US nuked Spain

[G.Elias]

Don't how true this is but its damn https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/photos-f...-palomaresscarey

[barq2]

Yes, I believe it is true. I read about them accidentally dropping the nuclear bombs a while ago. There were other similar accidents.

Part of the problem was that Mutually Assured Destruction required the USA and USSR to get their nuclear bombs in the air within minutes. That led to a culture where missiles were on hair-trigger alert and safety was compromised. JFK was aware of this and instructed the navy to put an extra code lock in the launch process to make it safer. I understand the Navy didn't much like the idea, so set the code to 0000.

There was a very scary episode in the 80s when a USA/NATO military exercise in Europe was nearly misinterpreted as the build up to a pre-emptive strike. There was a lot of pressure in the USSR to launch first. Luckily they didn't. The exercise was called Able Archer (you can look it up) and it is a plot point in the drama Deutschland 83.

Scary stuff!

[G.Elias]

Yeah Barq,not finished watching all of Deutschland 83,there was a doc a while ago where a Nato excersise in the early 80's was believed to be the real thing.
Thankfully one of the Russians refused to believe it was the real thing and didn't start pushing buttons that would have led to WW3,or not actually WW3 but the complete ending of life on earth.

Those trains full of nuclear waste still pass through where i live,one day i hope there is not an accident,truly horrifying what man takes chances with,shows how much they actually value our lives and our earth.

[Mack30]

This is a story certainly not ran in the US and with the US recently blowing up a Hospital killing 42 ..not good press.
Could have done without the photo of the naked man too that left a visual. ughh

[barq2]

Yeah Barq,not finished watching all of Deutschland 83,there was a doc a while ago where a Nato excersise in the early 80's was believed to be the real thing.
Thankfully one of the Russians refused to believe it was the real thing and didn't start pushing buttons that would have led to WW3,or not actually WW3 but the complete ending of life on earth.

Those trains full of nuclear waste still pass through where i live,one day i hope there is not an accident,truly horrifying what man takes chances with,shows how much they actually value our lives and our earth.

Deutshcland 83 is so good. The way they treat Able Archer is fictionalised, but close enough. I think I know the documentary you mean - possibly on Channel 4 and I picked it up on YouTube.

The containers of nuclear waste on trains are very tough. They are designed to withstand a high speed rail crash - they have to be very solid because if something like that ruptured in a fire the contamination would be a problem for a significant chunk of the UK. So I believe that aspect to be reasonably safe. The worrying bit is the state of Sellafield and the water pools in which high level waste is kept.

Unfortunately the entire nuclear power system was designed to make bombs. That cold war decision affected the type of reactors that were built and even the fuel they use. There was a very promising research program into thorium as fuel which would be far safer. But thorium doesn't help you build bombs so it was never developed seriously. I'm not saying thorium is perfect (some of the documentaries make it seem too good to be true), but it would have been safer and produced less waste.

On this topic, have you ever watched Edge of Darkness? It was a BBC drama in the mid-80s about these sorts of issues. There was a more recent remake with Mel Gibson that is best avoided.

[G.Elias]

I remember Edge of Darkness,very good series,not the Mel Gibson one!
I have relatives in Cumbria,there was a leak up there in either 50's or 60's,all milk produced up there had to be recalled for fear that cows eating grass in the area had become contaminated.

I knew about Windscale(now sellafield) was making material for nuclear missiles,they never told the people of the UK that though,said it was just energy,always lies with military and politicians.

Sellafield,isn't it now just reprocessing nuclear waste?For what i wonder?Sooner all those places close the better,not like we get cheap energy from them is it?

[G.Elias]

Can you remember what the channel 4 doc was called barq?Wouldn't mind watching it but cannot remember the name of it,was shown a good few years ago,it was on the old 4 OD website but i couldnt find it,must have removed it at some point.

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I think i found it on veoh dot com,it looks like Ch4 removed it from yoo toob,after a dig around found out its called Able Archer 1983 The Brink of Apocalypse ,think that is the doc we talked about?

[barq2]

Can you remember what the channel 4 doc was called barq?Wouldn't mind watching it but cannot remember the name of it,was shown a good few years ago,it was on the old 4 OD website but i couldnt find it,must have removed it at some point.

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I think i found it on veoh dot com,it looks like Ch4 removed it from yoo toob,after a dig around found out its called Able Archer 1983 The Brink of Apocalypse ,think that is the doc we talked about?

Yes, that is the one. I found it here (but in 10 min chunks): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Df7Uf3mlk

You mentioned Windscale, that was a bad fire and they really didn't know what to do. Fortunately one of the scientists had insisted they must put filters on the chimneys, otherwise a lot more would and leaked out. There is a BBC documentary about that on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Df7Uf3mlk

I believe Sellafield is just reprocessing now. They have huge amounts of waste because the early nuclear projects were frantic attempts to build bombs with very little consideration of the waste. The reactor designs we are left with now are a legacy of the cold war. If you weren't building bombs then you can use far more efficient designs that produce far less waste. If it weren't for the bombs we would possibly use thorium in reactors rather than uranium.

But for a country like the UK that has very extensive coastline not to make use of all that tidal power is insane. Of course the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, but tidal power is very reliable.

I think part of the problem is that politicians seem to favour big projects rather than a series of smaller ones that might in total be more efficient.

I don't work in the nuclear industry or anything like that, but I researched the history and the physics for a script. Unfortunately the project never came together, but I might return to it one day. I find the subject of scientists creating this monster, and then becoming very scared of what they had done an interesting theme. many of the scientists working on the Manhattan project tried to stop the bomb from actually being dropped on Japan.