
Radioactive Hulk of Carrier USS Independence Found Off San Francisco (2015) - herendin2
https://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2015/04/radioactive-wreck-of-aircraft-carrier-uss-independence-located-off-san-francisco-coast.html
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PopeDotNinja
I used to live on Treasure Island. Many years prior, some of these radioactive
ships had been docked there. Recently I googled my old Treasure Island address
& discovered the living room of the house in which I had been living had been
flagged for higher than normal levels of radiation.

I'm still waiting for my superpowers to manifest.

~~~
toyg
Maybe you already have them - the proportional strength and agility of... a
living room.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I am exceptionally good at being a couch potato.

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slg
According to Wikipedia the wreck was found in 2009 and this article was about
when it was first imaged. Although it isn't clear to me why exactly the
Independence needed to be found in the first place since it was intentionally
scuttled. Was the location of the ship classified? Or was the record keeping
from the 1940s so bad they the Navy didn't record the location of a scuttled
ship or listed it as something vague like "off the Farallon Islands"?

~~~
sitharus
Ships don’t sink in a straight line, knowing where it sank does not give an
accurate position for where it rests.

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justinator
Humans are pretty stupid.

So, we exploded a nuclear bomb, just to see what would happen to a bunch of
ships (I guess since, it was quite the mystery), then towed one the ships back
to a major metropolitan city, sandblasted it to try to decontaminate it (which
didn't work), stored the now contaminated sand onto the ship, then towed the
ship back out to see, just to use it as target practice until it sank, thus
sinking a radioactive ship and it's contaminated sand.

Living a few miles from Rocky Flats, where are sorts of crazy stuff _almost_
happened, it's no wonder we survived the 20th century.

~~~
crazygringo
Nope, humans were trying to figure out how to manage the consequences of
nuclear weapons, which were judged to be a necessary strategy to end World War
II to attempt to defeat fascism and save democracy.

Not "just to see what would happen" but to know how vulnerable our Navy would
be to the very real threat of atomic attack from the Russians, and thus to
responsibly inform strategy and tactics should that nightmare ever come to
pass.

Testing decontamination also necessary to inform e.g. necessary fleet sizes in
case of nuclear war -- could ships ever be reused or not? An existing shipyard
is the logical place to do that, and unfortunately widespread environmental
consciousness just didn't happen until the landmark publication of _Silent
Spring_ in 1962, more than a decade later.

Storing the contaminated sand on the ship and sinking it was a pretty
reasonable thing to do at the time, not "just to use it as target practice"
but to kill two birds with one stone.

Nobody's perfect, but you seem to _really_ be judging people from several
generations ago according to current societal standards, and completely
misportraying their motives.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
There has also been an awful lot of humans doing stuff "just to see what would
happen" across history. From ice-picks for faster lobotomies, through widely
available quack remedies to project A119 - "I wonder what would happen if we
nuked the moon".

Let's not presume high moral motives in everything our forefathers did, nor to
all of our current generation either.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119)

~~~
TeMPOraL
As 'paulddraper notes, doing things "to see what would happen" is a recognized
research strategy that created a lot of science and technologies we enjoy
today. This thinking, a childlike curiosity of sorts, is something you seek in
good researchers.

As for A119, the issues with the project were entirely political. The idea of
bombing the moon is a _good_ one; it's a legitimate way of collecting
scientific data in lieu of being able to deploy a drilling team on the
surface, and something that's been done with non-nuclear impactors. See [0],
[1], [2], and probably a bunch of other cases I don't remember today.

It's easy to say that "nukes bad humans stupid", but there are aspects to this
idea - and a bunch of other so-called "peaceful uses for nuclear weapons" \-
that illustrated human smarts, not stupidity.

\--

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS)

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELENE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELENE)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Impact_Probe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Impact_Probe)

~~~
monetus
Does that type of _aggressive_ research just assume that the systems being
impacted are durable enough to withstand the destruction (2tons of tnt, in one
of your links), or has that really been studied? I don't know the context of
this, but I can't help but think of how many of the ocean's submersibles
damage the ecosystem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The Moon has some very convenient features for such research - namely, it's a
big, dead rock. Hard to think up a bad thing that would happen from hitting it
with a satellite, or even a bomb. We already know it receives a regular
beating from the solar system, in form of meteor impacts.

~~~
monetus
I don't see one of the impact probes having as much force as a meteor, but I
could see it being enough to throw off a fragile system. Yeah, its not like
bombing ganymede or mars' ice-caps. I'm just curious if they are going to
accidentally collapse some cave network, or give it a temporary atmosphere of
dust.

Edit: thanks for the response btw

~~~
TeMPOraL
Who knows? There's always uncertainity, and a non-zero probability that the
bombing site happened to have a geologically interesting cave system
underneath, or a hidden cache of alien artifacts. The probability of such a
thing, while non-zero, is _really_ low, and we also don't observe fragile
systems on the Moon. It's simply a dead rock.

As for bombing Mars ice caps, that was a nice idea too, IMO (even though AFAIK
it turned out to not be useful). The goal here was to densify the atmosphere
with water vapor and CO₂. Assuming you consider terraforming Mars a good idea,
doing it in reasonable timescales will require some preparations involving
direct applications of lots of energy - whether it's melting the ice caps, or
redirecting comets to hit the planet. At some point we might be able to
accelerate the process by deploying bacteria and plants (read: self-
replicating chemical processing nanobots), but the conditions are not right
for this yet - hence the ideas like using nukes or comets to bootstrap those
conditions.

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skybrian
Hmm. As a way of disposing of nuclear waste, how bad is sinking a ship at sea?

~~~
sitharus
Nuclear waste is like asbestos, it’s fine if you leave it alone. If the depth
is sufficient that the water is fairly anoxic and the area is geologically
stable it’s pretty safe.

However if the area is unstable or the ship can rust you can easily end up
with a huge distributor of radioactive contamination. The effects depend on
the substance and type of radiation.

Dumping of radioactive waste in the ocean has been banned since 1993.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactiv...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste)

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Animats
Remember Blueseed, the "seasteading startup"? Their planned location was west
of Half Moon Bay, roughly where this is.

~~~
Dylan16807
Cool, a piece of history lurking under your workplace. Far enough down that
there's no problem with floating above that particular spot.

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ge0
So at least we have a good idea where Godzilla will likely rise from the ocean
and decimate San Francisco!

