All due to his decision to very actively oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb on both a personal and a deeply felt humanitarian basis within the toxic McCarthyism era political climate.
"
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
-Robert Oppenheimer
Unbelievably up until 1952 the Trinity Site as was the Missile Range was unfenced and wide open to whoever wanted to drive to the desolate site on dirt roads that were barely more than tire ruts in the desert dust.
Interestingly, there are people that live off what they can scavenge from active proving grounds.
Documentary about them:
IIRC, a 50M ton H bomb is about as big as one could make it and still have the ability to spread across a land mass to cause any real destruction. At higher levels the blast goes up and down....not out. In fact, a 50M ton one detonated by the USSR didn't cause that much more damage, but did cause a huge fallout cloud that threatened population areas.
"All of the wooden and brick buildings in nearby Severny, located 34 miles from the aiming point or ground zero, were annihilated. In other Soviet districts located over a hundred miles from ground zero, wooden houses were demolished, and brick and stone ones suffered damages. Radio communication outages were also reported.
One test witness felt the thermal effects at a distance of 170 miles, even with dark goggles. The intense heat from the detonation was
capable of causing third-degree burns at a distance of 62 miles from ground zero. The shock wave was felt as far away as the Dikson settlement located 430 miles away,
and windows shattered at a distance of 560 miles. Windows even shattered as far away as Norway and Finland due to atmospheric focusing of the shock wave. Despite being an air burst detonated 13,000 feet above ground, Tsar Bomba’s seismic magnitude was estimated at 5–5.25.
Seismic sensors continued to register shockwaves even after a third revolution around the Earth."
Tsar Bomba was actually originally designed to be 100MT, however that design was never tested. They had a hard enough time dropping the 50MT version without blowing the delivery aircraft out of the sky.
"Both aircraft were painted with a
special reflective white paint to minimize heat damage. Despite this effort,
Durnovtsev and his crew were given only a 50% chance of surviving the test."
"When detonation occurred,
the Tu-95V dropped one kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely."
It's kind a funny that they'll calling it "Nuclear Waste" and on same time NASA has been building and developing
RPS devices >> (formerly known as RTGs on
SNAP program) which are using this so called "waste" as their power source. Why all this misrepresentation for? -Yes, some of those materials can be dangerous when mishandled but they'll should educate people more for it instead scare people and create mass hysteria.
It's actually becoming a problem for NASA. There's been very little Pu-238 production since the cold war and as a result NASA is running out of the stuff. They've got enough to last about another 10 years unless production starts back up.
Some countries are also working on safer nuclear reactor designs that produce less waste, not
none, but less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_benefits
One of the worst I can think of was an amonium nitrate explosion in Texas City during WW II. It was actually thought to be benign and a ship full of the stuff went off and pretty much destroyed the harbor and killed many people. Destroyed a large chunk of the town too, IIRC.
If we're talking biggest explosions from conventional weapons then the Halifax explosion still has first place at 2.9kT TNT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
I think some of big things that makes so many people afraid of nuclear technology, is that firstly, its completely undetectable by human senses (unless you get dosed with enough that your organs start melting), and its really poorly understood. Unless you take the completely optional physics and/or chemistry classes in highschool, there isn't really much teaching about how ionizing radiation works. For the most part, when people hear about radiation or anything nuclear, its in the news, usually because a reactor blew up or because North Korea was testing bombs again. So a lot of people only know that radiation is invisible and can kill.
Case and point, a couple months ago at college, I was doing a photography project with some nice old uranium glass cups, and I brought them in to the school studio (they have lots of blacklights to use), and one of my classmates asked me what makes them glow, and she freaked out when I told her there was a tiny bit of uranium in the glass. I had to assure her several times that they are barely radioactive, and that people used to eat and drink off the stuff without ill effect.
Really, radioactive materials aren't any more dangerous than explosives, or toxic materials. If you store and handle them properly and safely in the manner required, they won't harm anyone.
Like with many things, educating people better on the subject is key.
Lots of people don't realize that coal power actually releases more radiation than nuclear power.
Nuclear power is fine as long as it's done properly, but it can cause large problems for lots of people if anything goes wrong.
"If you store and handle them properly and safely in the manner required, they won't harm anyone. "
That applies to just about anything. Unfortunately things aren't always done properly.
Here's hoping we can figure out fission in the next 100 years.
