If you worked in the Nevada test site then I guess you have seen some of the tests we did out their. Over 1000 nuclear detonation tests on US soil. Even though they are powerful many people believe that a nuclear bomb would destroy a whole state or small country.. hardly. lol
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Yep, lot of misinformation about nuclear waste that has crippled the nuclear power plant production in the US. France gets about 40% of their electricity from nuclear and haven't had any incidents the last I heard. A lot of it generated from the skuzzball US Senator Harry Reid, that made it a political football, makes sense that the nuclear waste from the Paducah plant should be kept there in a heavily populated area with 40 inches of rain instead of the huge isolated heavily guarded Nevada Test Site, already "contaminated", with four inches annual rainfall and buried in Yucca Mountain, a huge solid granite mountain. Does that make sense to you? They drilled 17 miles of 25' diameter tunnels in solid granite, just to investigate the feasibility of using it, but right now that is all abandoned and on hold, and they sold a lot of the equipment.
Wild days around Las Vegas when I was single, not sure how I got through it. I worked on the Kiwi project when I first left the Saturn rocket project in Huntsville out of UK, (went to Huntsville because GE were on a scheduled 60 hour work week and I was tired of starving), Kiwi was developing a nuclear rocket which we had two successful tests of before they shut it down, everyone too panicked by the word nuclear.
The plowshare program was very interesting, a physicist friend (played on my flag football team) left weapons testing to join it, they were going to blast a huge channel through a small mountain range separating the Mediterranean Sea from a huge valley that was below sea level in Egypt and build the worlds largest hydroelectric plant on the inexhaustible river created. They also planned to excavate a huge harbor in Australia using nuclear bombs------by the way, the only radiation generated from a hydrogen bomb is the small atomic reaction needed to trigger it------but public opinion killed both of them.
BUT, nuclear bombs can be harmful to your health, I worked on one that was "underground" (plowshare program) but only 256' so it came out like an above ground one. Waited three months for the exact weather (wind forecast) and spent several weekends there when they thought the weather would be all right, but they fired it one weekend when they kept a skeleton crew because they thought the weather wouldn't meet their stringent requirements. The control point was about 15 miles away but I still regretted not getting to see it. It was in the far northwest corner of the test site, about 150 driving miles from Las Vegas, but we flew to work every day in an old DC3, unpressurized, and I thought my ears were going to kill me when we dropped in from over the Charleston range one day.
The biggest event was moved to the Amchitka Island chain, 1972 IIRC, they spent $100,000,000 on the 8' diameter 5500 foot deep hole they put it in to keep it underground and probably another few hundred mill on transporting the men, bomb, and diagnostic equipment there. That was a serious bomb, rumored to be 5,000,000 tons of high explosives, five hundred times bigger than the two Japanese bombs. So yeah, they can be harmful to your health, they also had small ones that would fit in a briefcase when I left NTS, scary world we live in. And we have some radicals that wouldn't hesitate a minute to go to heaven and claim their Virgins for killing the infidels.
Nuclear waste, not nearly that big a deal, and most assuredly better at the Nevada Test Site than in cities like Paducah and other populated areas, and much safer from terrorists etc.