[ RadSafe ] News article: Air Force finds 'no evidence' of lost nuke

[John Jacobus]

>From cnn.com.  The original article is at
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/17/georgia.nuke.ap/index.html

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Air Force finds 'no evidence' of lost nuke

SAVANNAH, Georgia (AP) -- The first government search
in decades for a nuclear bomb lost off the Georgia
coast in 1958 failed to uncover any trace of the
sunken weapon, the Air Force said in a report Friday.

The report released nine months after scientists
tested radiation levels in waters off Tybee Island
concluded the 7,600-pound bomb cannot explode and
should be left at sea.

"The best course of action in this matter is to not
continue to search for it and to leave the property in
place," said the report by the Air Force Nuclear
Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.

A damaged B-47 bomber jettisoned the Mark-15 nuke into
a sound about 15 miles from Savannah in February 1958
after colliding with a fighter jet during a training
flight.

The military never recovered the bomb and gave up
searching for 46 years until last year, when a retired
Air Force pilot claimed his private search team had
detected unusually high radiation levels in the sound.

Government scientists investigated the claims, taking
radiation readings and soil samples from a football
field-sized area of water September 30. The report
said varying radiation levels were observed, but they
were from natural elements in the sediment on the sea
floor.

The Air Force has said the bomb contains an
undisclosed amount of uranium and about 400 pounds of
conventional explosives, though it lacks the plutonium
capsule needed to trigger a nuclear blast.

In a July 2001 report, the Air Force declared the bomb
"irretrievably lost" and estimated it lies buried
beneath 8-to-40 feet of water and 5-to-15 feet of mud
and sand


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"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea and never shrinks back to its original proportion." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


		
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