Talk:Nuclear fallout/Archive 1

nuclear fall-out
Some mention of the nuclear winter should be made as this would be the most significant effect on human population numbers. This article says a 25 year long nuclear winter - no crops - would result from 100 nuclear bombs. https://www.globalzero.org/blog/how-many-nukes-would-it-take-render-earth-uninhabitable  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7D:863:8200:6585:8325:EC6B:ACEA (talk) 11:00, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Hopefully somebody with real information will have a look at section 'Short term', as infomation there is very contradictory or confusing (stating first that a dose of 6 Gy is invariably lethal and later that a dose 30 Gy is incapaciting).

I know about this, the dose of 6 Gy absorbed over a short length of time will have a good chance of killing a person.... But the dose will take hours/days to kill the unlucky person. The US military consider that a dose of 80 Gy (gamma and neutrons) will instantly incapcitate the person and kill them. I have read that the higher the dose the quicker the radiation will kill a person, I think at high doses (cira 10 Sv) that the bigger the dose the quicker the person will get to the terminal stage of the acute radiation 'sickness'.Cadmium 23:08, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Also Gamma radiation is mentioned in the article as being the most dangerous form of radiation and this is a Gross conceptual error. Gammas are particle radiation also known as photons, they have minimal mass, high amounts of energy and are nuetrally charged. They are however one of the most prevalent forms of radiation. Now this lack of charge and minimal mass causes a relatively low amount of interaction as the particle is traveling through material. Imagine a semi-truck and a ping pong ball travelling at the same speed through a crowd at a baseball game. The semi will hit many more people than the ping pong ball even without taking into consideration the geometry of particles. In actuality the most dangerous form of radiation is Alpha radiation. Now an alpha particle is a He atom that has no electrons, thus giving it a much larger mass than a photon and a positive charge that is much greater than a proton.

Minor actinides
I think that a reference to this term should be included. In the science of spent fuel and advanced reprocessing, the transplutonium elements are known (along with Np) as the minor actinides. As some of the minor actindies were first identified in fall out from H bomb tests, I think that a mention of minor actindies should be made. The minor actinide page needs some more work, but it has been started.Cadmium 23:08, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Data on Np-239, U-237, etc is at :

"In 1958, W.J. Heiman of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory released data on the sodium-24 activity induced in sea water after an underwater nuclear explosion in which 50 % of the gamma radiation at 4 days after burst is due to Np-239. He found that Na-24 contributed a maximum of 7.11 % of the gamma radiation, at about 24 hours after burst (Journal of Colloid Science, Vol. 13, 1958, pp. 329-36).

"Hence even in a water burst, Np-239 radiation is far more important than Na-24.

"Perhaps the most important modification in the April 1962 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the disclosure that the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons contains substantial amounts of radioactive nuclides from neutron capture in U-238. This had been pointed out by scientist George Stanbury (who worked with data from nuclear tests, and had attended British nuclear tests to study the effects) of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in report A12/SA/RM 75, The Contribution of U239 and Np239 to the Radiation from Fallout, November 1959, Confidential (declassified only in June 1988).  Both Mr Stanbury and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1962 found 40% of the gamma radiation dose rate from fallout is the typical peak contribution due to Neptunium-239 and other capture nuclides (e.g., U-237, which is formed by an important reaction whereby 1 neutron capture in U-238 is followed by 2 neutrons being released), which all emit very low energy gamma radiation, and are important between a few hours and a few weeks after burst, i.e., in the critical period for fallout sheltering. Because of the low energy of the gamma rays from such neutron-capture elements, which are present in large quantities in both Trinity-type fission bombs (with U-238 tampers) and thermonuclear bombs like Mike and Bravo, the fallout is much easier to protect against than pure fission products (average gamma energy 0.7 MeV). However, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, while admitting that up to 40% of the gamma radiation is from such nuclides, did not point out the effect on the gamma energy and radiation shielding issue, unlike Stanbury’s Confidential civil defence report. This discovery greatly stimulated the “Protect and Survive” civil defence advice given out in Britain for many years, although it was kept secret because the exact abundances of these bomb nuclides in fallout were dependent on the precise bomb designs, which were Top Secret for decades." 172.141.71.168 12:25, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Different types of bomb?
The article doesn't seem to distinguish at all between different types of bombs, although they differ greatly in the amount and type of fallout. This is surely the main 'factor affecting fallout'?? The current discussion seems to be mainly for the old-fashioned fission bomb. --Tdent 10:52, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the fallout is mainly influenced by the bomb yield and placement (ground, air, underground, water, etc.) Sure you can get bigger yields from the thermals, but that's not the point. The point is, as far as I can tell, any radiological differences would be pretty localised and short lived, especially compared to the other factors. --Elgaroo 19:07, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Effect Of Fallout On Material Properties
One topic I was hoping to see covered here alongside the expected ones is the effect of fallout on material properties. The reason I am interested in this (and I suspect it would be of interest to quite a few other readers) is that I have heard mention that nuclear fallout has had a long term impact upon the manufacture of steel. For specialised applications, what is known as 'pre-fallout steel' is harvested (plates from sunken World War I battleships are one such source) because its material properties are, I am told, superior for those applications than steel made after the appearance of fallout in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, attempts to Google the topic throw up lots of references to computer games (sigh). I'd certainly like to know more on this, including the reasons why fallout has affected the engineering properties of steel made after 1945, but sadly trying to find references to this topic is proving to be an uphill struggle. Any offers? Calilasseia 15:34, 25 July 2006 (UTC)


