company:los alamos national laboratory

Upgraded Russian SPY PLANE makes maiden flight over US nuclear & military sites – report — RT World News
▻https://www.rt.com/news/457679-russian-spy-plane-us

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A Russian Tu-214ON spy plane has reportedly made a reconnaissance tour over the southwestern US, taking a glimpse at an array of military bases as well as nuclear and chemical weapons depots as part of the #Open_Skies treaty.

The Drive reported, citing FlightRadar 24 tracking service data, that the newest version of the Tu-214 observation aircraft graced US skies after taking off from Rosecrans Air National Guard Base in St. Joseph, Missouri on Thursday.

The flight reportedly lasted six hours and saw the surveillance aircraft fly over a series of US defense and storage facilities scattered over the territory of West Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. The plane is reported to have flown over the Kirtland Air Force Base, which hosts the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and functions as a nuclear storage site. In Colorado, the plane passed over the Pueblo Chemical Depot, one of the last two sites in the US with chemical munitions and materials.

The flight itself had been authorized by the US under the Treaty on Open Skies, which allows its signatories to conduct short inspections of each other’s territory. The treaty was signed in 1992, but did not come into force until 2002. The US and Russia are among its 34 members.

The Russian Defense Ministry has not commented on the details of the mission. Earlier, Sergey Ryzhkov, head of the Russian Center for Reduction of Nuclear Threat, announced that the Tu-214ON would be conducting surveillance from Missouri Airport between 22 April and April 27. Under the treaty, the flight has to be monitored by US specialists on board the plane.

Washington eventually greenlighted the Tu-214ON flyover after initially refusing to certify the Russian “spy eye,” claiming that its digital surveillance equipment was more advanced than Moscow had declared and might manipulate digital data. After some back-and-forth, the US approved the plane for the flights over its territory in September last year.

Tu-214ON is an updated version of the regular Tu-214. Its cockpit can fit two more people, which allowed the manufacturer to install more modern electronics. Its range has increased to a reported 6,500km (4,040 miles). The aircraft boasts three sensor arrays that include a digital photo camera, an infrared camera, and a TV camera complete with a sideways-looking synthetic aperture radar.

What Counts as Science? - Issue 41: Selection
▻http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/what-counts-as-science

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xxx.lanl.gov. The address was cryptic, with a tantalizing whiff of government secrets, or worse. The server itself was exactly the opposite. Government, yes—it was hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory—but openly accessible in a way that, in those early Internet days of the 1990s, was totally new, and is still game changing today. The site, known as arXiv (pronounced “archive,” and long since decamped to the more wholesome address “arXiv.org” and to the stewardship of the Cornell University Library), is a vast repository of scientific preprints, articles that haven’t yet gone through the peer-review process or aren’t intended for publication in refereed journals. (Papers can also appear, often in revised form, after they have been published elsewhere.) As of July 2016, there were more than (...)

Nuclear accident in New Mexico ranks among the costliest in U.S. history - LA Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump-20160819-snap-story.html

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.

The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste.

But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
[…]
The dump, officially known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, was designed to place waste from nuclear weapons production since World War II into ancient salt beds, which engineers say will collapse around the waste and permanently seal it. The equivalent of 277,000 drums of radioactive waste is headed to the dump, according to federal documents.

The dump was dug much like a conventional mine, with vertical shafts and a maze of horizontal drifts. It had operated problem-free for 15 years and was touted by the Energy Department as a major success until the explosion, which involved a drum of of plutonium and americium waste that had been packaged at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The problem was traced to material — actual kitty litter — used to blot up liquids in sealed drums. Lab officials had decided to substitute an organic material for a mineral one. But the new material caused a complex chemical reaction that blew the lid off a drum, sending mounds of white, radioactive foam into the air and contaminating 35% of the underground area.

#USA : Une catastrophe nucléaire est en cours au Nouveau Mexique, plus de 500 fûts de Plutonium prêts à exploser
▻http://www.brujitafr.fr/article-usa-une-catastrophe-nucleaire-est-en-cours-au-nouveau-mexique-plus

Depuis le 5 février 2014, une catastrophe nucléaire est en cours au centre de stockage profond de déchets radioactifs au Nouveau Mexique (USA). Un incendie dans la zone nord puis, 9 jours plus tard, un relâchement de radioactivité dans la zone sud se sont produits au WIPP. Le Waste Isolation Pilot Plant est prévu pour entasser 176 000 m3 de déchets transuraniens contenant notamment de l’Américium et du Plutonium, issus d’activités nucléaires de défense (recherches militaires et production d’armes nucléaires). Ces containers proviennent du LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) qui mit et met au point les bombes atomiques. Ils contiennent du Plutonium et de l’Americium. Un ou plusieurs containers se sont ouverts, à 655 mètres sous terre, suite à une explosion (...)