Kind: captions
Language: en
part of this video was sponsored by hbo
max and their new show
raised by wolves
[Music]
there's a place in the new mexico desert
open to the public for just two days out
of the year
but i got to visit by myself with only a
small film crew
this is the trinity bomb test site
where on july 16th 1945 at exactly 5
29 and 45 seconds in the morning the
first
nuclear bomb was exploded
the test was called trinity there was
actually a tower here that stood
100 feet or about 30 meters
[Music]
the list of people who witnessed the
test reads like a who's who of 20th
century physics
fermi feynman oppenheimer von neumann
but the test was top secret the general
public weren't to know
but how do you hide a huge nuclear
explosion
well the albuquerque tribune published a
statement claiming it was a large but
accidental conventional explosion it
wasn't just the general public who were
kept in the dark
the governor of new mexico was not even
aware that trinity was a nuclear test
until
after the bombing of hiroshima even then
details about the blast were scarce
but kodak the film company based on the
other side of the country in new york
state
well they figured out what was happening
it all started with some defective x-ray
film
kodak found when they developed unused
film it showed tens or even
a hundred little dark spots the film had
been exposed to radiation even though it
had never been taken out of its
packaging
this was actually not a new problem
during world war
ii radium was used extensively to make
glow-in-the-dark dials flight
instruments and
watches radium glows because it is
radioactive it gives off alpha particles
now some of this radium ended up on
paper and cardboard at these factories
and because supplies were scarce
leftover paper products were
salvaged and recycled leading small
amounts of radium to
end up in the general paper supply and
when this paper was used to package up
kodak film
radiation from radium would expose the
film before it was ever used
and it was such a problem that kodak
altered their supply chain carefully
selecting
just a few paper mills where they could
strictly control the raw materials
one of the mills was in vincennes
indiana on the wabash river
it made strawboard which was inserted
between sheets of x-ray film
now for months this strawboard was
working perfectly until a batch
manufactured on august 6 1945 started to
cause spots to appear on the x-ray film
so julian webb a scientist at kodak was
tasked with solving the problem
so he punched out little holes of
strawboard behind where the film had
been exposed
and then he measured the alpha particles
coming off that material
but the level was not appreciably higher
than background
and this ruled out radium and the other
naturally occurring isotopes of uranium
thorium and actinium
all alpha emitters but when he measured
beta radiation
he found significant activity this
matched what he saw on the film
the radiation penetrated several layers
something beta particles can do
but not alpha and over a period of
months
he measured the half-life of the
radioactive substance finding it was
only about 30 days
this half-life combined with the energy
of the beta particles led webb to
conclude that the radioactive
contaminant was most likely
cerium 141 an isotope that could
only have come from a nuclear fission
explosion
what's more the same contaminant
appeared in paper from another of
kodak's mills
this one hundreds of kilometers away in
tama iowa
so how did cerium 141 end up in that
straw board
well when that first atomic bomb
exploded in the new mexico desert
the plutonium core underwent a fission
chain reaction
plutonium nuclei ripped in two releasing
energy and more neutrons to continue the
chain reaction
but vision is a messy process it doesn't
always split the nucleus into the same
products
instead hundreds of different nuclei are
produced
virtually all of them radioactive and
they are carried up into the
stratosphere with the mushroom cloud
and dispersed on air currents whichever
way the wind blows
in this case they traveled over a
thousand kilometers ending up over
iowa and indiana here rain captured some
of these radioactive particles causing
them to fall
out of the sky hence the term
radioactive fallout
this radioactive material ended up in
rivers like the ones that run beside the
two kodak paper mills
which used that river water to make
their paper so that's how cerium 141
ended up fogging kodak's x-ray film
and exposing the u.s nuclear secret now
word of kodak's detection made it back
to scientists at los alamos
who were intrigued and wanted to know
more a consultant wrote to webb to find
out how much radioactivity per square
mile he detected
and the size of the particles which fell
and the half-life of the activity
although webb completed his experiments
by the end of 1945
he only published them in physical
review in 1949
and that's because i'm sure he
recognized just how sensitive his
findings were
after all he himself had worked on the
manhattan project at berkeley
and oak ridge using electromagnetic
techniques to separate uranium isotopes
what was clear to kodak was that they
needed to take steps to protect their
film
and so they installed air samplers to
monitor for fallout in the air intakes
of their buildings
fallout is a vitally important subject
bombs are being tested which to some
extent
contaminate the atmosphere now the us
government was aware they needed to
carefully consider where to test nuclear
bombs
what we need is a site closer to our
stateside laboratories and available air
support
somewhere in the continental united
states but where
after trinity the manhattan project's
chief of radiological safety stafford
warren
recommended tests be conducted at least
150 miles
from civilian populations in 1948 an air
force meteorologist colonel holzman
told the site selection committee that a
location on the east coast would be best
because otherwise the prevailing
westerly winds across the u.s would
spread the fallout across the country
the site they chose was nevada almost as
far west as you can go and just 100
miles from las vegas
the rationale was this site was closer
to weapons labs so it would accelerate
their development
after the first bomb test there in 1951
kodak detected fallout at their
headquarters in rochester new york