 * The low radioactivity steel is normally used for things such as radiation detectors, by lowering the radioactivity of the steel the background of the detector can be lowered.Cadmium

source data
The plots look great, but I haven't seen explicit references to the source data and/or formulae used to generate them. If the data are in the public domain, I believe they can be uploaded to the Commons and linked to from there. If they're not, I'm not sure how the derivative copyright applies in that case. Also, a plot with no source data might be construed as original research. Ojcit 21:22, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

The charts are also inconsistent resulting in confusion. The first chart plots the bomb in pink and the reactor in blue while the last two charts invert the color representations. These charts are in need of some explanatory paragraphs to clarify what we are looking and and provide additional context (such as area/distance from bomb/reactor used for measurements). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.18.239.243 (talk) 22:06, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

10kt+ into stratosphere?
Regarding the line about bombs larger than 10kt reaching the stratosphere, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that only the very largest bombs (500kt+) actually loft dust into the stratosphere. This would seem to imply something like a 20kt bomb wouldn't, which contradicts what's written here.

Anyone have a source? Gigs 13:49, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

What kind of radiation is it?
This article doesn't say what kind of radiation it is. Is it gamma radiation? This must be made clear. 64.236.121.129 (talk) 18:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Nuclear Fallout can be Alpha, Beta or Gamma. It depends on what made it.(86.31.188.237 (talk) 00:27, 6 July 2008 (UTC))

Proposed External Links addition
I suggest that the following address be added to the Nuclear Fallout page, External Links: http://old-elf.tripod.com/fallout.html Article by John Hanna (activist - Environmental Life Force), Micronesia Service Committee, Bulletin, March 1979. The article describes his first-hand observations on a 1974 visit to Rongelap Atoll with the AEC medical survey team. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.110.210.6 (talk) 18:31, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I've seen this plot before. It is comparing the initial energies and rate of decay of gamma emissions from Chernobyl to those from fallout from a nuclear bomb. The Chernobyl plot should not be zero though. The point to be taken is that the gamma emissions of fallout - the radiation settling on earth starting about 1 hour after a nuclear explosion - are mostly due to iodine-131, which has an 8.02 hour half-life. The other main gamma emitter is cesium-137, which has a 28 year half-life. The shorter the half-life the more quickly the isotope releases energy. Iodine-131 then is the most dangerous form immediately after a nuclear blast while cesium-137 is more enduring. A nuclear fallout shelter would have to protect from the initial high radiation. After a nuclear war, a small portion of the US would be exposed to extraordinarily high peak radiation (10,000-30,000 rads), while about 10-40% of the country would be exposed to the 1,000-5,000 rad range. In either case someone would need sufficient shelter to survive the early radiation (assuming they survived the thermal radiation and blast). If they did so, they would face another set of problems when they emerged from their shelters. That would be contamination of the environment from long-term gamma and beta emitters. Still, more people would survive a nuclear exchange than would not (contrary to popular fantasy). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.188.203.194 (talk) 23:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

