I mean, really! How long is this overprotective nanny state going to ruin everyone’s fun and place undue burdens on business? First the government said kids couldn’t play with firecrackers, and now you can’t even set a nuclear warhead on fire without getting a nasty letter from some government agency!
I thought this was pretty funny – “Operations at Y-12 are safe.” Dude, nice try, but let’s face it – if you deliberately skip a safety step and wind up setting a fire with a nuclear weapon, you’re going to get a letter from the government. Nobody’s buying the “operations are safe” line.
Look, fires happen. It’s not like B&W invented the triangle of oxygen, fuel, and combustion! And let’s be realistic: it isn’t like a whole Minuteman missile was engulfed in flame, it was just the warhead, which is really pretty small compared to the size of an ICBM.
Plus, who are you going to believe when it comes to the safety of nuclear weapons? Lots of highly paid government contractors, who wouldn’t be paid so well if they weren’t as smart as they are; or some old paper manuals that probably date back to the 1970s? Why, if those stupid ol’ books had their way, we’d all be wearing polyester leisure suits and getting our hair permed!
I understand that it’s dangerous to toast marshmallows over burning warheads because you might ingest radiation which could give you an upset stomach and diarhea. So long as they had the foresight not to do something that foolish I don’t see what the problem is - nukes are designed to get much hotter than a simple fire can get so no harm no foul. Typical overreaction says I.
Not to rain heavy water on the outrage (they’re obviously trying to brazen it out after screwing up), but the inexplicably flaming radiation source was not necessarily a nuclear warhead. The article said the component was made of depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing shells and (oddly enough) radiation shielding because of its density. I don’t know that they don’t use depleted uranium for shielding in a nuke, but something like an anti-tank shell seems more likely, since it actually involves a DU spike inside a discarding sabot full of propellant. It’s a stupid thing to be careless with, but not quite in the same class as an H-bomb.