Ten Pounds of Plutonium

Plutonium was a major ingredient in the first nuclear bomb to be detonated successfully, the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, New Mexico.  The bomb contained thirteen pounds (5.9 kg) of plutonium, but subsequent measurements of the blast showed that only about three pounds (1.4 kg) of plutonium was consumed by the chain reaction.  This means that the remaining ten pounds (4.5 kg) spread from the blast site over the New Mexico counties of Guadalupe, Lincoln, San Miguel, Socorro, and Torrance, as well as other counties and states to the east.  As plutonium-239, the isotope used in the bomb, has a half-life of 24,000 years, virtually all that plutonium is still out there somewhere, with large amounts scattered among the ranches and villages of southeastern New Mexico.  However, later investigations showed that some plutonium from the bomb reached 46 of the 48 continental United States as well as Canada and Mexico. 

 

When breathed or ingested, the high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei) that plutonium emits cause havoc in any living system they enter.  In a documentary I saw last week entitled "First We Bombed New Mexico," a woman recalled the summer day in 1945 during her childhood when white particles looking something like snow began to fall.  She and her brothers tried to form it into snowballs, but it wouldn't stick together.  It turned out to be fallout from the Trinity test.

 

Far from being an uninhabited area, the part of New Mexico selected for the world's first nuclear explosion harbored ranchers, cowboys, and others trying to extract a hardscrabble existence from the dry soil.  Most of them were poor, most of them were Hispanic, and virtually none of them knew anything about fallout, nuclear explosions, or radiation.  But as rates of cancer, thyroid disease, and infant mortality began to rise in 1945 and 1946, people started to wonder what was going on. 

 

It is impossible to "prove" that a particular case of cancer in one person was caused by radiation from the Trinity test.  But statistics cited in the movie persuaded me that a great injustice has been wrought on the residents of the region heavily contaminated by fallout, an injustice that continues to this day as  plutonium gets concentrated by rainfall in streambeds and aquifers in ways that no one has had the resources to quantify, except in rare cases.

 

Residents of Nevada near the subsequent thermonuclear-bomb test sites used in the 1950s, some residents of Utah, and some uranium miners were in principle compensated for their losses by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which was proposed in 1979 but not signed into Federal law until 1990.  Ironically, it excluded the first victims of nuclear fallout:  the New Mexico residents who were the nation's first guinea pigs in the uncontrolled experiment of seeing what ten pounds of plutonium spread over the landscape would do.

 

An activist (and cancer survivor) named Tina Cordova has devoted most of her adult life to getting New Mexico included in an extension of RECA, which was set to expire in 2022 but was extended to 2024 by President Biden's administration.  Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group of cancer survivors, uranium miners, and relatives of deceased victims of cancer who are trying to extend the reach of RECA to cover their region as well. 

 

As I watched the film, I found myself imagining what would have happened if the Trinity test had been performed outside, say, Albany, New York instead of Socorro, New Mexico.  Southeasterly winds would have carried the fallout over Springfield and Boston in Massachusetts and Hartford in Connecticut.  If anything close to the level of radiation after Trinity was found in that part of the country, it's likely a bill would have been passed to dig up every square inch of soil in New England to a depth of six inches and get rid of it somewhere—maybe New Mexico?  They need topsoil there, don't they?

 

There was very little in the way of technical information in the film.  Most of the time, the director, Lois Lipman, followed Tina Cordova around as she spoke at rallies, visited community events, and participated in memorial ceremonies in which paper bags with candles in them, one for each cancer survivor, were blown out one by one. 

 

The Catholic faith is a constant undercurrent in the region of New Mexico contaminated by plutonium, and many victims and relatives gave God credit for getting them through the tribulations of cancer treatments, the sadness of watching one relative after another die of cancer at an early age, and the frustration of seeing the RECA bill amendments turned down year after year.  At this moment, the U. S. Senate has passed a version of the bill, but Speaker Mike Johnson is preventing it from coming to a vote in the House.  God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but I'm sure He is interested in the outcome of this particular political tussle.

 

The nation was at war in 1945, and at least in the early stages of the nuclear bomb's development, we did not know how far Nazi Germany was in developing something similar.  This situation initially justified a habit of secrecy which continued well after the end of the war, when the USSR became the chief nuclear threat instead.  This air of secrecy perhaps explains, but does not justify, why virtually nobody in the path of the fallout was evacuated or even warned of the danger after the July 1945 test. 

 

But now that we know and have records of the injuries and premature cancer deaths that ten pounds of plutonium have wrought upon thousands of mainly poor people in New Mexico, it is a simple matter of justice to compensate them in some way roughly equivalent to what the other people covered by the RECA law have received.  That is the message of "First We Bombed New Mexico," and that is the message I hope our elected representatives get when Tina Cordova and others plead once again for its amendment and renewal.

 

Sources:  The award-winning film "First We Bombed New Mexico" was shown at a community center in San Marcos and accompanied by the director, Lois Lipman.  It is not generally available, but Lipman is trying to get it aired publicly in time for the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is coming up in July of 2025.  I also referred to a news article on Tina Cordova at https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2024/03/05/activist-who-has-fought-for-reca-expansion-chosen-as-lujans-guest-for-the-state-of-the-union-address/ and the Wikipedia articles on plutonium and the Trinity test. I also included some information provided to me by Lois Lipman concerning the extent of the fallout.

