In 1954 the US government pulled some really sick shit, they needed a place to test the hydrogen bomb and found a central pacific island to do it at. Showing very little regard for the inhabitants, they turned the island and the surrounding islands into a radioactive wasteland. Having grossly underestimated the size of the blast and fallout zone, they never evacuated or informed the surrounding islands of the threat.

The following are 2 videos of Early US atomic weapons tests.

CLICK HERE - Bikini Island Atomic Bomb Test Video

CLICK HERE - US Nuclear Testing Video Compilation

In the morning of March 1st 1954 people living on the islands surrounding a place called Bikini Island or Bikini Atoll watched in amazement as 2 suns rose in the sky. Shortly thereafter, it began to snow white ash and the islands water supply became brackish.

“Children played in the fallout; their mothers watched in horror as night came and they began to show the physical signs of exposure. The people experienced severe vomiting and diarrhea, their hair began to fall out, the island fell into a state of terrified panic.”

This is from the testing of atomic weapons on Bikini Island by the United States. Scientists underestimated the explosion and created a radioactive disaster that went far outside the evacuated areas.

The people on the neighboring islands received no explanations or warnings whatsoever from the United States government. Two days after the test some of the native people got medical treatment.

The radiation levels made the area uninhabitable for decades to come with the area finally being settled in the early 70’s. Unfortunately for the people who had to wait decades to come home, the problem with radiation was far from over.More testing showed that the area was radioactive and the soil and water supply was contaminated. The radiation caused an increase in birth defects and cancer and in the mid 70’s, the Bikini Islanders sued the US government in order for them to do more testing.

Early in the morning on March 1, 1954, the hydrogen bomb, code named Bravo, was detonated on the surface of the reef in the northwestern corner of Bikini Atoll. The area was illuminated by a huge and expanding flash of blinding light. A raging fireball of intense heat, that measured into the millions of degrees, shot skyward at a rate of 300 miles an hour. Within minutes the monstrous cloud, filled with nuclear debris, shot up more than 20 miles and generated winds hundreds of miles per hour. These fiery gusts blasted the surrounding islands and stripped the branches and coconuts from the trees.

Joint Task Force ships, which were stationed about 40 miles east and south of Bikini in positions enabling them to monitor the test, detected the eastward movement of the radioactive cloud from the 15 megaton blast. They recorded a steady increase in radiation levels that became so high that all men were ordered below decks and all hatches and watertight doors were sealed.

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Millions of tons of sand, coral, plant and sea life from Bikini’s reef, from three islands and the surrounding lagoon waters were sent high into the air by the blast. One and a half hours after the explosion, 23 fishermen aboard the Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, watched in awe as a “gritty white ash” began to fall on them. The men aboard the ship were oblivious to the fact that the ash was the fallout from a hydrogen bomb test. Shortly after being exposed to the fallout their skin began to itch and they experienced nausea and vomiting. One man died.

On Bikini Atoll the radiation levels increased dramatically. And, in late March following the Bravo test, the off-limits zones were expanded to include the inhabited atolls of Rongerik, Utirik, Ujelang and Likiep. It is startling to note that none of these islanders were evacuated prior to this blast or even before the subsequent nuclear weapons tests. In the spring of 1954, Bikar, Ailinginae, Rongelap, Rongerik, were all contaminated by the Yankee and Union weapon tests which were detonated on Bikini Atoll. They yielded the equivalent of 6.9 and 13.5 megatons of TNT respectively.

In more modern news, We all know about this one…

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At this point we know the devestation that the radiation caused, many places in the US are taking down the nuclear power plants, many are already shut down or are scheduled to be.. I must think that the insane accident at Chernobyl has something to do with that.

As safe as we are led to believe those power plants are two things can never change - There is still no safe method to dispose of waste and human error can not be set aside.

Chernobyl - a now unpopulated place
What was the sequence of events?
The accident in reactor no. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station took place in the night of 25 to 26 April 1986, during a test. The operating crew planned to test whether the turbines could produce sufficient energy to keep the coolant pumps running in the event of a loss of power until the emergency diesel generator was activated.

In order to prevent the test run of the reactor being interrupted, the safety systems were deliberately switched off. For the test, the reactor had to be powered down to 25 per cent of its capacity. This procedure did not go according to plan: for unknown reasons, the reactor power level fell to less than 1 per cent. The power therefore had to be slowly increased. But 30 seconds after the start of the test, there was a sudden and unexpected power surge. The reactor’s emergency shutdown (which should have halted the chain reaction) failed.

Within fractions of a second, the power level and temperature rose many times over. The reactor went out of control. There was a violent explosion. The 1000-tonne sealing cap on the reactor building was blown off. At temperatures of over 2000°C, the fuel rods melted. The graphite covering of the reactor then ignited. In the ensuing inferno, the radioactive fission products released during the core meltdown were sucked up into the atmosphere

In the above photo the red shows the radiation exposure worldwide.

“The Chernobyl accident in 1986 was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated with inadequately trained personnel and without proper regard for safety.”
– World Nuclear Association
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one of many created in the former Soviet Union in order to provide energy for its many cities. The actual city of Chernobyl (1986 pop. 10,000 people) is located not far from Kiev , the present-day capital of Ukraine , as well as many medium sized cities in the area. In all, over 2.4 million people were directly affected by radiation exposure after the accident.

Chernobyl was a Soviet designed RMBK, a Russian acronym for Reactor Bolshoi Moschnosti Kanalynyi “Channelized Large Power Reactor.” This type of reactor was used in over seventeen power plants throughout the Soviet Union , and was partially created to produce plutonium for ulterior uses (mainly for the purpose of creating nuclear weapons). This type of power plant also encompassed many flaws that have since been fixed.

