Are Hiroshima and Nagasaki off limits because of the high level or radiation or is it now safe?
474054
Those cities were rebuilt and are now home to millions of people.
1143694
I used to live in Japan and I have been to Hiroshima. As horrible as it was I really think the bombs saved lives on both sides. I have met older Japanese who have told me about being trained to repel the invasion with bamboo spears as children. Even after Nagasaki an anti-surrender faction attempted a coup. A blockade might have been an alternative strategy but then a lot of Japanese would have starved to death. Don't forget that there were POWs and civilian internees that were dieing from disease and starvation at the time in Japanese camps. Truman's first responsibilty was to bring the war to it's earliest possible conclusion.
1083384
1945 Harry Truman had the Atomic Bomb dropped on Japan.You don`t need any frequency with that action,that was up there with the holocaust,but the world seems to separate the two acts of carnage.
526111
Yes, one it is enriched and now radioactive because an atom has been split. I don't know the science. Two people still need to go in and get more uranium. There is a plan to bury it all in an abandoned mine, of limestone I believe to limit the leakage. The problem with burying it all in one place and setting up a perimmiter in this dead zone is that a) it will still spread/ leak. b) shipping stuff from all over the US to one place in the southwest is very risky. Now it is all required to stay on site at each nuclear plant in the special barrels. The plan for transport is very thourough but still not a pleasing idea. If a truck crashes/ terrorist/ whatever goes wrong you will severly contaminate a large area, 50 mile radius or more. \n\nWould you like to know the plan for shipment? Well here it is. First we've got super buckets to carry it in. Big red plastic looking capsules. We ran them over with a train. Didn't break. Was funny to see a huge red thing fly through the air though. Geographers used computer mapping to find routes that were the quickest but also went through the least populated areas. The final decision was based mainly on the least population and it doesn't travel through major cities. Many objected about going through suburban areas but in some cases there just wasn't enough farm land to pass through without having to make such a detour that it would take a long time and effect more population. The highways and streets it must pass through will be closed to traffic and the trucks will be escorted by military. If your local highway is closed for somereason chances are it's passing through your neighborhood.
638207
None.\n\nThe five Nuclear Powers.\n\nThe World should stop at 5 Nuclear Powers.\n\nThe nukes may never go away.\n\nBut it helps to know there has not been a single nuclear attack against any country since Nagasaki 1945. That is more than 60 years ago.It would be safe to keep it that way.\n\nCan anyone guarantee the same if other countries(ANY) start developing nuclear weapons indiscriminately?
91365
Ignore the abusive idiot above. He has no idea what he is talking about.\n\n\nThere are lots of different radioactive elements. Some are dangerous but the vast majority are harmless. \n\nYour body and everybody else's is already full of radiocative elements. You are loaded with isotopes like 13Carbon., tritium, 44Calcium and so on. Every living thing that has ever existed on Earth has been losded with those radicoative elements. We've evolved with them from the beginning and as a result they are quite harmles to us in normal doses.\n\nA few unnatural radioactive isotopes are harmful in small doses, and some natural isotopes are dangerous if they are concentrated in the body. But the general answer is that radiocative elements are quite harmless.
178530
From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it sounds like they need alot of upgrading.  They don't have as many nukes targeted on the USA as i had thought, although one would be enough.
1134778
The only real limitation to a thermonuclear (h-bomb) explosion is the amount of fuel available for the burst.  The limitation to a fission explosion is due to proximity of material - you initiate a burst, the fissile material moves.
644977
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
924996
There are thousands of toxic items used in industry, agriculture, water treatment, etc that can be used as terrorist weapons. However Po-210 is very toxic.  It is readily soluble in dilute acids and disperses throughout the body.  It is 5000 times as radioactive as radium.  It emits alpha particles, which means that inside a sealed container or capsule it's virtually harmless, but in proximity to bone marrow, hair follicles, lung, liver, and kidney tissue (plus other tissues) it can deliver a high dose of radiation.  It is made in nuclear reactors by bismuth-209 absorbing a neutron to become bismuth-210, which emits a beta particle (same charge and size as an electron) to become polonium-210.  Which leads one to speculate that, if Mr. Litvinenko was indeed intentionally poisoned with this substance, the perps must have had access to a nuclear reactor and/or waste products from one.   \n \n        An interesting medical trivia point:  smoking 2 packs per day gives one on the average 1300 millirems of radiation a year because of adherence of polonium (and other radioactive substances) to tobacco leaves.  This is roughly four times the average annual US radiation dose from natural background, including radon, that all of us receive.  Of course, there are areas of the world, e.g. some spots in Iran, where the dose from radon from hot springs is ten times higher than the dose from smoking!
