Irradiated: The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry | Hacker News Reader

Irradiated: The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry

media.mcclatchydc.com

25 points_xonj15 comments

At least 33,480 former nuclear workers who received compensation are dead

Yes, and 100% of US soldiers who were shot at in the first world war are dead, even if none of the bullets ever hit them!

Counting deaths makes sense for a short-term event (e.g., X residents of Hiroshima died within a week of the bomb being dropped) but when you're looking at deaths over the course of 70 years, you need to either adjust for the number of individuals who would have died from natural causes or (much better) estimate how many QALYs were lost compared to their natural lifespan.

I have no doubt that there were real health and safety problems with the production and maintenance of the US nuclear arsenal -- particularly in the early days when the issues were poorly understood -- but statistics like the above do nothing to inform and a great deal to mislead, and should be avoided whenever possible.

    > 100% of US soldiers who were shot at in
    > the first world war are dead

I was curious about this so I looked it up. The last American survivor died just over 4 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Buckles

Interesting perspective, but nobody tried to pretend that getting shot in the First World War didn't happen, or that being shot wasn't a problem. These workers were subjected to workplace dangers that were unacceptable in any other context, and many paid a dear price.

There are many deaths, cancer clusters and environmental impacts from nuclear weapons production.

I said being shot at. 100% of WW1 soldiers are dead even if none of the bullets hit them.

I'm not saying that nuclear weapons production didn't kill people; just that the statistic they cited is utterly useless.

I'm amazed of the unethical treatment of the workers whom handle the plutonium plates (Ralph Stanton). It's a shame that these companies are allowed to operate, it's also a shame that there exists other people whom are continuing this cycle, the doctors whom miss-treat them, the managers that are writing them up in-order to get them fired, the individuals that make the calls for alpha particle detectors to be removed from above the working area.

There was more text down here, but I'm at a loss of words.

I'm told my grandfather photographed early atomic bomb tests, which is why my mother grew up on a Strategic Air Command base. He died in the 1980s, relatively young (though smoking contributed) and matters of his health and his pension were also subject to bureaucratic limbo.

My other grandfather trained to operate a Davey Crockett missile (the shoulder-launched missile with a M388 atomic warhead). I'm mostly just glad to live in a world where I worry about terrorism instead of global thermonuclear annihilation...

Plutonium 238 is something we need a lot more of for deep space flight.

http://kumar.party/2015/07/04/nasa-needs-plutonium%E2%80%8A-...

Fascinating. But the site damn near killed my Firefox.

Worth a read is the story of Karen Silkwood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood

Also worth a watch is the film Silkwood based on her time at Kerr McGee:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086312/

At least huge compensation amounts were paid, and the victims are remembered on this page and elsewhere.

In Soviet nuclear program, lots of human beings died for nothing, their names forgotten.

I thank the 3828 liquidators that cleaned up the worst of the Chernobyl roof, two minutes at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk

> died for nothing

While that is certainly true, it's worth remembering that most are still alive, though many are now having trouble in the healthcare system thanks to poor CCCP records (or finding those records now).

And we are spending another trillion dollars on this?!

Yep cause building subways, high speed rail systems, and upgrading the national power grid doesn't make economic sense.

Hmm. I need perspective on 'trillion'. calculates

$1T is basically telling every employed person and factory in the USA that they're going to spend three weeks working to pay for the new nuclear weapons. I wonder how long that investment is good for.

That is the way to think about it. From my dad who worked for the government I learned something contrarian. The government doesn't waste much money at the level of a worker. The government wastes money at the program level. As an example the Reagan administration brought the USS Iowa out of mothballs. You can bet that the work done to upgrade her was done efficiently and economically (as efficiently and economically as any huge project like that goes). But on the big picture, they should have left her to rust.

Stuff like this is why I make comments about building public infrastructure. Say the critics are current, the California High Speed Rail project is a boondoggle. Well at least we get a high speed rail line out of the deal. Vs a couple thousand shiny new nukes which aren't useful to anyone really.

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