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Nuclear transport issue is one most of us choose to ignore

When I was a kid, I used to try really hard not to think about some of the science stuff I’d see or read about — things like a wayward asteroid hitting the earth, that day in the far, far future when the sun goes nova and incinerates the earth, and the reality that I lived fairly near Omaha, Nebraska, a prime nuclear target during the Cold War.

I got pretty good at denial, as did most of us Baby Boomers who were trying to get on with growing up and planning lives during that Cold War period. So good at it that we probably never think much about anything nuclear anymore. At least not until we hear about a glitch in the everyday procedures for handling all those nuclear weapons we still have. Seems an Air Force crew recently flew a B-52 bomber mission to transport some cruise missiles from a base in North Dakota to a base in Louisiana. But someone forgot or failed to notice that the missiles still had their LIVE nuclear warheads. (You can read the story by CLICKING HERE.)
Sources tell us that the warheads really posed no threat, what with all the safety devices. And they were completely under military control every mile of the way.

But the story got me thinking about a more ominous “nuclear denial” we perform daily: How many tons of nuclear materials would you think are transported back and forth across the nation, through cities and small towns, highways and byways, etc., every day and night of our lives??

I just googled “transport U.S. nuclear” and found the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) website. It’s staggering to read there that, “about 3 million packages of radioactive materials are shipped each year in the United States, either by highway, rail, air, or water.”

We can take some comfort, I guess, in knowing that apparently there haven’t been any nuclear incidents, leaks, explosions, exposures, or whatever in decades of such scary work.

I’m not sure how comfortable I am, however, in knowing the NRC and Department of Transportation together work on this stuff. I guess there’s something less than reassuring to see the state of our nation’s highways and bridges — also under the care of the DOT.

But keep up the good work, all you NRC and DOT people out there. Maybe denial is the best attitude us “folks-on-the-street” can take. That and doing all we can to vote some intelligent, wise leadership into power in Washington. That hasn’t worked out so well in recent CENTURIES, but hey, we must press on and keep trying!

Ah, well, what do I know? I’m just a guy who reads the papers.
[tags]nuclear warheads, nuclear material transportation, Air Force, NRC, Department of Transportation, nuclear denial, just a guy who reads the papers[/tags]