How Kodak Exposed Nuclear Weapon Testing - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Veritasium

[iwantmyvanback]

The "Dolly Parton Curve" for "scientific reasons" is too funny. Lol

[GermanManExplosives]

ve is one of the guys on youtube that actually makes his videos fun and informative without making you dooz off to sleep

[lynndonharnell]

Worked at a natural gas/LPG plant in Queensland Australia. They have a low level nuclear waste storage. Turns out there is a trace of radon in the gas, and gets centrifuged out by the LOG loadout pumps and the casings eventually reach a threshold of some form.

[jzay]

Kodak is based in my hometown of Rochester, NY.

Destin from the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel has a lovely 3 part series on Kodak including a tour of their film factory in Rochester, NY.

Would be cool to see a reaction to that video series or one of Destin’s other great videos.

[tfrowlett]

4:24 they used to put so much radium on those dials. I recently went to an aviation museum with a Radiacode 103 and found one dial which was over 300k CPM, 1000x the normal background. Even the large reconnaissance cameras were radioactive thanks to the thorium in the lenses.

[ronmaximilian]

The problem with the East Coast is that it's virtually all heavily populated. You're not going to find areas where you don't have people with in 100 miles, let alone 150 mi. The West Coast and especially the desert states are far less populated and also are largely owned by the federal government. It's just easier to find testing space in Nevada than North Carolina

[kcgunesq]

For those of us old enough to remember when cameras always used film, asking airport security to hand inspect film canisters was a thing. Obviously, a different mechanism than this story is discussing, but still something that we used to do.

[apeacebone]

I read somewhere that, due to nuclear testing, certain very sensitive machinery could only be made with steel that itself was made before 1945, because even the trace amounts of radioactive elements that found their way into steel made after that were enough to mess with the sensors. Apparently, one common way of acquiring pre-1945 steel was to recover it from shipwrecks. I have no idea if this is actually true and would love a confirmation/debunking!

[dalenmonroe]

I'd like to note that the government usually relied on the same film producers for their espionage films. It's only fair to give them a warning about damaging their product when its also vital to your own operation 😅

[johnbennett]

Probably the main reason film was given special treatment, was because they knew about it and were suing. The government was just concerned about keeping it quiet. Keeping products or people safe was an afterthought at best.

[petergunn]

back in the 1980s i built a bunch of test fixtures for Polaroid that measured the density and consistency of Polaroid film by exposing sections of a test sample of film to a radioactive source. they would then develop the film and determine whether they needed to adjust their manufacturing process. the company i worked for also built test fixtures for their SONAR based autofocus mechanisms. an audio transducer would send out a ping, and start the lens moving at a constant rate. when the reflection of the ping was detected. the lens motion stopped and the shutter tripped.

[andrewduff]

August 6, 1945 when they noticed the spots on the film was also the day when the first nuclear bomb was used in combat so everyone knew we developed the bomb. It seems like any half reasonable person would ask themselves, “Are these two things related?” I couldn’t find the day when the trinity test became public knowledge. Wikipedia just says shortly after Hiroshima and that’s what I would expect since there would be no reason to hide the test after Hiroshima. It’s still a cool story but they didn’t discover the trinity test or the Manhattan Project and they had some massive clues about what the problem was.

[JP_Names]

My dads ex girlfriend's dad was on one of the navy ships supposedly at a safe distance from one of the nuclear tests, they watched the blast. The ship got such a high dose everyone on board was put on a timer and sent home and the ship was retired. I dont know if they actually believed it was safe or if they just guessed.

It's wild how wreckless they were with something we know now is such a heavy contaminant, but maybe people will be saying that about us and plastic in 70 years

[chrisharris]

You should check out America's Unhinged Nuclear Testing - Operation Plumbob by The Fat Electrician. It talks about some other "interesting" tests done with nuclear weapons.

[RC-nqmg]

Those girls suffered far worse than throat cancer. Many developed bone cancers, teeth would rot and fall out and even jaws would fall off. Truly horrific.

[Name-otxw]

RE: Those numbers can't possibly add up.

There's a youtube video out there that animates every known nuclear weapons test over time, things got pretty nuts there for a couple of decades.

[nobody.of.importance]

It should be noted that it IS possible for a relatively small number of mutations to lead to duplicated body parts. The overall large scale body plan of a given animal is determined by it's homeobox genes, and alterations of these genes can, in some cases, lead to variations in limb formation ranging from polydactyly to cephalomelia. More often it's the case of a parasitic twin being partially absorbed, but it does happen on rare occasions.

Somewhat loosely related, there's a condition scientists have *created* for vinegar flies called antennapedia, where the instructions for building a leg are used in place of the instructions for antennae, so the fly grows a literal pair of legs out of it's face. That's how fascinating and malleable homeobox genes can be.

[michaelbobic]

I was I grad school when those hearings occurred. Sen. Harkin asked a good question, but he also tried to use this to build a national reputation for higher ambition. Nevertheless, these Hearings received only moderate media attention. We heard far more about neutron bombs, SALT I, SALT II and the START treaties. I'm old enough to have done duck and cover. I love videos like this, because you can tell immediately if a person like Veritasium has lived in the nuclear threat age, or mostly or entirely in the post Soviet-U.S. Cold War era. Those of us who lived in the Cold War have very different reactions to these videos. For us, the Kodak story is current events. It's just a difference of Half century of life.

[chagorith]

11:00 heyyyy same works for chemical leaks, for example, the place I'm working at has 2 giant ammonia tanks for cooling 2 of the warehouses we have and in the safety and emergency manual, it was explicitly mentioned that one of the first things to do in case of an ammonia leak is to determine wind direction and speed so we can immediately notify nearby businesses, civilians, etc. to evacuate the area

[Captain_Char]

this is gunna date me, We had to make film cameras for shop class in school and learned the basics of photopaper, exposure times, development etc, I ended up using the film paper in an old 1930's camera for a few shots but even then we would get "burns" as we called them on the film sometimes random spots of darkness sometimes looking like black dots, also supposedly Vegas had rooms after the testing became public, with good viewing distance etc