Radioactive contamination triggers evacuation at shuttered nuclear site in Scotland, https://www.rt.com/uk/462857-radioactive-contamination-evacuation-scotland/28 Jun, 2019 Workers tasked with cleaning the decommissioned Dounreay nuclear facility in northern Scotland were evacuated from the site after “human error” resulted in low-level radioactive contamination, it has been revealed.
After an employee detected the contamination, a further investigation was quickly launched revealing several other “hot-spots” around the facility. Workers were immediately forced to vacate the area and work temporarily suspended, reportedthe Aberdeen-based Press and Journal.
Site managing director Martin Moore told a stakeholder group on Wednesday that the contamination had been “insignificant,” and was a result of a “lack of due diligence in monitoring around one of the barriers.”
It was human error. It shouldn’t have happened and we’re very disappointed that it did.
The incident actually took place on June 7, but it was only revealed to the public on Wednesday. Some people expressed anger that there was no public statement made on the day it occurred, although the Office for Nuclear Regulation was reportedly informed.
Officials from Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd (DSRL), the company tasked with decommissioning the plant, said that the measure had been precautionary and that the public was never in any danger.
There was no risk to members of the public, no increased risk to the workforce and no release to the environment.
DSRL has been working to decommission the site, which was shut down in 1994. Although they are also tasked with ensuring the area is decontaminated and clean of nuclear waste, they have already been censured for a safety violation at the same site in 2014, when a fire caused by employees released radioactivity into the atmosphere. In the wake of that incident, the company promised to “learn lessons” and implement a wide-ranging new safety strategy, which seemingly turned out to have issues as well.
Located in northern Scotland, Dounreay was established in 1955 to test UK nuclear reactor technology and shuttered in the mid-1990s. Barring any further accidents, work is expected to be completed between 2030 and 2033.
Two workers exposed to unsafe radiation dose at Lucas Heights nuclear facility, Guardian, Michael McGowan@mmcgowan 24 Jun 2019
Production at Australia’s only nuclear medicine facility halted after ‘safety incident’ Production has ceased and an urgent investigation has been launched after two employees at a newly opened Australian nuclear medicine facility at Lucas Heights were exposed to an unsafe dose of radiation late last week.Just two weeks after it was granted a licence to enter into full domestic production, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) has confirmed production at its new $168m nuclear medicine facility has been halted after “a safety incident” on Friday morning.
Ansto said three of its workers were “attended to by radiation protection personnel” after the incident, in which contamination was detected on the outside of a container holding 42 millilitres of the radioisotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99).
Two of those workers received a radiation dose above the legal limit roughly equivalent to a conventional cancer radiation therapy treatment, an Ansto spokesman said……
Located at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility in Sydney’s south, the $168m nuclear medicine facility was announced by the federal government in 2012 with the goal of tripling Australian production of Mo-99, the parent isotope of Technetium-99m. …..
It is the second contamination scare at the Lucas Heights facility in only a few months.
CT scan service shut following radiation leak, SABITRI DHAKAL, Kathmandu, June 22 Bir Hospital shut down its CT scan service yesterday after radiation was found leaking from its highly shielded room.
The hospital has closed its services upon the recommendation of Nepal Academy of Science and Technology as a monitoring team from NAST found higher level of radiation in areas around the CT scan room. It has suggested that the hospital adopt protection measures against radiation leakage. The hospital had fixed a new CT scan machine six months ago.
Immediate exposure to high level of radiation will harm blood and skin cells. Effect of radiation on gonads, one of the reproductive organs in a male or female can lead to birth defects in babies, said Dan Bahadur Karki, president of Nepal Radiologist Association.
Skin burns can occur when exposed to higher level of radiation. A long term exposure to radiation could result in cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The early symptoms of sickness from radiation are nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.
Radiation leakages can occur in hospitals due to defects in X-ray machines or when proper shielding of the X-ray room is not maintained. To prevent radiation leakage lead shielding is necessary, said Buddha R Shah, a senior scientist at Physical Science Laboratory, Faculty of Science, NAST.
