[ RadSafe ] MSNBC on Averting Nuclear Disaster in Chile -

Wed Apr 14 18:03:01 CDT 2010

Dear Stewart et. al,
I read your post, reviewed the Sandia video, and concluded that nuclear fuel must be extremely dangerous to justify the effort and expense that goes into containing it. If you want to aggravate fears (rational or irrational) just spend lots of money, put on a big show, and tell everybody you will protect them. It's like trying to convince a fearful child that they will be protected against the bogeyman. Such effort is likely to be counterproductive, especially when you are not trusted to begin with.

Jerry Cohen

________________________________
From: Stewart Farber <radproject at sbcglobal.net>
To: radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu; RichardHansen <HansenRG at nv.doe.gov>
Sent: Wed, April 14, 2010 2:08:23 PM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] MSNBC on Averting Nuclear Disaster in Chile -

I wrote Rachell Madow thru her MSNBC link last evening [about a segment of her show the night before]  and told her how inaccurate her report had been about the potential consequences of one of the ocean going containers, in which was loaded one of the 25 ton shipping casks, having shifed upon loading onto the ship when a crane malfunctioned. At worst the container with the nuclear fuel cask would have dropped at from a height of a few feet, onto the ship deck.

I sent her the following link which showed a test conducted by Sandia where a train engine, propelled by a number of rockets to  80 miles per hour, crashed into a nuclear shipping cask sitting on a flatbed trailer positioned across the track. It is a very cool piece of video. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JhruRobRI&feature=related

The crash caused no serious damage to the shipping cask and would have
completely contained the small quantity of HEU material taken from the test reactor about which Maddow had raised a spectre of explosion and/or release of HEU.

I told her in my email that her staff needed to do a much better job of fact checking on her on-air segments, and that she could not succumb to nuclear dogma and cliches.

On a separate subject, there is also a very cool video I found last night of a test where an F-4 jet on a rocket sled was crashed at 500 mph into an element of a reactor containment. The jet was turned to dust with no damage to the containment structure itself. This test shows that it is unlikely [if a bunch of hijackers were even able to fly a commercial airliner into a containment --not an easy task given the size of the target] that any damage would have been done that might breach the containment.

Stewart Farber, MSPH 

Farber Medical Solutions, LLC

Bridgeport, CT 06604

[203] 441-8433 [o]

website: http://www.farber-medical.com

============================

--- On Wed, 4/14/10, Hansen, Richard <HansenRG at nv.doe.gov> wrote:

From: Hansen, Richard <HansenRG at nv.doe.gov>
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] MSNBC on Averting Nuclear Disaster in Chile
To: radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 4:23 PM

Roger,

The U.S. Energy Department (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Chilean Commission of Nuclear Energy project to remove highly enriched uranium from Chile is discussed in an NNSA Press Release and a Washington Post article.

April 8, 2010
Ahead of Nuclear Security Summit, NNSA Announces Removal of All Highly Enriched Uranium from Chile
http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/2894.htm

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the removal of the final highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Chile, making it the fifth country to remove all of its HEU since President Obama called for an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. The operation in Chile was successfully completed despite a massive earthquake on Feb. 27 and numerous aftershocks that occurred while the NNSA team was in the country. 
[more on web site]

The Washington Post ran the following story. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2010/04/10/AR2010041002811.html
As U.S. attempted to remove nuclear material from
Chile, earthquake struck
By David E. Hoffman

When the shaking began just after 3:34 a.m. on Feb. 27, Andrew Bieniawski woke up with a start in his room on the 15th floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Santiago, Chile. A picture fell off the wall. He raced to the lobby. He had arrived from the United States just the day before to oversee a delicate operation that the U.S. government and Chile had been quietly setting up for more than a month, and now an earthquake was tearing apart the center of the country. The magnitude‐8.8 quake killed 486 people, set off a tsunami, cracked buildings and roads, cut off electricity and phone lines, and spawned dozens of aftershocks.

While the disaster unfolded, Bieniawski and his team from the Energy Department had another worry: They had packed 39.6 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough to make a nuclear bomb, into a shipping container, ready for a secret evacuation by road to a port and then by sea
to the United States. The quake threw up several new hurdles for the secret mission, and Bieniawski's first concern, he recalled in an interview, was this: Was the container damaged? Grabbing a phone before the lines went dead, he learned that the weapons‐grade material was intact. But his team's problems had just begun.
[more on web site]

Best regards,
Rick Hansen
Senior Scientist
Counter Terrorism Operations Support Program
National Security Technologies, LLC, for the U.S. Dept of Energy
hansenrg at nv.doe.gov
www.ctosnnsa.org

-----Original Message-----
Message: 12
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:07:18 -0700
From: "Roger Helbig" <rhelbig at sfo.com>
Subject: [ RadSafe ] MSNBC on Averting Nuclear Disaster in Chile
To: "Radsafe" <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>

Rachel Madow seems to be going off half-cocked.  Does anyone on the list
know anything about the removal of highly enriched uranium from Chile at the
same time as the 8.8 earthquake?  The claim that nuclear disaster was
narrowly averted seems to disregard that this 40 pounds of HEU would have
been stored in safe fashion before the quake.

Thanks.
Roger Helbig

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