Since the tail end of World War II, humanity has struggled to deal with its newfound ability to harness the tremendous energy in the nucleus of the atom. Of course there have been some positive developments like nuclear power which can produce tremendous amounts of electricity without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels. But largely humanity decided to build a tremendous nuclear weapons arsenal instead, which has not only cause general consternation worldwide but caused specific problems for one scientist in particular.
[Steve Weintz] takes us through the tale of [Dr. John C. Clark] who was working with the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States and found himself first at a misfire of a nuclear weapons test in the early 1950s. As the person in charge of the explosive device, it was his responsibility to safely disarm the weapon after it failed to detonate. He would find himself again in this position a year later when a second nuclear device sat on the test pad after the command to detonate it was given. Armed with only a hacksaw and some test equipment he was eventually able to disarm both devices safely.
One note for how treacherous this work actually was, outside of the obvious: although there were safety devices on the bombs to ensure the nuclear explosion would only occur under specific situations, there were also high explosives on the bomb that might have exploded even without triggering the nuclear explosion following it. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants aren’t the only things that the atomic age ushered in, though. There have been some other unique developments as well, like the nuclear gardens of the mid 1900s.
And, afterwards, they pulled diamonds out of his sphincter.
Looks good on a resume, though: “Disarmed two atomic bombs”
Please specify which sphincter you are referring to? I imagine it would be painful to pull a diamond out of an eye.
Eh, just another day in paradise…. 89D ..hooahh ! ….would love to mess with a W86 ! Hurt Locker dude ain’t got nuthin’ on me !
No.
I only have the one.
And you think you have a sh!tty job?
HIs job was worse than mine.
However, there was one Saturday afternoon when I questioned all my educational choices… I had inherited 3 labs worth of chemicals from a retired synthetic organic chemist, and had to sort and move all of them so the construction crews could tear out the old hoods and install new, with new HVAC. He had retired 2 years before, I was the only technician for the group, and the scientist hired after was an engineer with no chemical experience. It started on a Thursday, when I opened a cabinet to assess the contents and started counting potential peroxide formers-peroxides have a tendency to form impact-sensitive explosive compounds, Then I called in a PhD chemical engineer with more experience to assess the explosion hazards. (He was the union rep that had helped a previous retiring scientist to contest being required to sort and dispose of chemicals. It wasn’t in the scientist’s performance requirements, so the argument was you couldn’t hold up his retirement. So the second guy skated out without cleaning up either.) Once the multiple bottles were tested as safe to move, all those got hauled to disposal and I started working on the rest, finding SDSs for each one, writing up the individual disposal form, and making copies.
We work with characterizing and making biobased polymers and materials from wood byproducts. Everything that reacts with wood will react with any other biological tissue, including me. By Saturday, I was down to all the bottles smaller than a liter, and working my way through shelves of stuff with NFPA Health 3 and 4 with cautions like “Breathing vapor will instantly cause swelling and constriction” similar to the old “joke” “This will kill you, and hurt like heck the whole time you are dying. I started to get tired, and thought to myself, “it would be safer to go sort through the heavy metals, rather than drop one of these vapor lethal chemicals”. And that was the time I questioned all those years in school to get to a master’s degree….
Sounds like an argument for sturdier containers or storage on the floor. In any case, don’ pick up none, won’ drop none. Failing that…
taskrabbit.com
Was it this guy? His book is simultaneously interesting, inspirational and terrifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Gergel
You needed another organic chemist.
He would have hauled off half of it for you, been happy to do it.
If that wasn’t the chemist you had, he would have known who to call.
My dad was packrat and chemist, but not an organic chemist.
Still sitting on his mass-spec…I know what I got (spiders, lots and lots of spiders).
I’m more intrigued by the previous article teased on the bottom of this one: “This Nuclear Outboard Motor Was a Really Terrible Idea.”
Yes it was.
https://daxe.substack.com/p/this-nuclear-outboard-motor-was-a
I like the pic of the atomic fireball : you can clearly see the structure of the support tower and the plasma spikes towards the ground due to the metal cables which conduct heat better than the ambient air.
A pretty good view of hell…
It’s not that they conduct heat better – rather, the intense x-rays are causing them to vaporize, and as x-rays move at the speed of light while the fireball moves slower than that, this causes protruding spikes.
Thank you for saying this. I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. Looked like an x-ray of a particle of silicaa or electron micrograph of something.
There are a bunch of those early a-bomb detonation pictures.
Really cool camera hack.
Dude’s name escapes me.
Did all the early high speed camera work.
As it happens I am reasonably familiar with the first one he disarmed. The second? That’s new to me. The story of the first was told I believe in one of the many things I was reading during the frustrating activity we call school.
Maybe a switch installed to de-energize the device? To physically disconnect it from everything?