The hospital is unsure of resuming the services any time soon as it lacks enough budget for repair and maintenance of the CT scan room. “It costs around 20-25 lakh to maintain the room. We don’t have enough budget. It takes two to three months for any maintenance work at the hospital incurring a cost of above Rs five lakh as the hospital administration has to go through a tender process,” said Kedar Century, director at the hospital………https://thehimalayantimes.com/kathmandu/ct-scan-service-shut-following-radiation-leak/
Chernobyl Episode 4 Scene | HBO | Graphite Clearing
This man knows what it’s really like shovelling radioactive debris on top of Chernobyl’s reactor ABC News
By Katri Uibu “Sometimes it happens in life that someone, somewhere, has to do something. Whether they want to or not.”
Key points:
At age 32, Jaan Krinal was forced to go to Chernobyl and clean the roof of the reactor
He says men were initially enthusiastic to help eliminate the radiation
One-third of the men of his town he served with in Chernobyl have died
When he left his wife and two children on May 7, 1986 and went to work, Jaan Krinal didn’t know he would be one of those people.
The 32-year-old was working on a state-owned farm in Soviet-occupied Estonia.
Because he’d been forced to complete the Soviet military’s retraining a year before, he was confused when officers surprised him at work and said he’d been called up again — immediately.
Jaan and 200 other men were taken to a nearby school. Once they’d walked through the door, no-one was allowed to leave.
The men’s passports were seized before they were loaded onto buses and taken to a forest, where they were told to slip into brand new army uniforms.
“That’s when I first questioned what’s really going on here,” Jaan recalls………
Workers told radiation could have health benefits
It all happened fast.
Hundreds of men boarded a Ukraine-bound train on May 8. By the next evening, they were setting up camp on the edge of Chernobyl’s exclusion zone.
They were just 30 kilometres away from the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — the still-smouldering wreckage of a reactor torn apart by a series of explosions and spewing radiation in a plume across Europe.
Jaan was among the first group sent to clean up in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
Tasked with hosing down radiation on the houses in nearby villages, he was thrown into the thick of it……
Despite the apparent uselessness of the job, they continued to work 11-hour days without a day off until the end of June. After that, they had two days of downtime a month.
As the weeks rolled on, suspicions grew.
“We started to have doubts. But all the officers said, ‘Why are you fretting, the radiation levels aren’t that high.”
In a cruel irony, the commanders told the men that being exposed to radiation would actually have health benefits.
“They joked that whoever has cancer can now get rid of it — because the radiation helps,” Jaan says.
Men unaware of deadly reason behind roof time limit
By the end of September, whatever enthusiasm the men initially felt had faded.
As many developed a cough, concerns grew about whether they were being lied to about the radiation being harmless. The respirators the men were given wouldn’t stay on because of the heat and were used until they got holes in them.
Later they found they should have been replaced every day…….
A rumour had it that the very last leg of the assignment was going on the roof of the reactor to clean up as much debris as possible.
Humans were going to be given a task that remote-control robots had previously attempted, but failed. The machines simply stopped working due to the unprecedented levels of radiation.
“When they told us, ‘You have to go to the roof’, we thought, ‘Oh, this means we can go home soon’,” he says.
On the day, he changed his army uniform for a protective suit, glasses and a gas mask, and a metal groin guard.
“We were all lined up and told, ‘who doesn’t want to go on the roof, step forward’. But only a couple of us did,” he says.
“There was no mass rejection. Most people went up there.
“It had to be done. We couldn’t just leave it. I think everyone realised the longer the reactor would have stayed open, the more dangerous it would have become.”
Jaan was shown on a small screen exactly which piece of debris he had to pick up with a shovel and throw off the roof of the reactor, but strictly warned against going too close to the edge.
He had two minutes to complete the assignment — a bell would ring to tell him when to run back.
The two-minute timeframe was to limit exposure to radiation, which could kill a man.
But this wasn’t communicated to the men at the time.
Jaan says the roof-cleaning scene depicted in HBO’s mini-series Chernobyl mirrored real life events…….
A staggering one-third of the men of his town who went to Chernobyl have died.
The average age of death has been 52.
“Over the past couple of years, just a couple of us have died. But not too long ago it was around 10 men a year,” he says.
“There have been cancers. There have been suicides too, but thankfully not too many.”……
he hopes tourists won’t start flocking to the ghost city.
“I hope they’ll never start sending large groups of tourists there. It’s still a dangerous zone,” he says.
How The Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Meltdown Formed World’s Most Dangerous Lava, Forbes, David Bressan 16 June 19 “………Even areas thousands of kilometers away from Chernobyl are still today contaminated with radioactive particles, transported by the wind in a gigantic plume over Europe.
