Early nuclear weapons testing photographs

[IROC]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

The only thing that the Manhattan project and the cold war did was to work out the minor engineering details and get a production line running for the material.

I drive past the Graphite Reactor every day...

[ODDJOB UNO]

ya know after doing nuklar miss-kill nose cones/towers, nuklar triggers, f-117 delivery systems(old skool) and going to all these nuklar sites, and seeing 1st hand up close and personnal what the hell we have and what the hell we CAN DO............these lil piss ant rogue nations so much as pop corn fart................they will see the sun come up twice.


the craters in mercury were beyond comprehension. i mean it literally beyond anything i can describe in words.


feeling the last underground det. back in 92 in henderson, really opened my eyes to what the hell its all about.



peace thru BIGGER NUKLAR KUNG FU!

[JeremyD]

My old physics professor worked with Oppenheimer back in the day. He (in NM at the time) had some fabulous stories. There was great concern by even some of the more experienced that the "mega" bombs might actually catch the atmosphere on fire...

[sammyg2]

I attended a training class a few years back on advanced vibration analysis. One of the lecturers was Arthur Crawford who was a junior research scientist on the manhattan project.

he told us that as an alternative to using deuterium for the first ever breeder reactor, they had to make absolutely pure powdered carbon and the only thing they had to turn the hard chunks into powder was a large rock crusher and for some reason the vibration was so bad on that machine that it nearly destroyed itself and crashed. His job was to find out why it was vibrating so badly.
He was a nuclear physicist so he was out of his field, but he developed vibration analysis equipment to determine the cause and solution.
Accelerometers, filters, FFts, he came up with all that stuff.
Then he designed a system to use that equipment to perfectly balance the machine.

HE was the father of modern machinery condition monitoring and vibration analysis and modern balancing machines.
Fascinating man but a very, very dry lecturer. I looked around at the class and half the students were mesmerized and the other half were asleep.

Most of the content was extremely high level technical details. He had PHD's scratching their heads

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

...
HE was the father of modern machinery condition monitoring and vibration analysis and modern balancing machines...

The scale and the type of problems they came across drove the creation of new fields of study and entire industries. Amazing what can be done with the right resources and motivation.

Some of my less-informed peers here think that the Manhattan Project was only in Los Alamos -- little do they know that most of the _really_ cool and mindblowing stuff was done in Washington, Tennessee and elsewhere. Talk about BIG projects - look at the Oak Ridge area!

Too many documentaries focus on the physicists and the spies. Some hit on the genius of von Neuman's and Metropolous' mathematical work but it seems like the engineers don't get as much of the love...

[IROC]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

Some of my less-informed peers here think that the Manhattan Project was only in Los Alamos -- little do they know that most of the _really_ cool and mindblowing stuff was done in Washington, Tennessee and elsewhere. Talk about BIG projects - look at the Oak Ridge area!

Big projects are still going on... My entire facility takes advantage of an errant observation from the neutrons produced in the Graphite Reactor during the Manhattan Project (well, actually in 1946). It is a shame how little the general public knows (or cares) about the phenomenal things going in this country...

[RWebb]

to be honest, the general public probably could not understand it anyway - science education in the US is not exactly at a high level

[sammyg2]

I seem to remember a metallurgical lab under an athletic field, Chicago?

[RWebb]

Chicago = reactor

[Evans, Marv]

This discussion reminds me of living in a small CA town named Tehachapi between Bakersfield and Mojave in the desert. This was the early/middle '50s, and we went over to the house of one of the teachers for a while. She lived near the school and we watched one of the nuclear test shots on her TV (B&W of course). They usually announced the pending shots if I remember correctly, and they were mostly in the early morning, if I remember correctly. Anyway, I got up early one morning when they were going to have a test. I had figured approximately the direction to the test area from where I lived and went and sat down in the front yard facing that direction. At about the time it was supposed to happen I saw a really bright light over in that direction and a little time later heard the sound of a sharp thunderclap. Even at that age I was amazed that much could be experienced from such a long distance away.

[IROC]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

I seem to remember a metallurgical lab under an athletic field, Chicago?

They may have called it a "metallurgical lab", but it was actually a nuclear reactor. They loaded up all of those folks and came down here to Tennessee and the rest is history...

[Embraer]

here's my awesome, completely nerdy 3/4 length sleeve t-shirt.....

[ODDJOB UNO]

me getting nuked.

[ODDJOB UNO]

yeah we had our noses in everything that went BANG or BOOM and then some. got to see some wild poo. the pic of my dodge pre-runner d-50 "john baker especial" is at PVNGS here.


im glad my lil sperm a-toads were put to good use conceiving (2) kids before i visited all of these sites.


the eyeball opener was at trinity when the air police's geiger counter went off the scale ie HOT REMS...............after all these years.



never failed in some poo hole holiday inn bar when the subject came up "what do YOU do?" and i replied "well today we made some nuklar bomb triggers. yesterday we made some nose cones for ICBMS, and the other day we machined some REALLY HOT REM RADIATED PARTS and my BALLS ARE KIND OF GLOWING!"

[IROC]

Originally Posted by ODDJOB UNO

the eyeball opener was at trinity when the air police's geiger counter went off the scale ie HOT REMS...............after all these years.

I know this will sound crazy, but you exaggerate. You don't know the meaning of "hot rems"...

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by IROC

I know this will sound crazy, but you exaggerate. You don't know the meaning of "hot rems"...

Mrs mjohnson did a few months on a project with Np in a hot cell. After that (not even near the stuff coming out of an accelerator or reactor) she says that plutonium is kinda no big deal.

Funny how the "free thinkers" in Santa Fe freak out about a barrel of Pu tainted gloves yet they completely ignore the truckloads of medical radionuclides heading through town....

Would love to see the goods @ ORNL!

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by ODDJOB UNO

the eyeball opener was at trinity when the air police's geiger counter went off the scale ie HOT REMS...............after all these years.

Dunno on that - they let the public scamper around the place without dosimetry. How hot can it be? The DOE is _so_ paranoid about radiation these days so it must have been pretty low.

Again, without dosimeters, I got a thorough tour of the test site last year. Crawled around the bank vault on Frenchman's Flats, poked my head into what was left of the houses from the Apple shot (the famous ones in the movies that get blown away in the blast) and walked around in the tunnels and vacuum chambers from the line of sight tests.

Though - this was in 2010. Most of the bad stuff drops off quickly with time. I bet 10 years or more ago things were slightly warmer.

I guess Homeland Security has taken over the test site. Shame - it should be a national park/monument. Thousands of square miles of untouched nature housing some of the most amazing, sobering and mind-blowing pieces of America's history/willpower/craziness/technological prowess.