Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

July 31, 1790: The first U.S. patent X000001 is issued to inventor Samuel Hopkins for an improved potash process, under the new U.S. patent statute signed into law by President Washington, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson on April 10, 1790.




July 31, 1970 at six bells in the forenoon watch, Britain's Royal Navy issued the last daily rations of rum, ending a 230-year old tradition. Sailors mourned "Black Tot Day" by holding mock funerals and wearing black arm bands. The Royal New Zealand Navy issued the daily tot until Feb 28, 1990.

Making 'The Blue Flash': How I reconstructed a fatal atomic accident

In 1946, a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist when his screwdriver slipped. To tell his story, Ben Platts-Mills pieced together what happened inside the room.

Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test, a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life.

In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.

Last week, BBC Future explored the consequences of this fatal accident in a specially illustrated story created by the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills:

he Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

In this gallery, Platts-Mills explains how he composed the illustrations, based on reconstructions created shortly after the accident, archive photographs, and his own mock-up of the apparatus built from household materials.

What’s even more fascinating about this article is it has a guy riding the Fatman bomb with Bugs Bunny on it. The original Maj. 'King' Kong. LOL! There seems to be little known about the photo op bomb and assume it's just the shell casing minus the warhead & explosives.

I'm not 100%, but the Bugs Bunny 'bomb' photo may have been taken here:


Quonset Hut TA-22-1


July 31, 1990: the United States assembled its last completely new thermonuclear warhead, a 455-kiloton W88 for the Trident II D5 SLBM at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Since then, several thousand existing nuclear warheads and bombs have been significantly refurbished at Pantex.


U.S. Nuclear Weapons Production and Naval Nuclear Propulsion Complex

Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are the design and engineering labs for the W88 Alt 370, while multiple nuclear security enterprise facilities are responsible for other aspects of the W88 Alt 370:

• Sandia National Laboratories produces the neutron generators.
  
• Los Alamos National Laboratory produces detonator assemblies.
  
• Kansas City National Security Campus produces the gas transfer system and the arming, fuzing, and firing subsystem.
  
• Savannah River Site is responsible for testing, evaluating, and replenishing the gas transfer system.
  
• The Pantex Plant is responsible for producing the conventional high explosives and final assembly of the complete W88 Alt 370 for delivery to the U.S. Navy.
  

W88 Alteration 370

 
The W88 Alt 370 program, which completed its First Production Unit on July 1, 2021 (18 months behind schedule), will cost at least $2.8 billion through 2026. See First Improved W88 Nuclear Warhead For Navy’s Trident Missiles Rolls Off The Assembly Line.

NNSA and the Pentagon have estimated the alt 370 program will cost about $4 billion over roughly 10 years, including up to $3 billion in NNSA expenses.

If DOE schedules and budgets remain on track, (big IF) based on history, in December 2029, new W87-1 warheads filled with refurbished plutonium pits from Pantex will once again begin rolling off the Pantex assembly line to arm the new Sentinel ICBM.

The Department of Energy has not mass-produced new plutonium pits for US nuclear weapons since 1989, when the Rocky Flats plutonium foundry in Colorado was shut down. Now it's spending billions at Los Alamos in New Mexico to churn out 30 per year by 2026. And that is not all...the DOE is spending billions more to manufacture an additional 50 pits per year at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, a facility that has never done such work. In all, DOE is on track to spend up to $24 billion by 2030, when they hope to make a total of 80 pits per year. Given the agency's track record you can bet the cost will skyrocket. The new pits will be remanufactured using the large plutonium surplus left over from retired weapons.

In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again (TIME, July 24, 2023) | Archived link

A "pit" is the fissile core of a nuclear warhead. In modern warheads, it creates a nuclear explosion that triggers a substantially larger thermonuclear explosion. All pits currently in the U.S. nuclear stockpile were made at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, CO, which opened in 1952. The Department of Energy (DOE) halted pit manufacturing operations there in 1989; the United States has been unable to make stockpile-quality pits -- and therefore complete nuclear warheads since then. Inability to make pits may have adverse consequences. For example: (1) The United States cannot replace pits for the W88 warhead (for the Trident II missile) that are destroyed during evaluation; currently, only one W88 evaluation pit remains, so use of more W88 pits would reduce deployable warheads. (2) Pits deteriorate over time, though the rate at which that happens is under study. If pits of a given type deteriorate so much as to be no longer reliable, or if an unanticipated defect arises, then hundreds to thousands of deployed warheads might have to be withdrawn.

Nuclear Warhead "Pit" Production: Background and Issues for Congress (2004)

Meanwhile, the US Ministry of nuclear truth recently rejected two requests from FAS to declassify the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile...

"While Advocating Nuclear Transparency Abroad, Biden Administration Limits It At Home" -
Double-Denial of Nuclear Weapons Transparency

I guess deterrence is best served by ambiguity until US/Russia decides its in their interest to start cooperating again and in this resurrected cold war climate neither side is going to provide data nor declass anything.


Check out my bunker door...

This photo from 1979 shows a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employee opening the world's heaviest hinged door, which was eight feet thick, nearly twelve feet wide, and weighed 97,000 pounds. A special bearing in the hinge allowed a single person to open or close the concrete-filled door, which was used to shield the Rotating Target Neutron Source-II (RTNS-II) -- the world’s most intense source of continuous fusion neutrons. Scientists from around the world used it to study the properties of metals and other materials that could be used deep inside fusion power plants envisioned for the next century.
DOE photo of the week for Aug 24, 2012 | Photo at Flickr

2 days later...LOL!

'X' sign atop Twitter HQ in SF taken down after city, resident complaints

SAN FRANCISCO -- The large and bright 'X' logo that sat on top of the San Francisco headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter has now been taken down.

And now, the company will be fined for installing the logo on the roof without a permit.

According to the Department of Building Inspection in San Francisco, fees will be for removal of the structure, building permits and to cover the costs of DBI and planning department's investigation.

Patrick Hannan, communications director with the DBI, said a building permit is required to remove the structure but, due to safety concerns, the permit can be secured after the structure is taken down.

Hannan said they received 24 complaints about the 'X' logo structure over the weekend including concerns about its safety and illumination.

ABC7 went to the building Monday morning and the sign is no longer up. Crews were also working on the vertical sign along the side of the building.

The sign was installed Friday, and lasted three days. The city of San Francisco said that they were opening an investigation and complaint into permit requirements for the sign.

Residents in the area were also not pleased, as the sign pulsated light, illuminating the surrounding buildings.