As the cooling system of the reactor was shut down and the insertion of control rods into the reactor core failed, the nuclear fission went out of control, releasing enough heat to melt the fuel rods, cases, core containment vessel and anything else nearby, including the concrete floor of the reactor building. The fuel pellets inside the fuel rods are almost entirely made of uranium-oxide while the encasing in which the pellets are placed is made of zirconium alloys. Melting at over 1,200°C the uranium and zirconium, together with melted metal, formed radioactive lavaburning through the steel hull of the reactor and concrete foundations at a speed of 30 cm (12″) per hour. Concrete doesn’t melt, but decomposes and becomes brittle at high temperatures. Part of the concrete was incorporated in the lava flow, explaining its high content of silicates, minerals composed mostly of silicon, aluminum and magnesium. Due to its chemical composition and high temperature, the lava-like material has a very low viscosity. When lava has low viscosity, it can flow very easily as demonstrated by stalactites hanging from valves and tubes in the destroyed reactor core.
Four hundred miners were brought to Chernobyl to dig a tunnel underneath. It was feared that the radioactive lava would burn through the containment structure and contaminate the groundwater. Only later it was discovered that the lava flow stopped after 3 meters (9 feet). Chemical reactions and evaporating water cooled the mixture below 1,100°C, below the decomposition temperature of the concrete.
About eight months after the incident and with the help of a remotely operated camera, the solidified lava was discovered in the ruins of the reactor building. Externally resembling tree bark and grey in color, the mass was nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.
At the time of its discovery, radioactivity near the Elephant’s Foot was approximately 10,000 roentgens, a dose so high, only minutes of exposure would prove fatal. In 1996, radioactivity levels were low enough to visit the reactor’s basement and took some photographs. The photos are blurry due to radiation damage. The lava-like material resulting from a nuclear meltdown is also named corium, after the core of the reactor. An unknown uranium-zirconium-silicate found in the corium of Chernobyl was named later chernobylite. Chernobylite is highly radioactive due to its high uranium content and contamination by fission products. Corium will likely remain radioactive for the next decades to centuries. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2019/06/14/how-the-chernobyl-nuclear-plant-meltdown-formed-worlds-most-dangerous-lava-flow/#4d73b4f01691
Selfless Chernobyl ‘suicide divers’ saved Europe from nuclear devastation. Mirror UK , 16 June 19
The world held its breath as the brave volunteers risked it all to but to prevent a second huge explosion. he world owes him an eternal debt, but for Chernobyl hero Alexei Ananenko, it was just part of the job.Engineer Alexei was one of three men who volunteered to wade through radioactive water to prevent a second cataclysmic explosion at the stricken nuclear reactor.
They were dubbed “suicide divers” over the perilous mission.
Decked from head to toe in protective clothing, they descended into the bowels of Reactor 4 on a doomsday mission as the world held its breath.
Their heroism gripped viewers of Sky Atlantic drama Chernobyl. But with great understatement, 60-year-old Alexei insisted last night: “It’s nothing to brag about. Why should I feel a hero?
“I was on duty and it was my job. I was trained in what to do.”………
Experts believed that if 185 tons of molten nuclear lava hit the water below it would cause a radioactive steam explosion of 3-5 megatons – so massive that it would leave much of Europe uninhabitable for 500,000 years. Alexei was one of the few employees who knew where the latches and valves were located to drain water from the coolant system.
He, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov were tasked with turning them off.
Firefighters drained a huge volume of water so the men would not have to swim, but they were still forced to walk through radioactive fluid three metres below ground level.
The image of them carrying search lights as they wade through a toxic soup is captured in the TV drama…….
After the explosion a cloud of radioactive strontium, caesium and plutonium affected mainly the Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus, as well as parts of Russia and Europe. Between 1987 and 1990, 530,000 workers – known as liquidators and conscripted from across the USSR – worked in and around Chernobyl to clear up the toxic mess. ……….. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/selfless-chernobyl-suicide-divers-saved-16523155
The U.S. kept nuclear accidents like the Damascus Incident secret for decades.
HBO’s Chernobyl is over, but if you’ve seen the series, you’ll remember it for a long time.
Coming on the heels of the mega-hyped Game of Thrones series finale, the five-part miniseries—created and written by Craig Mazin, and directed by Johan Renck—quickly overtook the fantasy story with its astonishing performances and commitment to its immersion in a world that Americans never really understood.