slight change
I changed the page saying "thnuduclear explosion" to nuclear explosion I feel, so proud to help wikipedia :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjabby (talk • contribs) 18:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Tactical military considerations
This article has a number of problems, but I'm focusing on the "Tactical military considerations" section...since it's entirely unreferenced, how are we to know this isn't purely speculative? I will remove this material if it is not explicitly sourced with in-line citations. If someone thinks it can be sourced from the existing general sources, please fill it in! Thanks! Cazort (talk) 23:05, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Black Rain
Black rain re-directs here but the name is nowhere mentioned in the article. Anybody care to include that somewhere? —Preceding unsigned comment added by SuperChencho (talk • contribs) 21:09, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Fallout shelters
I removed a two-part unsourced statement. There is no source to back up the statement that "popular opinion" is that "short term survival would be futile" after a nuclear attack. It also said that fallout shelters are no longer maintained. Whilst they are certainly no longer maintained to the standards which they once were, the blanket statement is incorrect.Mk5384 (talk) 06:53, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Added some information on the principles of fallout protection, as that section was empty of anything useful. Citation and reference can be the same as [1] though the graphs in the article contain the same curves (i.e. factor of 7 in time giving factor of ten reduction in overall fallout). 79.135.110.169 (talk) 15:54, 6 April 2013 (UTC).

Source removed
In this edit user:SD Energy removed this content

There is evidence that low level, brief radiation exposures are not harmful.

with this comment: "MIT study citation removed. Study debunked in journal it published in without functional rebuttal."

It is more customary to replace sourced content with updated sourced content, so I am posting this here on the talk page for comment.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   21:30, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Units and Effects
The Effects section introduces the non-SI unit the Roentgen This unit is obsolete - it is only used in the USA, and even there the policy of authoritative bodies (eg the Health Physics Society) is that only SI units should be used. In addition the Roentgen is not mentioned anywhere else in the article. If there are no objections, I will remove all references to Roentgens and make appropriate changes to the section. Baska436 (talk) 10:19, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Sieverts
The standard and measurable SI unit is the Gray. 1 Gy = 1 joule/kilogram matter or tissue – a measurable quantity. The Gray is used for high dosages that are likely to cause death.

The most common term in use in the literature is the Sievert. It is an SI unit derived from the Gray that describes the equivalent effect of radiation on organisms. It too has the form 1 Sv = 1 joule/kilogram of tissue, but is altered by factors that depend on the type of radiation. These factors are provided by the ICRP. A dosimeter device measures and calculates, typically, micro sieverts per hour exposure and total exposure expressed in sieverts. Sieverts measure quantities that increase death rates in populations, such as the increased risk of leukemia per 10,000.

Insofar as Sieverts are the most common measurement unit in current use, I recommend that the article be reviewed for unit usage. Rhadow (talk) 11:53, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Better explanation of this graph.
Hi, I know nothing about phyiscs or nuclear fallout, so I'd appreciate this graph being better explained:



It seems to me that the Chernobyl fallout as shown here is completely flat, or possibly non-existant.

OK, here is my understanding of it: the Chernobyl graph is like the tail-end of the bomb graph – hence it is relatively flat. This is because the Chernobyl release would not contain high proportions of short-lived radionuclides which are characteristic of the early stages of fallout from a nuclear bomb.

Inside a reactor radionuclides are created gradually in a controlled reaction over an extended period of time. Consequently any short-half life isotopes would decay in hours or days before there is a significant build-up. In contrast, a nuclear bomb creates all its resulting radionuclides in one quick event. Hence the proportion of short-life radionuclides is high. The shorter the half-life, the more radiation is emitted per unit of time. So the bomb graph shows a high initial dose of radiation, which decays rapidly as the short-lived radionuclides decay over a matter of days. In contrast radioactivity from Chernobyl is from longer-half life (less radioactive) materials which persist for years.

