(from
M.Christian's Meine Keline Fabrik)
This is exceptionally cool: a brand new piece I wrote for
Dark Roasted Blend - on Some of the Biggest Spills And Accidents - just went up. Check out the teaser below -
and for the full thing just click here.
And, don't forget, I have an entire book of this stuff available right now:
Welcome To Weirdsville!
Some of the Biggest Spills And Accidents
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." -Oscar Wilde
What
makes this quick look at ten big-time spills, accidents, and boo-boos
especially scary is that they far too often involve stuff that you’d
think we'd be taking extra-extra-extra special care with: industrial
waste, nuclear weapons, molasses, and - more shocking than anything else
- beer.
Even though evolution has graced us homo
sapiens with two of them, the briefest glances at the history of
extremely large scale accidents is more than enough to make us wonder if
we should be sporting nothing but thumbs.
10. The Demon Core
It
seems as soon as mankind started splitting them, we've been letting
atoms slip through our fingers. Even putting aside the sad irony of
Marie Sklodowska-Curie dying by her own discovery of radioactivity, our
earliest attempts to harness the power of atomic energy are filled with
shuddering tales of glow-in-the-dark slip-ups.
Back
in 1945, when the scientists of the Manhattan Project were first
banging blocks of uranium together, there was a nightmarishly series of
accidents involving what - very aptly - came to be called The Demon
Core.
Basically
just a little-less-then 15 pound ball of plutonium, in August 21, the
core went first went demonic when Harry Daghlian accidentally dropped a
brick of tungsten carbide into it. Heroically, Harry managed to pull the
brick out - avoiding a supercritical reaction - but died shortly
thereafter from radiation poisoning.
A
few months later, on May 21st, Louis Slotin tried to – and if this
doesn't make you shiver then nothing will - "tickle the dragon's tail'
by basically pushing the core as far as they could ... his only safety
feature being a carefully inserted screwdriver.
All
it took was for that well thought-out safety feature to slip and the
core went momentarily supercritical: as with Daghlian, Slotin managed to
prevent a chain reaction, but fatally dosed himself - and exposed eight
other people nearby with enough radiation to seriously shorten their
lifespans.
9. The Kyshtym Disaster
American
scientists weren't the only ones fumbling and bumbling with nuclear
power. On the other side of the world, the Soviets were racing with mad
abandon to catch up with their counterparts ... emphasis on the phrase
"mad abandon."
In
the closed science city of Ozyorsk, they built the vast plutonium
manufacturing plant of Mayak. Unfortunately, they were more-than-a-bit
fumbling in the dark when it came to nuclear power, and on September
29th, 1957 a radioactive waste tank exploded. While the blast itself was
impressive - it tossed the tank's 160 ton lid completely off - the
release of toxic materials contaminated the region, resulting in an
estimated 8,000 deaths.
What's
particularly surreal about the The Kyshtym Disaster is that it didn't
officially exist: the Soviets simply erased not just the accent but the
town itself. The name "Kyshtym Disaster" is used because Ozyorsk and
Mayak were erased from all subsequent maps and Kyshtym just happened to
be the closest landmark.
If
that makes you shake your head, keep shaking: there are reports that
while the Soviets made Ozyorsk and Mayak "go away" the CIA knew of the
disaster but kept the information secret to protect the US's own nuclear
power industry.
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