The focus in the discussion around Chernobyl lies where the miniseries has gone: nuclear reactors meant for peaceful energy. The safety of nuclear plants is of upmost importance, but that’s not the only place nuclear energy is located. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Department of Defense maintains an estimated stockpile of approximately 4,000 warheads. Mishaps with these weapons of mass destruction are referred to as “Broken Arrow” accidents.
The United States has officially had approximately 32 of these incidents, often involving the transport of weapons from one location to another. None of these incidents caused a major disaster, let alone a Chernobyl-like event. Two nuclear weapons were dropped on Goldsboro North Carolina in 1961 and are now commemorated with an historical marker. But there’s no such memorial for the 1980 accident in which a Titan II missile carrying a thermonuclear reactor exploded near Damascus, Arkansas.
Chernobyl offers a new chance to examine these Broken Arrows. Fortunately, both the stories of Goldsboro, the Damascus Incident, and other Broken Arrows have already been documented in the film Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner and based on a book by Eric Schlosser.
Available on PBS, Netflix, and other streaming services, the documentary shows that the story of lies and of nuclear mismanagement is not limited to Soviet borders.
On September 18, 1980, routine maintenance on an Titan II went awry. A Propellant Transfer System (PTS) team was working on the missile under the authority of the Air Force. A ratchet was used instead of a torque wrench, and that was all it took for a socket from the missile’s oxidizer tank to fall 80 feet down, where a freak bump allowed it to puncture the missile’s first-stage fuel tank.
Efforts to stabilize the missile failed, and late into the night, it exploded. Two men sent in to vent the gas were presumed dead. One of them, Senior Airman David Livingston, died 12 hours later. The nuclear warhead was later found in a field.
There are many differences between Damascus and Chernobyl, of course. Honesty was maintained within the chain of command, although the man who dropped the socket had trouble articulating the truth of the situation for half an hour afterward. And while safety protocols couldn’t keep the 7-story missile from exploding, they did keep the warhead in check.
But when it comes to nuclear incidents, Command and Control makes it clear that the U.S. shares more with the scientists of Chernobyl than many feel comfortable to admit.
There may not be a deeply embedded culture of lying stateside, but the U.S. was as willing to cover up the truth of Damascus, as well as thousands of other nuclear accidents, for decades. And when it came down to the final decision making in Damascus, the documentary paints a picture of an out-of-touch Strategic Air Command that issued commands without any understanding of the situation on the ground—decisions that resulted in Livingston’s death.
Mazin has made it clear that his Chernobyl is not primarily focused on nuclear power. It’s a complex subject, as Valery Legasov, played masterfully by Jared Harris, makes clear in the final episode. But perhaps the greatest similarity between Damascus and Chernobyl was the confident belief that nuclear power could be safely managed at all.
Explaining how nuclear power works in a Soviet court, Legasov describes a dance that can generate tremendous energy. But as Adam Higginbottom shows in Midnight in Chernobyl, it’s a dance that people have been trying to get right for many years.
The Soviet system might have set up the scientists at V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant for failure. But even with the best dancers in the world, there’s eventually a missed step.
Evening Standard 2nd June 2019 Three sailors serving on a submarine which carries 16 nuclear missiles have
been caught taking cocaine, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. The
Royal Navy submariners failed a Compulsory Drugs Test shortly after HMS
Vengeance visited a US naval facility in Florida.
Chernobyl: horrifying, masterly television that sears on to your brain. This breathtaking series throws us right into the hellish chaos of the nuclear disaster – and its terrors are unflinching and unforgettable, Guardian, Rebecca Nicholson, 29 May 2019 After three of its five episodes aired, the miniseries Chernobyl found its way to the top of IMDB’s top 250 TV shows in history list. While the fan-voted chart might seem hyperbolic, given that the drama had only just crossed the halfway point, it is not undeserving of the honour. Chernobyl is masterful television, as stunning as it is gripping, and it is relentless in its awful tension, refusing to let go even for a second. That old ‘don’t spoil the ending’ joke about Titanic will inevitably be rebooted here, but it is confident enough to withstand any familiarity with the story.
From the opening moments, it conjured up panic and despair, beginning with the suicide of Jared Harris’ nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Harris must have “harrowing departure” on his CV), then throwing us right back into the hellish disorientation of the disaster itself, two years earlier …..