Radiation: The Unsolved Problem of Space Travel

These appear to be great times for future space travelers.  Commercial rocket outfits such as SpaceX are thriving, the Dutch organization Mars One is still refining their pool of potential Martian astronauts for a flight presently scheduled for 2032, and National Geographic's "Mars" docu-drama TV series has intermingled interviews with space experts and a dramatic portrayal of what an actual flight to Mars might be like, complete with death-defying crises. 

Then along comes Charles L. Limoli, a radiation biologist at UC Irvine, with his mouse brains shot full of holes, as he describes in an article published in the February 2017 issue of Scientific American.  They're not holes you can see with the naked eye—just tracks of ionization damage caused by nuclear particles intended to simulate the damage caused by cosmic rays and solar particle radiation that a typical years-long round trip to Mars would involve.  The bad news Limoli has is that when you take smart mice and shoot their brains with that much radiation, it damages certain fragile parts of the nerve cells:  the dendritic spines.  And they don't grow back.  So even high-IQ mice who get zapped in a NASA particle accelerator designed to simulate the type of radiation that astronauts will be exposed to, end up with what amounts to a mouse form of Alzheimer's.  The performance of these mice in certain mouse intelligence tests (don't ask me how they figured out how to do that) fell to only 10% of what it was before the zapping.  And the damage seems to be permanent, at least in mice.

So what, you say?  We'll just shield the space capsule.  Think again.

The more energetic a particle is—the faster it's going and the heavier it is—the harder it is to shield against.  Turns out that galactic cosmic rays, which are one of the two main kinds of radiation astronauts on deep-space missions will encounter, are the highest-energy particles known, with many of them having more energy than the most powerful earth-bound particle accelerators can produce.  The only practical radiation shielding presently used involves putting a lot of heavy stuff—concrete, steel, lead—between you and the radiation.  On earth, this isn't such a problem if you happen to have a disused salt mine handy—you just go underground.  But weight is the enemy of space travel, and a rocket that was shielded well enough to reduce cosmic-ray fluxes to something comparable to what we encounter on earth (shielded as it is by its magnetic field and atmosphere) would be prohibitively heavy.  We are talking shield thicknesses of many feet, all around the living areas of the vehicle. 

So at present, all these nice dreams of people spending years in deep space are still only that—dreams.  Based on the work of Limoli and others, sending astronauts on an unshielded rocket to spend a year or more in deep space would likely turn their brains into Swiss cheese, radiation-wise, with dire consequences that would affect everyone on board.  I don't know about you, but I can't think of a more depressing end to a space flight than to have everybody turn into candidates for assisted living in a matter of months.  And that's just if we try to get to Mars.  If the astronauts somehow manage to get there without losing their minds, the first thing they'd have to do would be to dig a deep burrow to shield themselves, or apply whatever unknown shielding technology they used on the trip to the newly established colony as well.

Space optimists look at this problem as just another speed bump on the road to Mars.  There may be medical ways of alleviating some of the damage that radiation causes to neurons.  But any such treatment is far in the future, and prospective space travelers need it now.  There is even less likelihood of finding a lightweight way of shielding against high-energy cosmic rays.  The physics of the problem has been well understood for decades.  In principle, you could use magnetic fields to create a shield, but the field intensity to deflect such particles is absurdly high—even the superconducting magnets in  today's MRI machines, which have to be carefully isolated from any ferrous object, probably wouldn't do the job.  And if you don't do something, you're condemning your space travelers to virtually certain mental decline.  Of course, some may think that this is just a risk we have to take.

Having watched the entire National Geographic "Mars" series over the Christmas holidays, I noted a disturbing tendency on the part of some enthusiasts for what I would term secular millennialism.  The religious millennialists called the Millerites were followers of William Miller, who convinced both himself and many others that he had figured out when the second coming of Christ would occur:  Oct. 22, 1844, about ten years ahead of when he was writing.  In the years leading up to 1844 he accumulated a large following who sold their farms, businesses, and houses and gathered in small groups, waiting for the big day.  In what became known as the Great Disappointment, nothing unusual happened, either then or later.

Secular millennial movements such as classical Marxism exact arduous and even painful sacrifices today for a promised millennial paradise tomorrow—and somehow, tomorrow never comes.  Some present-day promoters of deep-space travel have convinced themselves that the future of the human race lies not on Earth, but on Mars or other places where we'll be able to start over again and do it right.  If you really believe this, it's going to affect your attitude toward life on Earth.  After all, if we're just going to move soon, why paint the walls? 

It's not clear at this point whether radiation will pose a "deal-breaker" problem to deep-space travel.  I suppose if we get clever enough about orbital assembly stations, we could eventually manage to build a rocket that could carry enough conventional shielding to protect astronauts on their way to Mars.  But that does not seem to be in the current plans of many space enterprises. 

If somebody started calling for volunteers, or even offered lots of money, for people to jump off a thousand-foot cliff without parachutes "just for the experience," I hope we would find a way to shut them down.  That hasn't happened so far with Mars One, the Dutch outfit that is currently selecting people to go on a one-way trip to Mars.  But if by the time astronauts gets to Mars, their brains are so fried that they don't know where they are, it would be a shame for everybody—especially the astronauts and those who put them knowingly into a situation that was going to end badly. 

Maybe we'll figure this one out, but in the meantime, any time I see someone promoting manned deep-space flight, I'll be wondering what they plan to do about radiation.  And so far, I don't see anyone taking it seriously enough.

Sources:  Charles L. Limoli's article "Deep-Space Deal Breaker" is on pp. 54-59 of the Feb. 2017 edition of Scientific American.