Even still, the problems that faced Chernobyl in the mid 1980s prove what could happen in the case of a nuclear accident. It is thus a prime example for the reasons nuclear power plants are considered dangerous and even poisonous.

Here we go with the problem of human error, small group of people testing the bounds and causing devestation on the world.

The test that was conducted was actually against the power plant’s official policies; it was done by a small group that wanted to test out the ability of the reactor to create electrical power without its source of energy being connected. Without the approval of the safety commission for the plant, the team that led the test attempted to run the plant on low-power, ignoring many safety regulations.

Along with the fact that proper safety precautions were not being followed, the RBMK reactor itself had other major flaws that allowed for massive amounts of radiation to escape. Unlike the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, during which the radiation was contained within the facility, Chernobyl was not constructed to withstand such a large blast of radiation.

The building at Three Mile Island was constructed with a final layer of concrete on the outside specifically put there to contain radiation. The RBMK facility did not have this containment layer to protect the environment from radiation. go figure

Radioactive poisons had been released into a radius larger than 100 miles, but, furthermore, they became airborne and are known to have affected areas in Sweden , northern Russia , and even Alaska .

Effects of Radiation

“Patients who came into that hospital were more radioactive when they left than when they came in…”
- Nowhere to Hide: a Look at the Chernobyl Disaster

No one actually knew about the accident until three days later when Sweden published a report stating that it had found increased radiation coming out of the Soviet Union . In fact, the Soviet Union was doing all it could to cover up what had happened and assess the damage before the world could find out.

In the midst of the cold war, the Soviet Union did not want to undermine any credibility it had been assuming. A disaster of such massive proportions would cause (and did cause) international and national embarrassment. Indeed, such measures were taken to cover up the incident that medical treatment and clean up was delayed in order to make the public think that nothing was wrong.

The results of radioactive poisoning, however, were too large to ignore. Sweden quickly determined that extremely high levels of radiation were coming from somewhere in the Soviet Union .

For three days the Soviet Union had kept the incident completely under wraps, trying to do anything it could to contain the disaster and make it seem things were okay. When the Swedish report was published, however, it was impossible to continue covering up the facts of the matter.

Four hundred thousand people were evacuated and resettled to another place following the disaster, but millions of others continued to live in contaminated areas. The radioactive results were staggering. People exposed to the immediate radioactive clouds often died within a week from radiation poisoning. People living farther away from the incident suffered immediately from thyroid cancer. Since the accident birth defects have gone up 22%; the live birth rate has decreased immensely.

Here are a few pictures

Can it Happen Again?

Almost twenty years have passed since the Chernobyl accident, which truly was an eye-opener for the world. After the incident, the IAEA forced operating plants to change their safety standards.

All facilities are now required to have backup systems in case of a meltdown. This means that if one system fails another one will kick in and take over the job of cooling and moderating the materials.

Containment structures are being built stronger and those that existed before the Chernobyl incident are being reinforced to keep in radiation in the case of an explosion. While an incident on the same scale as Chernobyl would not be completely contained even with these reinforced walls, any smaller incidents will be. Furthermore, the walls would contain most of the results of an accident on such a large scale. The effects would not be as big or as problematic and will cover a much smaller area.

Nonetheless, the possibility for nuclear meltdown and radiation poisoning still exists. As mentioned in the safety section of the “Nuclear Reactor Specific” page, human error or malicious intent can still cause an accident to occur.

So, basically, what it comes down to is a string of errors that caused devestation to millions. Bad engineering, outdated systems, lack of funding, and… the human element of a handfull of mad scientists playing with the world around them trying to prove thier theory caring only about the results and not the what ifs.

They did prove something 20 years back. They proved that nothing is beyond error and nuclear power as green as it should be, is still outside of our grasp. Nuclear power is great in theory, but without a way to dispose of waste and the devestaton an accident(even a small one) can cause, may not be the way to go. well, I’m thinking…

Here is a blog with more info about Chernobyl

and, more pics of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster

here is the image gallery of some really sick shit

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On the bright side here, yep believe it or not there is.

Due to the people all leaving the area, wildlife has come back and adapted. Plants and animals are back into the non-human populated areas and seem to be doing well in the radioactive waste. Hell, we may even get a few new species out of this one and who knows, the radiation may cause the little lizards to come back as giant dinosaurs making all the kids happy. Time will tell and teenage Munant Ninja Turtles may become reality in 100 years.

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So I was looking at .gov sites for …well sick shit and found this

The Office of Human Radiation Experiments, established in March 1994, leads the Department of Energy’s efforts to tell the agency’s Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects. We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE’s 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country. Internet access to these resources is a key part of making DOE more open and responsive to the American public.

so… cool, wanted to read it… right? NOT

here is the message on the now closed site…

blah…blah..
website is currently closed down for two reasons: (1) After the events of September 11, 2001, the Federal Government undertook a review of all information on its websites to determine the appropriateness of the information on the websites.
blah.. blah..

fo, they give a link to redirect to a new site… and that gave a link that came back to this same mess… hey…what happened here?

after a bit of digging… I found some pretty sick information, from a university site that I ended up at through some redirect..

this was the page
From 1946-1974, several agencies of the United States governmentconducted or sponsored experiments on human subjects involving

radioactive materials.The agencies included the Atomic Energy Commission and several

branches of the military services, among others.

Many such experiments resulted in valuable medical advances like

radiation treatments for cancer and the use of isotopes to

accurately diagnose illnesses.

However, the Clinton Administration has questions about whether

subjects of some experiments were treated properly.

There are indications that in some cases:

(1) some subjects may not have been notified that they were

participating in an experiment;

(2) some subjects may not have given proper informed

consent;

(3) certain subjects gave consent, but may not have been

fully informed of potential health consequences of the

experiment;

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