed. Now, look at the hotel floorplan, see the problem?  Yeah, the Winecoff had a opening in the middle containing the staircases and elevator shafts in one big shaft that quickly became one big chimney, letting the smoke rise. There were two Atlanta Fire Department stations two blocks away and firefighters were on the scene 30 seconds after being called but it was already too late, a hotel is filled with flammable things like carpet, mattresses, sheets, and people and the fire spread up that shaft very, very quickly.      For the people inside sleeping they had a problem, some were able to make a makeshift "bridge" over an alley yet others were able to rescued by firefighters. The fire department's ladders could only go to the 7th floor of the 15 floor hotel. Those above the 7th floor either burned, suffocated or were force to jump and died on the sidewalk and streets. A firefighter was killed when a jumper slammed into him. 119 people died, including the hotel's owner who lived in the 15th floor penthouse. Due to the YMCA gathering the dead included members from all over Georgia. In one tragic case a letter one student wrote to her family about the good time she was having only arrived after news of her death in the fire.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rdUq2Eg47k The hotel is open nowadays as the Ellis Hotel, a upper class, boutique kind of place with only a small, lonely, plaque hidden behind a subway entrance.     The Winecoff does have one lingering effect though felt daily throughout the country. The fire so shocked the nation that within a few years the loopholes that had allowed the Winecoff to avoid fireproofing the interior had been closed. So, every time you stay in a hotel and don't burn to death try to remember the Winecoff. I've posted links for more reading regarding the fire below if anyone wants to learn more including some absolutely astonishing survivors experiences. http://www.firehouse.com/news/10568390/the-winecoff-fire-our-nations-deadliest-hotel-fire http://my.firefighternation.com/profiles/blogs/historic-loss-of-life-the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winecoff_Hotel_fire http://bainbridgega.com/news/publish/article_6268.shtml http://www.winecoff.org/2011/11/last-letter-discovered.html Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 03:46 on Dec 3, 2016 |
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Dec 3, 2016 03:44
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Nckdictator posted:In a few days it will be the 70th anniversary of the Winecoff Hotel fire, the deadliest in American history and mostly forgotten these days. I suspect it may be overshadowed by A Date Which Will Live in Infamy.
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Dec 3, 2016 03:52
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The darkest & guiltiest of  at building a giant oven and then calling it fire proofLike yeah technically it is
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Dec 3, 2016 04:30
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Platystemon posted:I suspect it may be overshadowed by A Date Which Will Live in Infamy. I assume he meant the deadliest hotel fire in American history, since there are plenty of other building fires that killed many more. For example the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 people, the majority of them (123) being women and children. So every time you don't burn to death at work because your piece of poo poo bosses locked you in from the outside you can thank those folks.
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Dec 3, 2016 05:04
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