Chernobyl is a disaster movie, a spy movie, a horror movie, a political thriller, and a human drama, and it spins each plate expertly. The terror is unflinching and explicit, and its images of burned bodies collapsing into putrid decay are impossible to forget. Yet it never feels shocking for the sake of it, only as haunting and horrible as its subject matter demands. It manages to navigate the perilous path of having its characters speak in jargon, and largely refusing to explain it, while keeping viewers on top of what is happening…..
Often prestige television like this – expansive, expensive and ambitious – falls back on its wordiness, and Chernobyl is certainly well-written enough to justify that. But it is as cinematic as it is reliant on dialogue, and it has the patience to let images do the heavy lifting when it is called for. ……
The obfuscation of truth is rampant and catastrophic. We may not be living under the threat of the KGB, but the menace of constant surveillance does not feel far away. The rejection of scientific knowledge, of experts, has terrible consequences. It makes sense that modern audiences would take to Chernobyl; the contemporary resonance is plain.
Radiation in UW building: 200 employees being moved, cleanup could take at least six more weeks, Seattle Times, By Ryan Blethen ,Seattle Times staff reporter,26 May19
The UW Medicine Harborview Medical Center Research & Training Building houses 35 labs for research on infectious diseases and other global-health issues. Over the next seven to 10 days, about 200 researchers and staff are moving into other UW Medicine and University of Washington facilities and will remain there until the building reopens.
Meanwhile, the public is not in danger, said UW Medicine spokesperson Susan Gregg, who could give no firm date for how long the cleanup will take.
On the evening of May 2, a device called an irradiator, containing the radioactive material cesium-137, was being moved to a safe disposal site when the substance spilled. Radiation was detected on the loading dock of the building, which is at Ninth Avenue and Alder Street.
Thirteen people were exposed, 10 of whom were admitted to Harborview’s emergency room and discharged the next day……
An investigation of the spill by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration is expected to take several months, said Kate Lynch, a spokesperson with Washington state Department of Health, which is working with the federal agency and UW on the cleanup.
Contractors hired by the Department of Energy are doing “survey and decontamination work on certain floors of the building” while other parts of the remediation plan are still being worked out, Gregg said.
Hankyoreh 21st May 2019 According to South Korea’s nuclear power regulator, a nuclear reactor whose thermal output exceeded safety limits was kept running for nearly 12
hours when it should have been shut down manually at once.
Furthermore, the regulator said, an individual who wasn’t licensed to operate the reactor
was holding the control rods, which regulate the reactor’s output, at the
time. A continuing increase in output could have led to a thermal runaway,
potentially causing the reactor to explode.
The Chernobyl accident is one of only two nuclear energy accidents that is classified as a “Level 7 Event,” the highest classification. The other is 2011’s Fukushima disaster in Japan. At the lowest level of Reactor 4 lies the famous “elephant’s foot”, a several-meter wide mass of corium that is still giving off lethal amounts of radiation. The half-life of radioactive elements is defined as the amount of time it takes for the radioactivity to fall to half its original value. The half life of U-235 is 700 million years.
Chernobyl – A Timeline of The Worst Nuclear Accident in History [the original of this article gives details on how the accident happened. ]
33 years ago, a series of missteps caused the worst nuclear accident in history, and its effects are still being felt to this day. Interesting Engineering, 11 May By Marcia WendorfLocated 65 miles north of Kiev, Ukraine, the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station at Chernobyl was a model of Soviet engineering. Its four RBMK nuclear reactors produced enough electricity for 30 million homes and businesses.The RBMK reactor is a class of graphite-moderated nuclear power reactor that was designed and built by the Soviet Union. Certain aspects of the design contributed to the Chernobyl disaster, and there were calls for the reactors to be decommissioned. However, the reactors were redesigned, and as of 2019, ten are still in operation.
1,600 Radioactive U-235 Fuel RodsIn 1986, Chernobyl had four working reactors, with two new ones under construction. The newest of the four, Reactor No. 4, contained 1,600 radioactive uranium-235 fuel rods. Because U-235 is unstable, its atoms spontaneously release neutrons, which hit other U-235 nuclei, causing them to release neutrons. This is what is called a chain reaction.
……… This night involved the continuation of a test that was begun twelve hours earlier.
……..“The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years.” — Vitali Sklyarov, Minister of Power and Electrification of Ukraine Continue reading →
In Middle of Nuclear Standoff, U.S. Seizes North Korean Cargo Ship Illicitly Exporting Coal, Slate, By ELLIOT HANNON, 9 May 19
The U.S. has seized a North Korean cargo ship that it alleges has been used to illicitly export coal from the country in violation of international sanctions, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. The move, though many months in the making, is sure to stir resentment in Pyongyang as the two countries try to negotiate denuclearization.
