Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire: World War II

Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Cleaning Up Nuclear-Contaminated Sites Faster And Cheaper

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on cleanup of some major sites contaminated by radioactivity, primarily from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after World War II. These include the Hanford site in Washington, Savannah River site in South Carolina (pictured), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

by Staff Writers Corvallis OR (SPX) Jan 04, 2011 Members of the engineering faculty at Oregon State University have invented a new type of radiation detection and measurement device that will be particularly useful for cleanup of sites with radioactive contamination, making the process faster, more accurate and less expensive. A patent has been granted on this new type of radiation spectrometer, and the first production of devices will begin soon. The advance has also led to creation of a Corvallis-based spinoff company, Avicenna Instruments, based on the OSU research. The market for these instruments may ultimately be global, and thousands of them could be built, researchers say.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on cleanup of some major sites contaminated by radioactivity, primarily from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after World War II. These include the Hanford site in Washington, Savannah River site in South Carolina, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
"Unlike other detectors, this spectrometer is more efficient, and able to measure and quantify both gamma and beta radiation at the same time," said David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics. "Before this two different types of detectors and other chemical tests were needed in a time-consuming process."
"This system will be able to provide accurate results in 15 minutes that previously might have taken half a day," Hamby said. "That saves steps, time and money."
The spectrometer, developed over 10 years by Hamby and Abi Farsoni, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering, can quickly tell the type and amount of radionuclides that are present in something like a soil sample - contaminants such as cesium 137 or strontium 90 - that were produced from reactor operations. And it can distinguish between gamma rays and beta particles, which is necessary to determine the level of contamination.
"Cleaning up radioactive contamination is something we can do, but the process is costly, and often the question when working in the field is how clean is clean enough," Hamby said. "At some point the remaining level of radioactivity is not a concern. So we need the ability to do frequent and accurate testing to protect the environment while also controlling costs."
This system should allow that, Hamby said, and may eventually be used in monitoring processes in the nuclear energy industry, or possibly medical applications in the use of radioactive tracers.
The OSU College of Engineering has contracted with Ludlum Instruments, a Sweetwater, Texas, manufacturer, to produce the first instruments, and the OSU Office of Technology Transfer is seeking a licensee for commercial development. The electronic systems for the spectrometers will be produced in Oregon by Avicenna Instruments, the researchers said.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Nuclear Industry Workforce Education Revitalizes Skilled Labor and Manufacturing Careers

In 1950 manufacturing accounted for more than 30 percent of all U.S. employment. These skilled labor careers provided an unprecedented standard of living for more than two decades following the end of World War II, allowing millions of Americans to purchase homes and autos and pay for their children to go to college.
By 2006, manufacturing employment shrunk to a mere 10 percent of U.S. employment and with it the bulk of America’s well-paying skilled labor careers. Prognosticators predicted manufacturing’s ultimate demise as a significant driver of the American economy. But a look at the U.S. nuclear industry tells a different story: a narrative where job growth in the skilled trades is on an upward trend and the industry can serve as a role model for the revitalization of the U.S. manufacturing sector through the creation of new careers and economic expansion. In fact, it already has.
At this point 13 license applications for up to 22 new reactors have been filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the industry expects four-to-eight new plants to be operating by the end of the decade. Construction activities already have begun at plant sites in Georgia and South Carolina. As a consequence, over the past three years more than 15,000 careers, not just jobs, have been created as the nuclear industry has invested over $4 billion in new nuclear plant development. Plans call for the investment of another $8 billion to be in position to supply the materials needed to begin large-scale construction in 2011-2012. Many of these careers don’t require a college degree, but have earnings potential that equals, and even exceeds, that of college graduates. Teachers can play an instrumental part in creating awareness among their students of these careers.
K-12 educators should incorporate what we call “Energy Literacy” into their teaching plans and thus can play a significant role in encouraging their students to consider the career possibilities as electrical and mechanical technicians, radiation monitors, health physicists and engineers of all kinds. The nuclear industry has resources to help educators explain to students what career opportunities are available in nuclear power. For example, FREE curriculum and lesson plans are available from groups such as the National Education Foundation and The Ford Foundation on all sectors of energy production including nuclear power. The industry offers expert speakers from diverse nuclear-oriented groups including Women in Nuclear, the North American Young Generation in Nuclear and the American Nuclear Society, and there is a successful nuclear energy mentoring program known as Power Set that could be replicated around the country.
But is there proof of a revival in the American nuclear industry that warrants teachers’ interest? You bet there is. More at:

http://www.cleanenergyinsight.org/energy-insights/nuclear-industry-workforce-education-revitalizes-skilled-labor-and-manufacturing-careers/

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Bomb Chroniclers

Meet The Men Whose Job Was To Photograph Nuclear Explosions

ZERO HOUR Milliseconds after the image at left, the vehicles beneath the fireball were obliterated. "How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb"

The Bomb Chroniclers -- New York Times

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds.
The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again.
Then there was radiation.
While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps.
Read more ....

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Was there really a "nuclear revolution?" from Stephen M. Walt by Stephen M. Walt

Image via Wikipedia

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/03/rethinking_the_nuclear_revolution

Ever since graduate school, I've been a firm believer in the "nuclear revolution." The term refers to the belief that the invention of nuclear weapons constituted a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare, and conceivably in international relations itself. As Bernard Brodie put it in The Absolute Weapon (1946): "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them." (Hmmm. Given that we've fought at least five significant wars since World War II, and a host of minor conflicts, we don't seem to be following Brodie's advice).

The idea of the "nuclear revolution" goes further than that, however. As refined by scholars like Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Glenn Snyder, Robert Jervis, Kenneth Waltz, and Stephen Van Evera, nuclear weapons are said to provide states with the ability to protect their sovereignty and independence not via direct defense but rather through deterrence. Instead of defending one's borders or vital interests with conventional military forces, states could deter enemy attack by threatening to inflict unacceptable damage on an aggressor. As long as they possessed a secure second-strike retaliatory force, in short, they could deter attack by threatening to make an aggressor's losses outweigh its gains. As Winston Churchill famously put it, peace had become "the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation."

Finally, as Jervis argued in several important works, the nuclear revolution dampened (and maybe eliminated) the security dilemma between states. As long as a state possessed a secure second-strike capability (SSC), its security wasn't affected if an possible adversary had a much larger arsenal. In the world of mutual assured destruction, in short, "nuclear superiority" was a meaningless concept. Even if an enemy had a lot more warheads, it couldn't attack a state with a secure SSC without risking devastating retaliation. And it didn't take a genius to figure out that even a minor nuclear exchange would ruin your whole day.

According to the logic of the "nuclear revolution," therefore, states with second-strike capabilities were secure against attack and didn't need to worry very much about their sovereignty or independence. The "security dilemma" was muted, and cooperation between states would be greatly facilitated. (Other theorists took this argument even further, and suggested that the technological change embodied in the nuclear revolution heralded the end of the nation-state and the emergence of a global republic).

I've long accepted the core tenets of this basic argument, and I've taught it to my students for years. But lately I've started wondering about just how far-reaching this "revolution" really was. Although I still accept the core logic, the existence of nuclear weapons doesn't seem to have had the far-reaching political effects that Jervis and others anticipated.
More at link