after a snowstorm geiger counters read
25 times the normal background
so kodak threatened to sue the us
government for the
considerable amount of damage to our
products resulting from the nevada tests
or from any further
atomic energy tests but instead of a
lawsuit
the two sides came to an agreement the
atomic energy commission would give
kodak
and indeed the entire photographic
industry advanced warning about upcoming
tests and where the fallout was likely
to end up given
meteorological models in return the
company agreed to keep quiet about
radioactive fallout
and from 1951 until 1963 the u.s
conducted a hundred
above-ground nuclear tests in nevada the
resulting mixture of radioactive nuclei
was blown
as predicted across most of the country
when these atoms fell on agricultural
land they were eaten by livestock or
taken up in crops and they became part
of the food supply
radioactive iodine 131 eaten by cows is
passed on to humans through their milk
and this is particularly problematic
because iodine is concentrated by the
body in the thyroid gland
and children with small developing
thyroids
drink the most milk it's estimated that
the nuclear tests led to tens of
thousands of extra cases
of thyroid cancer the atomic energy
commission wasn't too worried about
iodine 131
because it has a radioactive half-life
of only eight days it decays quickly
they were more concerned about
strontium-90 which has a half-life of
almost 30 years
strontium-90 because of a unique
combination of properties
probably represents the greatest danger
strontium-90 behaves biochemically like
calcium
so when ingested it ends up in our teeth
and bones
and as it emits ionizing beta radiation
it can cause bone cancer
cancer in the surrounding tissues or
leukemia
in what's become known as the baby tooth
survey scientists in st
louis collected up 320 000 teeth between
1950 and 1970.
they found that kids born in 1963 had 50
times more strontium in their baby teeth
than those born in 1950.
presently existing evidence indicates
that fallout
has caused only a small increase in
background radiation
and correspondingly only a minute
increase
in mutations in reality both iodine 131
and strontium 90 plus
other radioactive isotopes in the
fallout almost certainly
increased rates of cancer and other
diseases in the u.s population
this is borne out by studies showing
correlations between rates of disease
and
radioactive isotope uptake the graph
shows a peak in 1964 just after the
partial nuclear
test ban treaty was signed in 1963 it
banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere
underwater and in outer space leaving
only underground tests
a central aim of the treaty was to
address growing public concern
over the scale of nuclear tests and the
resulting radioactive fallout
when the u.s senate finally held a
hearing on the matter almost 50 years
later in 1997
the agreement with kodak was sharply
criticized especially by
senator tom harkin who said the
government warned the entire
photographic industry and provided maps
and forecasts of potential contamination
where i asked were the maps for dairy
farmers where were the warnings to
parents of children in these areas
the government protected rolls of film
but not the lives of our kids
there's something wrong with this
picture and i think the main problem was
that in the 40s and 50s
not enough was known about the
biological effects of radioactive
fallout
every so often a gene changes or mutates
and a characteristic of the organism is
altered
we do not know the exact process by
which mutations occur
cancers took years or even decades to
appear
and fallout models predicted a more
uniform and therefore less concentrated
spread
of contaminants when students in albany
new york measured a thousand times
background levels after a heavy
rainstorm
well the atomic energy commission's
report about the event called it
an interesting example of a small area
of very intense fallout
now concerned with alarming people
unnecessarily in downwind communities
the atomic energy commission's approach
was to
limit as much as possible the
information that was shared
their conclusion it seems was that
people are less sensitive to radiation
than film is so the studies of
radioactive fallout remain
inconclusive what is certain is that
1945 marked the start of a new
era no radioactive fallout before then
and lots after it
and scientists have shown you can use
this to detect wine forgeries
any wine made in the last 75 years will
give off distinctive gamma rays from
cesium-137
whereas none before that date will plus
the level of activity can be used to
estimate the vintage at least between
1952 and
1980 a similar technique can be used to
detect art forgeries because
old paint contains no radioactive cesium
or strontium
you can even use strontium 90 to
determine the age of a skeleton
how long ago that person died given it's
in the past 75 years or so
this technique has been employed in
dozens of forensic cases
where there previously was no reliable
method of estimating the year of death
if it was within the last 50 years
this method works because while we're
alive we are ingesting strontium-90
something that stops when we die to this
day
we all have some strontium-90 in our
bones albeit at lower levels
it's been about two half-lives since the
peak of radioactive contamination so
three quarters of it have decayed
and the rest has dispersed throughout
the environment so
these days it's no longer much of a
health concern
still it is there inside every one of us
a signal that can't be covered up or
faked we are of this modern age
in your bones are the literal atomic
fragments of atomic bombs that
exploded decades ago
hey this part of the video was sponsored
by hbo max and their new show raised by
wolves
the series comes from ridley scott and
it's about a post-apocalyptic future
in which they're trying to restart
humanity on an exoplanet and the young
children the
future of our species are being raised
by androids now i've watched the first
few episodes which are out and there are
some extraordinary performances in there
particularly by a couple of aussie
actors travis fimmel and winter mcgrath
so you should go check it out you can
stream raised by wolves on hbo max i'll
put some links down below
and thanks to hbo max for sponsoring
this episode