Los Alamos Atomic Bomb Implosion Testing Area...Buried Radioactive Material

so this Los Alamo sign is just a facade it's actually uh just a bathroom for people to stop in it's kind of strange that they uh didn't make like an actual Guard Station but yeah whatever loses now there's two mobile security stations I don't know what that's about I don't think it's because I'm here I think that's just a cool place to rest pretty sure so today I'm gonna go check out Baio can now this is the site where they did a bunch of implosion testing 254 tests to be exact and this left this area contaminated because they used radio lanthanum in these tests which was very radioactive but they use that radioactivity to study the bomb while it was exploding or imploding in this case and so they'd have like these ion cameras set up that would collect all that gamma energy and then they would be able to interpret what the explosion was doing based off all that gamma radiation so this left the site pretty contaminated has much of strontium-90 there and some uranium metal and some burial sites of where some of the really hot stuff was buried and it says do not excavate this site until 2154 2163 something like that and so I'm going to go down there check it out and see how radioactive it is all right let's get going foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] pretty cool place [Music] okay here at the beginning of the Bayo Canyon trailhead so I'm gonna make my way down to this like kind of cool feature where it looks like uh like big ruts maybe from giant trucks were like carved into the Rock I'm not sure but I remember uh coming down here once before and seeing these and I thought they were very uh interesting so I'm gonna do this upper part of the trail and then drive back down around and do the lower part which is where all those uh burial markers are for all the radioactive material that's still there in Bayo Canyon so we'll see how that all goes I don't know if I'll actually get to it today because there's a gate there that uh looks like it might close at some point uh when business hours are over so I don't want to get trapped in there so I might just do it tomorrow morning and if that's the case I'm just gonna camp in Bandelier a National Monument there's a campsite there so that should be pretty fun it's a really nice campsite from what I remember thank you so I don't know if those are vehicle tracks back behind me but they sure look like them I'm sure it looks like they've been carved into the Rock and if you know that's why maybe he was a military vehicle for all this implosion tests down further down in Bale Canyon uh it just it really doesn't look natural it looks totally like a tire erosion from uh really heavy vehicles coming up and down this Trail in the past so let's keep going so I am running my radical 101 to kind of track the radiation in this area to build like a radiation map and I don't know how well that's going to work because usually strontium 90 which is what I think the main contamination is here mainly a beta emitter so I'm not sure how well it's gonna get picked up by the radical 101 but uh I'll run so I'll pull out the rat eye B20 every once in a while just kind of check the readings see where they're at because I do remember this upper part of the trail did have an elevated radiation level so we'll see if that's still the case so this is like a little Hill just on the trail it looks like it's like a little pumice mountain right here that's what this looks like I mean yeah this whole area is like a giant volcanic caldera an ancient maybe extinct one not entirely sure it's pretty cool geology though oh yeah let's keep going this must have taken a lot of vehicles to achieve because these are some pretty deep ruts in rock I mean this is like feels like maybe kind of like a really hard pumice like a volcanic rock but still it would take a while to do this level of erosion so you can tell it looks like they might have been dragging their diff their differential going through here you can see like there's like a channel like carved into this rock all right just because it got too much people that didn't want to straddle it right here yeah it's pretty deep so this rat eye B20 has been giving me a little bit of a higher than normal background radiation here in this Canyon at this upper portion so there might be some level of contamination that's out here I'm not sure what it is though it could be strontium 90 could be uranium metal it could be a lot of things it's really hard for me to identify it um the isotope that might be out here but it looks like it is emitting gamma radiation because it kind of seems like it's it's picking up an additional radiation reading no matter where I point it so I think it might be gamma so this is at the upper portion of the Bayo Canyon not the lower portion that has all those burial sites for the radioactive material so that's kind of weird that it's all the way up here but I mean with all that testing that they did back in the mid 40s up until I think the late 50s maybe early 60s when they eventually stopped that would have blown a lot of contamination up this Canyon and down it so who knows all right so that's going to do it for this portion of bail Canyon I've already hiked this entire length of the canyon all the way down until the technical area 10 which is where all the implosion testing was done back in the day and I don't feel like doing that this time I'm going to try and see if I can drive into the gate there and drive all the way to the site because that just makes a lot easier than carrying all this gear for a couple miles down this Canyon then back up to drop it all off when I'm done so I'm gonna head on back and hopefully we can uh get this all done today if not we'll just have to pick it up tomorrow I still want to get trapped in that gate if they close it at the end of the day I guess that's one way to keep people out tell them there's explosives on the other side of the fence no one wants to go into a Minefield at least in my experience some interesting science glad I got a chance to photograph them it's a very uh interesting place to visit I would encourage people that are interested in nuclear power or nuclear weapons to come here and just drive around the area and see like the level of security that they have here it's pretty incredible but anyway off to the campsite not a bad place to make camp tonight and then tomorrow morning Bale King [Music] [Music] I slept pretty nice here except for the coyote calls in the middle of the night it's not like there was a pack of coyotes moving through here