376905
Radionucleides.  The only time you might ordinarily be exposed to them is during a medical proceedure wherein the radiation they emit is a desired aspect.  Those proceedures are either for diagnostic purposes or theraputic purposes.  \n\nBad for you?  No, the amount of radiation your body is exposed to during such an exam is quite minimal.  On the other hand, theraputic radiation is very, very carefully controlled and administered.  In the past, folks sometimes experienced quite a bit of discomfort during radiation therapy.  That's much less the case now, and we have medicines to help what discomfort there is - medicines that simply were not avaliable until recently.\n\nThat having been said, there's been a lot of fuss and bother over the possibility of someone "exploding a dirty bomb",  meaning a device that might spread radioactive particles over a wide area.  Despite Homeland Security's attempts to panic us, that is very, very, VERY unlikely.  So is a nuclear accident like Three Mile Island twenty or so years ago - and Three Mile Island, frightening as it was for people living nearby, left nobody outside the plant sick from radiation - nobody.  But a serious accident COULD result in many, many serious injuries and deaths.  The proper response is for surrounding communities to have in place a proper disaster response plan that may include mass evacuation and prophylactic medicines in stock.  Unfortunately, despite all the hype and all the promises, vitually no community has done squat to properly prepare for either a nuclear accident or a deliberate attempt an spreading nuclear-contaminated materal.  Sure as can be, the Federal government has done virtually nothing worthwhile in that respect!   The stinkers...
7743
It depends on the mass.  Take a look at the graph in the source link. Elements with an atomic mass lower than that of Iron (or there abouts) generally must have energy added to the system to split it.  Conversely, those same atoms lighter than iron will release enegy when you fuse them together.  This is the property of nuclear fission.  It is how the sun works to create heat and light by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms, and it is also the principle behind the H-bomb (the hydrogen bomb, or the fusion bomb, which is much more powerful than the fission bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima).\n\nIf the atom is heavier than iron, it will release energy when you split it.  Heavy elements like uranium and plutonium are unstable, and will naturally decay, releasing particles and energy.  If these high-energy particles hit other unstable elements--like more uranium--you can get a chain reaction, which makes decay happen more quickly.  Under controlled levels of uranium density, you can make this heat useful to boil water and run turbines and generate energy.  But if the density of the unstable element is really high, the chain reaction can take off uncontrolably, causing a nuclear explosion.  this is the principle behind fission bombs, like those dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.\n\nHydrogen bombs require tritium, which is a rare isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons.  the technology behind nuclear fusion is more complicated than that behind fission.  Power plants currently use fission, but fission has the problem of producing radioactive waste.  Hydrogen fusion has the problem of being hard to control, although people are working on developing a fusion reactor to generate energy, which would be advantageous.
970677
Irradiated foods are safe.  They are not radioactive (at least not due to the irradiation process) any more than you are after exposure to x-rays (although THEY can be harmful).  The radiation kills bacteria in the food.  \n\nIf irradiation did increase genetic variability it would probably be good for the human race, because, due to advances in medicine, the race is stagnating (genetically, that is) because harmful mutations and deadly diseases no longer always limit life, so the propensity for such mutations and diseases is passed on by reproduction.
1023510
All of the really really radioactive material that was airbourne has probably decayed to below background levels. The amount of radiation in the atmosphere today is greater than it was before nuclear testing in the 1940s, so it's clrearly possible for material to hang around.\n\nI suspect there is still material from chernobyl in our atmosphere, but it is now part of the background level and not dangerous.
308622
As far as I am aware, the 2 atomic bombs that were dropped are still causing deaths today due to birth defects and cancers.\nHyposcrisy? I have often wondered the same thing. The question I ask is why does it appear that the US government only allow the US and it's allies to even have nuclear capability?
818133
What nuclear leakage? Are you delving into the far distant past?\nThe nuclear industry must be the safest industry on the globe to day, there are so many safety measures and regulations that it would be almost impossible for any leakage. \nMake no mistake nuclear is the power of the future.
1049152
This is a very difficult question.  Yes, every country has the right to nukes, it is only fair.  However, that being said, every country having nukes is going to lead to an apocolyptic war, so it is in the interest of the entire world to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons.