Stories about nuclear fuckery or Australia tend to be big hits here.
I just had to go digging for a story of nuclear fuckery in Australia and hooboy, it’s a terrifying look into one of the deadliest animals in Australia: humans.
Today’s Moment of Science… the British are bombing.
After World War II, the hottest new trend all over the world was getting your hands on a motherfucking nuke. The problem with that, especially for smaller countries, is that they needed to test the technology out… somewhere. Somewhere safe. Somewhere remote where nobody lives and where no human is likely to accidentally stumble on the newly created radioactive wasteland.
If you’re Britain, the fact that your island nation is roughly the size of Tinkerbell’s panties presents a challenge.
So the UK was like “the commonwealth has a continent, right?” And indeed they did. They proceeded to bomb the shit out of Australia with the complete approval and support of the Australian government.
By which I mean Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies approved it with virtually no input or oversight. From 1952 to 1963 the UK tested nuclear materials in Montebello Islands off the northwestern coast, along with Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia. They dropped a dozen nuclear bombs between the three locations, categorized as “major trials.”
When your “minor trials” also use radioactive materials, and when you conduct six hundred of them, they eventually add up to a major problem. Amongst a laundry list of things they wanted to better understand about nuclear materials, one was how they dispersed when detonated. Using conventional (non-nuclear) explosions, they scattered plutonium, beryllium, and uranium like fuck-everything confetti across Australia. For observational purposes. As you do.
The British dropped 8,000kg of uranium in the minor trials. You might be thinking “at least it was in the middle of nowhere away from everyone.”
Well.
Because there’s no story that can’t and won’t be made worse by gross human rights abuses, of course Maralinga had been home to a few Aboriginal tribes. They’d been uprooted before the nuclear fuckery for other British military testing purposes, and the government was like “what Aboriginal tribes?” The upheaval led to social and economic unrest in their community. So when the tribes were further impacted by ongoing health problems from the nuclear bullshit, the government was like “what nuclear bullshit?”
They were forgotten about in every step of planning and testing. Warning signs were put up around the test areas, but not in a language the Aboriginal people typically spoke or read. One of the blasts at Emu Field produced a black mist that was followed by a rash of sickness and fatalities in the local tribe. It’s difficult to say exactly what the extent of the health effects have been, and no robust epidemiological studies have been performed.
After a massive clean-up effort, you can book a tour to go check out Maralinga. Emu Field and Montebello Islands are not entirely what I’d call “fixed.” But it’s Australia, and a little radiation might just be the least likely thing on the continent to kill you. Much like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, they’ve become tourist attractions, and people risk it despite the radiation levels being a tad iffy.
Montebello Islands is now a “marine park.” A lovely tourist brochure for the area warns, “Slightly elevated radiation levels still occur close to the test sites. As radiation effects on health are cumulative over your lifetime, be sure to limit visits to the affected areas (marked on the map) to one hour per day. Do not disturb the soil in these areas and do not handle or remove any relics associated with the tests as they may still be radioactive.” Straya.
In the 1990s, the Australian government tried suing the British government for their share of the cost for the environmental clean up and to properly compensate the Aboriginal people. The British government has never offered an admission of guilt or an apology.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, letting you know that more people died from incidents involving cows and horses in Australia than any of the more nightmare-inducing critters.
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Superb post. Look forward to your material and your humor.
Well, the UK made it out well, with the North Sea getting turned white from radioactive milk only once.
The Windscale Pile was a gift of unimaginable, nearly unmanageable scale. Complete with a burning air cooled reactor, whose fire was proved by a manager sticking his snoot inside the reactor exhaust to confirm fire shooting out of the reactor!
Oh, it was an otherwise sanitary operation – kept so by widespread transuranic element contamination spread everywhere the workers stepped.
What can you say? It looked great on paper…
Greetings from two miles downwind of two and a quarter mile island.*
*Previously, it was three mile island, but it shrunk during a cleanup.
You have to remember that until 1968, Aboriginal Australians were classified as fauna and land owners could legally shoot and kill Aboriginals, so what’s a little nuclear fuckery?