Pantex is located outside Amarillo, population 180,000. Yield of a W56: 1.2 megatons, 100 times the size of Hiroshima.

Can someone translate that into how much of the greatest state in the nation (I’m a Texan) it would have taken out? Would it just have been Amarillo, or more?

Sorry, morbid curiosity.

Esthier on December 16, 2006 at 2:03 PM

This should give you some idea of what a megaton detonation would do…

High Yield Detonation Effects Simulator

The most you could do is maybe blow yerself up detonating some of the conventional charges that initiate the nuclear blast,or maybe (MAYBE) achieve subcritical mass and irradiate yerself or crack the vacuum chamber containing the ‘material’ and release radioactive particles into a relatively small area. All of which would probably only kill you and the people around you.

In other words, a hulking moron with a 100lb sledge hammer could only kill hisself while playing with a nuke.If you took off the armor for him 1st. And only if he tried really really hard.
And I’m 100% confident the people who dismantle nukes are not morons.

But ‘accidentally’ achieving full nuclear detonation?
No. Not possible, the device is too complicated. If even one conventional charge failed to detonate at the exact right time(within 1 nanosecond), it wouldn’t go nuclear. And that is one of the hundreds of examples of what can go ‘wrong’ with a nuke.

Having said that. Yes, what this facility is accused of doing is stupid and dangerous if it’s true. But it’s not ‘OMG, A Mushroom Cloud over Texas’ dangerous.

The last thing heard in a nuclear weapons factory when somebody makes a mistake!

This is one of those situations where if a couple hundred thousand for more staff can keep a billion-dollar facility and surrounding city from being leveled, then it’d probably be a good idea to get some additional staff at Pantex.

Jones Zemkophill on December 17, 2006 at 12:22 AM

Yes, the Bush team is renown for their foresight and preventative actions. Just ask anyone from New Orleans.

“We have met the enemy and he is us!” has various tales told about it; the Wikipedia article has some of them.

As for more staff. This is one of those situations where if a couple hundred thousand for more staff can keep a billion-dollar facility and surrounding city from being leveled, then it’d probably be a good idea to get some additional staff at Pantex.

The argument that you can set off an atom bomb by turning a wrench the wrong way sounds like crap calculated to appeal to the comic-book reading public. If you actually read the article, it says that some safety officials think the practice COULD HAVE LED to a detonation. So, in other words, some people of unknown legitimacy think that there is a way that this event may have led to a detonation if unknown other events happenned. How lame does that sound to you? If some unknown safety official warned you that a mechanic at Jiffy Lube could turn his wrench in a way that mya cause your car to break down on the freeway and kill you, how seriously would you take it?

Having served as an Air Force officer charged with a nuclear mission, I can tell you that the military is serious as a heart attack about nukes. One mistake is a career ender. A $110K fine sounds like a love tap to me, the smallest punishment for the smallest infraction.

And what is the problem with using duct tape to fix a nuke? Do the comic book readers think you have to fix everything with some complex equipment? When a door latch failed on the fighter I flew, the mechanics used duct tape to keep it closed in flight. At first, I couldn’t believe it would hold, but the fact was that you could leave it there for weeks and it would only peel back a hair.

A friend of mine worked as an aircraft accident investigator and retrieved the black box from an aircraft that had crashed in water. He opened the black box with his Swiss army knife and found the tape was wet. So he went to Walmart and bought a hair dryer, then dried the tape out with that. It worked fine. Does it occur to any of the comic book readers that the simple solutions are better than the complicated solutions?

This event sounds to me like somebody in the bomb plant was pissed off and wanted to get back at management, so they found something that was a little bad or just sounded bad and exaggerated it in a letter. Then this POGO dame exaggerated it further to make it sound like the bomb plant is so irresponsible with nukes that it nearly wasted a corner of Texas. That is part of a lefty agenda to make the military sound like a bunch of reckless cowboys who can’t be trusted with nukes.

Simply put, this story is boob bait for ignorant lefties.

I read the basic letter from the Pantex employees. It is reasonably well written and non inflammatory (if putting your boss on report in public can be deemed non inflammatory). Some of their facts, I can corroborate. The infrastructure at Pantex is very old. It does need to be upgraded. There is not enough money in DOEs budget to do so quickly or with all the required bells and whistles. I do not know anything about how long or hard the employees are working, but I find 72 hrs a week for a large number of employees to be just a little unbelievable. There may be a few who are working that long and agreeing to do so to make more money (overtime). However, that doesn’t mean this (excessive work hours) couldn’t occur or should be accepted.

My experience in the Navy with nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors leads me to believe that if Pantex and BWXT are truly undermanned, then the situation the employees complain of is certainly possible. What I do find hard to believe is that DOE and DOE HQ would turn a blind eye to that particular issue. I am positive that DOE cares and inspects for these things. The employees insinuate that DOE is either ignoring the problems or is in cahoots with BWXT to cut costs and allow this situation to occur. After all how else to get promoted in our federal govt unless you can continually prove that you can do more with less money than your predecessor?

That is the culture which must be fought. In nuclear weapons and reactors, cutting costs in the name of eliminating govt waste ALWAYS leads to reduction in safety standards if allowed to be pursued (and in my opinion, it is pursued too vigorously by Republican administrations in the name of cost cutting, and Dhimmicratic administrations because they see it as a way to kill nuclear power and weapons in the name of “the environment”).

