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NNadir

(35,666 posts)
Sat Apr 26, 2025, 02:07 PM Saturday

The Origins of Oak Ridge National Lab, Hanford Nuclear Site, CSPAN lecture in history.

I just watched this excellent lecture on CSPAN focusing on the development of nuclear weapons in the 1940's, covering the construction of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (still an important site for nuclear science) and the Hanford Plutonium producing complex.

I'm not sure whether this belongs in the history forum or in the science forum, but the history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a Washington native, knows his science and gave a wonderful lecture on the topic, so I'm putting it here. I know a lot about nuclear technology and its history, but there were a few things I actually didn't know and learned.

University of Texas history professor Bruce Hunt discussed the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and the role of the Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie Groves. The University of Texas is located in Austin.


https://www.c-span.org/program/lectures-in-history/development-of-the-atomic-bomb/655354

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erronis

(19,264 posts)
1. Thanks - I look forward to watching this.
Sat Apr 26, 2025, 02:15 PM
Saturday

I worked peripherally around the nuclear energy world with GE and Hanford decommissioning.

NNadir

(35,666 posts)
2. Hanford is a very, very, very interesting place. PNNL is a place that, surprisingly, played a huge role in my field...
Sat Apr 26, 2025, 02:29 PM
Saturday

...mass spectrometry, particularly in the development of ion mobility spectrometry.

I think there's a lot to learn about the geochemistry of radionuclides from the place. While it scares the shit out of some people, I don't think the matter is quite as serious as credulous paranoia would have it. I wrote a rather long piece here on Hanford in response to an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke here.

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

It was a waste of time as far as addressing the antinuke, but a wonderful use of time for learning new things, one of which is that Hanford is kind of an Oklo redux that can tell us a great deal about the geology of radioactive materials. (The Oklo reactors were the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that operated a few billion years ago.)

It's interesting the discussion of mass spectrometry in the lecture, Laurence's "calutrons" at Oak Ridge. I actually did the Oak Ridge Tour when I took my son there for his undergraduate summer internship at the National Neutron Spallation Facility. There is a calcutron on display. After watching the lecture, I learned the etymology of "calcutron," the word.

It's a wonderful lecture. I highly recommend watching it. I wish that the entire course was on line.

IbogaProject

(4,306 posts)
3. My Mom's uncle died of cancer after working at Hanford during and just after WW2
Sat Apr 26, 2025, 05:06 PM
Saturday

He died around 1949 or 50.

NNadir

(35,666 posts)
6. If the claim is that your uncle's death was caused by radiation, in general, an epidemiological conclusion drawn...
Sun Apr 27, 2025, 01:38 AM
Yesterday

...from a study size of N = 1 has essentially no meaning.

Both my father and my mother both died from cancer, and neither of them worked with radiation. As Mukherjee pointed out in The Emperor of All Maladies, cancer has been known in humans for thousands of years; and indeed there is fossil evidence suggesting that dinosaurs got cancer.

My mother died from a brain tumor that she contracted after a bus trip out West she took (with my father) "to see the country." The bus drove through Colorado, presumably past Rocky Flats outside of Denver, where there was a plutonium finishing plant for nuclear weapons.

As a dumb, young, antinuke, fifty years ago, I wondered if that was the cause of her brain tumor.

Rocky Flats is in Jefferson County Colorado, which has a cancer rate (all cancers) of 416.5 cancers per 100,000 people (95% confidence level) which is lower than cancer rates for the general United States as a whole 481.1 cancers per 100,000 people. This of course, does not imply that plutonium processing plants are good for one's health, and that my mother might have saved her life by getting out of the bus and hiking around Rocky Flats. (As it happened, there was a cluster of brain tumors in the semiconductor plant where my mother worked, something I found out decades after she died, but I cannot assert working there was the cause of her tumor. It could have been, but it could have been something else.)

Benton County in Washington State, where Hanford is located has a cancer rate (all cancers) of 423.7 cancers per 100,000 people, lower than Washington State as a whole (463.1 cancers per 100,000 people) and, again, the US average.

Does radiation cause cancer? Of course it does; it's well known, but is dose dependent. The linear no dose threshold, the claim that there is no "safe level" of radiation, however has been shown to be speculative, and quite possibly based on scientific fraud, a claim made by the Health Physicist Ed Calabrese at the University of Massachusetts.



There is evidence of an effect known as hormesis, a claim that low dose exposure to radiation (or other stressors) can have a protective effect by stimulating cellular repair mechanisms, that low dose exposure (which all organisms on Earth are subject, owing to the radioactivity of the essential element potassium) can be beneficial as opposed to harmful.

Here is an open sourced paper that discusses the concept: Wan, Y., Liu, J., Mai, Y. et al. Current advances and future trends of hormesis in disease. npj Aging 10, 26 (2024). (It cites Calabrese.) There are many other papers on this topic, including potential cellular based mechanisms.

Hanford is one of the most radioactively contaminated places on Earth, at least in the vicinity of the waste tanks some of which are leaking underground, but it is not entirely clear to me that many lives will be saved by "cleaning it up" since I'm not convinced that many lives are actually at risk. I have argued that the use of fossil fuels to "clean up" Hanford are actually worse, at least in one case I explored, than doing nothing at all, that is simply waiting for the most radioactive components to decay to background levels.

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

There are tens of thousands of people living normal and healthy lives in Hanford's nearby city of Richland, where many people are employed by the "clean up" operations at Hanford or at the wonderful Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By the way, John Wheeler, the physicist, worked at Hanford works in the 1940's, before returning to Princeton where he trained multiple future Nobel Prize winners, including Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne. He died at the age of 96. His long life cannot be attributed to hormesis, again, because a sample size of N = 1 is meaningless and speculative.



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