This is the first time the U.S. has seized a North Korean ship for sanctions violations and U.S. officials say it is part of a broader push to increase pressure on Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear program. The coal sector is key to the North Korean economy and its nuclear weapons program. The ship, named Wise Honest, was also importing heavy machinery…….
Chernobyl Isn’t a Story About an Accident—It’s a Story About Endless Impact
Four decades later, the Russian nuclear disaster—now the subject of an HBO miniseries—is still reverberating, The Ringer, By Michael Baumann May 6, 2019 “……….. an immense tradition of fiction about nuclear war or radiological mayhem. But somewhat paradoxically, a nuclear disaster, in and of itself, doesn’t make for particularly interesting television or film. You can’t fight radiation the way you can fire, or hide from it like you can a tornado. In the trailer for HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries, which premieres Monday night, Jared Harris’s Valery Legasov compares a radioactive atom to a bullet. Indeed, radiation kills instantly, though the process of dying from radiation poisoning can take anywhere from days to decades. By the time a nuclear accident happens, there’s nothing to do but limit the damage it causes.
A nuclear meltdown is not only more alien and irresistible than a natural disaster, it’s entirely anthropogenic. Fires, storms, and earthquakes occurred before industrialized society and will continue to occur after it ends. They can be written off on some level as acts of God, even when they’re caused, intensified, or exacerbated by human carelessness or malfeasance. Not so with a nuclear meltdown; nothing like it exists in nature. It doesn’t matter that nuclear power plants have a better safety record than fossil fuel power plants for the same reason it doesn’t matter that air travel is safer than driving: The deaths in those accidents are caused by something we all know humans weren’t designed to do. ………
even as the international cleanup effort enters its fourth decade, and even after the Ukrainian government opened the 30-kilometer quarantine zone to tourists, the legacy of the initial cover-up continues. Legasov, the chemist who led the Chernobyl investigation, took his own life on the second anniversary of the accident, leaving behind more questions than answers. In 1999, Belarusian physician Yury Bandazhevsky was sentenced to eight years in prison, supposedly for taking bribes from parents of prospective students—he says the Belarusian government was trying to stop and discredit his research into the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster. …….. https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/5/6/18530653/chernobyl-hbo-miniseries-nuclear-accident
Kids who lived near the Chernobyl site have increased instances of thyroid cancer, and adults who helped with the reactor cleanup are more at risk of developing leukemia.
by Task and Purpose, 24 Apr 19, But the fact that these LSD rings popped up in the first place isn’t surprising at all. As I previously wrote, the middle of nowhere is the same kind of boring and awful whether it’s patrolling the Pacific or guarding nuclear silos in America’s heartland.
A sailor assigned to the nuclear reactor department aboard the USS Ronald Reagan admitted to bringing LSD aboard the aircraft carrier, Navy Times reports.
In a copy of a plea deal obtained by Navy Times, Machinist’s Mate (Nuclear Power) 3rd Class Philip S. Colegrove said he “wrongfully” brought the powerful hallucinogen aboard the Reagan while docked at various ports across Japan, as though there’s a right way to bring acid into the heart of a nuclear-powered warship.
The recent guilty pleas from Colegove and Electrician’s Mate (Nuclear Power) 2nd Class Sean M. Gevero bring the total number of Reagan nuclear reactor sailors disciplined in connection to “LSD abuse” aboard the Reagan to four, per Navy Times. A fifth is currently awaiting an Article 32 hearing
Ten other sailors, all from the same department, already faced administrative discipline last year for possessing and distributing LSD in connection to a drug ring aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier
The prevalence of LSD in a critical nuclear-related facility is surprisingly not confined to the Navy: In May 2018, 14 airmen from the Air Force security units at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming tasked with safeguarding nuclear missile silos were disciplined for dropping acid between shifts.
But the fact that these LSD rings popped up in the first place isn’t surprising at all. As I previously wrote, the middle of nowhere is the same kind of boring and awful whether it’s patrolling the Pacific or guarding nuclear silos in America’s heartland.
Anyway, if anyone has any insights into the right way to bring LSD into your (potentially radioactive) place of work, give me a shout — for, uh, science.
This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.
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