These specific kinds of cuts in costs and doing more with less always lead to problems eventually. Challenger blew up because NASA’s Quality Assurance personnel were overworked and underwhelming in their influence on safety. USS Thresher went to the bottom because we didn’t have sufficient safety designed into submarine systems initially and we hadn’t thought through the engineering possibilites well enough to prevent her loss with all hands onboard (and many, many shipyard workers as well). A crash Quality Assurance program was designed and remains one of the premier QA programs in the world to date. (NASA’s was based on it) Columbia blew up because we let our guard down on the dangerous practices which could be affected by something besides human error during space flight. Bridges and walkways have collapsed because we hadn’t thought the problems through completely or guarded against the likely eventualities adequately. Imagine how safe sticking a large Roman Candle between your legs and riding it to the moon is! And we’ve done it 6 times already as well as hundreds of times just around the Earth, and everytime it is still just as dangerous as the first.

That said, I don’t think using duct tape to keep High Explosive from crumbling off the warhead is necessarily the wrong answer. Duct tape is good for lots of unconventional uses, in a pinch (and opening up a warhead and finding HE about to drop on the floor and possibly blow your hand off would qualify as an unconventional and emergency operation to me). If it fell off and exploded inside the warhead during disassembly, you’d still be reading how a nuclear device exploded at Pantex and only killed three employees instead of 180,000 civilians. Based on the information we have been given, there is not enough to damn Pantex, BWXT, DOE or the employees either.

I think this is a good story that should get some attention from the correct levels. The next time a liberal or a reporter tells you what warmongers Republicans are, remind them that this story says Pantex is overworked at eliminating nuclear weapons because George W Bush got rid of so many nuclear weapons that it took from 2001 to 2010 to dismantle them safely. That is about 3-5 weapons per day working nonstop. That shouldn’t be a problem if you have enough folks to handle the job.

The real question here is whether BWXT has sufficient trained and qualified folks to allow a reasonable work schedule, or whether they experience the same kinds of trained personnel shortages many of us experience every day in corporate America because our bosses won’t hire more folks to help us meet the bottom line effectively instead of just-in-time with just-enough-stuff.

Good story. Don’t panic. I don’t believe the hype that a “near miss” occurred. That’s a load of hooey. Fix the culture, because that will save you in the end, but it will take an awful lot of time to do it right.

Just like winning in Iraq, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Press on.

Subsunk

-If they is Truthers it was the CIA.
-If they is the Media it was Bush.
-If they is Freepers it was the Left.
-If they is Republicans it was Clinton.
-If they is the Environmental Nuts it was Big Oil.
-If they is Peaceniks it was Haliburton and KBR.
-If they is no one cares, it’ll give us a chance to argue about Thermopylae.
-If they is Bush,…then it was Iran
-If they is the pro-Irsael lobby it was Iran
-If they is Blair then it was all in the “dossier”..lol
-If they is Taiwan it was China.
-If they is Japan it was North Korea
-If they is Japanese Nationalists it was revenge for Hiroshima.
-If they is the Palestinians it was Allah.
-If they is President Tom it was the 12th Imam.
-If they is the EU/UN it was deserved.
-If they is David Duke it was the Jewish Media.
-If they is Mel Gibson it was the Jews.
-If they is Michael Richards it was N*ggers.
-If they is Farrakhan it was the White Devils.

Anyone else picturing some knucklehead winding up with a sledgehammer to get the casing open?

“I’ll git that sumbeach open…..”

“No! Johnson, you fool!”

Dash on December 16, 2006 at 1:57 PM

No, Johnson, use this hammer instead – that’ll do the trick!

Not every bit of bad news is a media conspiracy, guys.

Allahpundit on December 16, 2006 at 2:31 PM

Indeed, bad news is more often the product of a failure to conspire. Suppose New Orleanians had conspired to move above sea level? Suppose Congressional Republicans had conspired to elect better leadership?

What was not made public at the time the fine was levied, however, is that according to safety experts knowledgeable about this event, it could actually have resulted in the detonation of the warhead.

It takes several steps, in a precisely timed sequence, to initiate a thermonuclear explosion. The way this article is worded, I’d bet that the event could have detonated the HE (high-explosives) surrounding the primary (the fission part of the weapon that triggers the secondary (fusion) part). Unless the HE is set off exactly right, the only danger (which is still pretty bad) is that some nuclear material is spread around a relatively small area. Pantex has been designed to contain accidental HE detonation, so the accident would probably not affected anyone outside of the Pantex plant.

I’m not minimizing the problem; the U.S. has not had a nuclear incident since the Titan II accident in Arkansas in 1980, a record that the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Defense, and all others involved with nuclear weapons are adamant to keep intact. I just think that the incident is being blown (no pun intended) out of proportion.

Allahpundit brings news of a pretty nasty incident about a year back. It seems we almost had an accidental detonation of a surplus nuclear weapon. The good news of course is that this was avoided. The bad news is that the company that almost brought……

Pantex was fined over the incident. Obviously something happened that concerned the authorities.

Not every bit of bad news is a media conspiracy, guys.

Allahpundit on December 16, 2006 at 2:31 PM

I’m not sure about the detonation part – it does sound scary. I do know that the DOE and military takes the nuke thing very seriously. Bases with a nuke mission have extremely high standards for their surety inspections and many will fail if the handling, protection or administrative related processes are not perfect. Many senior officers have had their careers cut short due to a failed inspection – as it should be.

My Dad worked in Oakridge in the 60′s on some of the weapons systems that had nukes. He can’t give much more specific details about it than that but one of his favorite stories he can tell was how some laborers were pushing a cart with some device on it through the facility when one of them bumped something and the clock started ticking down. The weapon was not matched up with the device that would need to be exploded to cause the nuclear detonation so there was never any danger.
But the poor guys pushing it weren’t engineers and he said the look on their faces was priceless – thought they may have had to change clothes at lunch!