I'll put this under a separate subject as it MAY have a life of its own.
James claimed recently that there had been no US deaths due to nuclear
accidents. This obviously depends on how you define "nuclear". He did note
that there would have been infrastructure deaths. This extremely interesting
list gives some of these

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_accidents

in the US and elsewhere. Even when the primary cause was non-nuclear, the
nuclear material can get in on the act and muddy the definitions. For
example, in the accident below there was substantial nuclear contamination
after an H Bomb exploded (chemical explosives). This happened in the UK. How
many people are affected and by what is liable to be covered up in such
incidents for a range of reasons. In this case the British government were
still telling lies more than 25 years later about what happened.


February 28, 1958 - At the US airbase at Greenham Common, England, a B-47E
of the 310th Bomb Wing developed problems shortly after takeoff and
jettisoned its two 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks. They missed their
designated safe impact area and one hit a hanger whilst the other struck the
ground 65 feet behind a parked B-47E. The parked B-47E, which was fuelled
with a pilot onboard and carrying a 1.1 megaton B28 thermonuclear free fall
bomb, was engulfed by flames. The conflagration took sixteen hours and over
a million gallons of water to extinguish, partly because of the magnesium
alloys used in the aircraft. The fire detonated the high explosives in the
nuclear weapon and convection spread plutonium and uranium oxides over a
wide area - foliage up to 13 kilometres away was contaminated with
uranium-235. Although two men were killed and eight injured, the US and UK
governments kept the accident secret - as late as 1985, the British
Government claimed that a taxiing aircraft had struck a parked one and that
no fire was involved.

____________

For a sobering thought, read about the shared jacket with a pellet of
radioactive caesium in the pocket :-(.



        Russell McMahon


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