Fukushima Daiichi water release

 "When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it.  If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger.

Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them.

Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs, in which case they're misguided and deserve your compassion.

Is that so hard?" - Marcus Aurelius

Broken Arrows - USAF wins the trophy

"Broken Arrow" is the military term for an accidental event involving a nuclear weapon, but which does not create the risk for a nuclear war.  The 'accidental event' typically involves losing and/or damaging the weapon.

There have been 32 officially recognized "Broken Arrow" events in the United States since the dawn of nuclear weapons, as of Sept 2013.  Some of these events have been relatively minor, but others have been massive radiological accidents.  One accident with a large Hydrogen Bomb nearly made North Carolina uninhabitable... not that you would have seen THAT in the newspapers when it happened.  Apparently the news media were just as compliant in the 1950's as they are today.

I will go over a few of the more interesting Broken Arrow events.  Not surprisingly, most of these involve military aircraft crashing with weapons on board, as well as the intentional or inadvertent jettisoning of nuclear weapons.  All of these event descriptions are courtesy of Wikipedia.

CANDU reactors

I had intended to write up a post about NMRI, or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging.  I may or may not get to that post.  To be frank, I don't find flipping atoms back and forth in a big magnet quite as interesting as discovering X-rays or splitting atoms.

So instead of a post on NMRI, I am going to write a post about splitting atoms :)