Of course, there was more material in Chernobyl than there would be in a typical bomb. So the graph is really like the tail-end of several bombs added together. In approximate terms, it is like the radiation from large nuclear bomb a year or so after detonation when all the short-life radionuclides have decayed.

one of these graphs is definitely wrong - if you compare both:  - you can see that although same data were used for bomb dose rate, there is crazy difference for Chernobyl curve. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.80.165.210 (talk) 13:09, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Reduction in fallout death predictions circa 1960?
I came across this report, which I highly recommend skimming. I draw your attention to page 13, which suggests a full-scale exchange would result in the deaths of 95% of the US population. An ABM system (Zeus) would reduce this only 10 to 15%, due to the rest of the deaths being from fallout. The text explains that the Soviets could kill a significant amount of the population simply by checker boarding the US evenly with warheads, and that the "optimum fallout" would increase this only in limited exchanges.

Yet I clearly remember predictions from the 1980s stating that most people would survive the initial attack and that radiation would not be the primary cause of death. I seem to recall this going back even to Goldstone. So either this report, and Gaither which it seems to be based on, are over predicting fallout effects, or there was some reason to suggest significant changes to the outcomes. Does anyone know? Maury Markowitz (talk) 21:00, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi. The 1959 report aims at showing that protection from fallouts is a necessity, and the 95% figure corresponds to an unprepared population. Nuclear fallouts are lethal only for a couple of days, and after ~2 weeks no protection is needed. With correct protection, radiation would not be the primary cause of death. Biem (talk) 11:54, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Similar reports from later years state that the vast majority of the US population would survive a full exchange. The smallest exchanges in the charts under full protection have higher casualty rates that later numbers for a full exchange. Something changed, and it wasn't fallout shelters. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:26, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the report was politically motivated as a way of saying - don't bother with project Safeguard(Zeus)? There, lest we forget, was much disagreement amongst the scientific community as to the ballistic missile "shields" effectiveness and thus a great deal of pseudo-scientific propaganda published about it.


 * However putting that aside for arguments sake. From my reading a number of things changed over the years, not least the average weapon yield. Chief amongst some plausible factors relate to the revisions in the LD-50 over the decades, due to the uncertainty over the dose received by those who died from ARS in Hiroshima, the ABCC's/Radiation Effects Research Foundation's "DS02" is an example of the revisions that are constantly being done when new data emerges. Also perhaps higher estimates on mortality as a result of unchecked ingestion during the estimated, so called "nuclear famine", may have factored into these earlier risk calculations? In any case, a good chronological primer on the path that the estimates on external gamma dose went thru is attached to the Duck and Cover article I largely penned. Structure shielding against fallout gamma rays from nuclear detonations By Lewis Van Clief Spencer, Arthur B. Chilton, Charles Eisenhauer, Center for Radiation Research, United States. National Bureau of Standards, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. pg 562-568
 * Boundarylayer (talk) 16:23, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Graph: Northern or Southern Hemisphere?
Caption below graphs says Southern Hemisphere, yet graph itself shows fallout for Australia and New Zealand. Typo in the caption? Aenchevich (talk) 08:02, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * , you inserted the picture and caption. Can you say anything to ?  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  13:47, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's an edit 9 years ago, that I no longer remember! Looking at the graph again, it is the Northern Hemisphere that near doubles from 100 to about 198, the Southern Hemisphere only climbs to about 168.  And in my original edit I said Northern Hemisphere.  It currently says Northern Hemisphere, so all seems to be well - unless I miss something. Rwendland (talk) 19:35, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys, my mistake - in the graph legend "Austria" is just below "New Zealand" and I misread it as "Australia" by association :) Can we delete this talk? It does not contribute any useful info. Aenchevich (talk) 09:24, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Nuclear fallout
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Nuclear fallout's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "NYT": From Indoor air quality:  From North Korea and weapons of mass destruction:  From Project A119:  From J. Murray Mitchell:  From Manhattan Project:  From Radiation and Public Health Project:  From Nuclear weapons and Israel: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal Vexed Nixon – The New York Times, November 29, 2007 

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 20:05, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

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