a couple times last night they woke me up other than that it was really quite a campsite all right time to go to bail Canyon well just my luck the gate is locked over the weekend so I'm gonna have to walk the two and a half miles to get to the site it's not ideal but not a deal breaker all right I get my water and stuff ready start heading in there that's so cool that guy is going back in there and opening up the gate and so I can just drive on back there no walking two and a half miles says I could uh be there until it takes off at four o'clock all right well here we are this is technical area 10. in Los Alamos this is where they did all the implosion testing this looks like a parking pad that's left over from here I'm going to imagine there are no structures left over here but we're gonna go take a look at some of these do not dig markers that have radioactive material all put in there and see what that looks like and see if there's uh any additional reading and then look at the fire zones like where they actually conducted the implosion testing pretty cool I'm just super happy I was able to drive out here instead of uh walk two and a half miles not like two and a half miles is that far but when you're carrying a bunch of gear it's not convenient all right let's get going it's so nice to be back here not totally exhausted I'm exploring from hiking the other direction but yeah so this is like the only thing that's like left out here I think it's like these like kind of asphalt and concrete pads over here so there might have been buildings out this way too for all their testing but I don't think there's anything else here right now let's see if I can't find a some scrap metal that is used in the implosion testing I've seen people find it out here before and some it's a little radioactive because it has like uranium impregnated into it but we'll see I find so this area used to be fenced off all the way down there here's the entrance so this is the entrance to the technical area 10 on the other side I just had to walk it because I came here like three years ago something like that and there was this other fenced off area that a tree had fallen through it and so I went and explored it and had all these other markers of radioactive material I still have the footage from that and hopefully if I can't find this area because I maybe they dug all that out [Applause] um I'll put that in this video from three years ago when I shot on my other camera thank you about this authorized Personnel thing is still in effect since this fence hasn't been uh since this fence hasn't been maintained in a while so yeah I might chance it and check it out [Applause] see what all this is all about it looks like some type of numbers here like 18. all right that's about all right this deal is but yeah I'm not seeing it right now I'll see if I find it the other way here but yeah I still need to check out the shot sites you know where they set off the explosives and see if I find any scrap out there and see how radioactive those areas are first little piece of something I found here sure what it is foreign I don't really finding anything uh with my rat eye it means a little bit elevated you know amount of radiation here but about the same as the upper Bayo Canyon Trail so nothing no big hot spots yet still kind of interesting just to walk around and think about the history of this place but still haven't found anything I'm gonna go check out the markers now here's one of the markers with the radiation is almost background slightly higher so I don't think there's any way to really detect what is buried underneath here so I guess it's kind of a good thing you can't detect what's buried down underneath here because that's kind of the whole point of burying the stuff and saying don't dig here so then no one is a is unnecessarily exposed to that radioactive material so good on them do a good job I was kind of hoping to find something a little hot around here I got a couple more sites to check out yeah I'll see what I find there's another marker it's almost like I have like a gasket on it something I'm not sure why this one has a gasket on it maybe it had some type of plate or it's a one sealed canister underneath it slightly higher than background radiation I know there's some people that say that Bayo Canyon is pretty contaminated and maybe there are parts of it but I'm personally not fighting any real signs of contamination I mean yeah the background radiation is slightly higher than normal but I mean it looks like they did a good job cleaning up the place as far as I can find I mean I haven't canvassed the entire area so I don't know why they like buried so many of these like so much this radioactive material kind of like in these certain areas like there's one like further up the hill up here and there's this one and then there's two more over there and so I don't know what was their justification for where they buried this stuff or entombed it or however you want to put it but yeah it's cool hiking around here but I'm not really finding anything radioactive okay so it took me a little bit of walking around without the camera to find some of these shot areas where they detonated the explosives to look for shrapnel and I was able to find it just walking around forever it seemed like and I actually found a pile now what I was trying to find was a piece that was actually radioactive and I was finding all these little pieces of shrapnel everywhere but nothing was radioactive everything was completely inert except for one so I'm not sure where exactly in the whole implosion scheme of things that this little piece of radioactive metal came from and I actually don't know what it is exactly I don't know if it's uranium or thorium or some other long-lived isotope left over from all that testing I can use the radicode 101 and hopefully this is giving off enough gamma energy that I could identify it we'll see if I can do that later on but for right now I'm going to walk back out to this site so you can get an idea of what it looks like where I was finding all the shrapnel all right foreign the shrapnel it's just all over the place it's right here too I'm on right now it appears to be like a little Cattle Trail because I think cattle kind of free roam through here too which is kind of funny to think about um but just looking down in this general area which I think is one of the shot areas I mean it only makes sense if I'm finding so much shrapnel here but yeah I only found that one piece that was radioactive all those other ones were completely inert still cool to find unless you've had a metal detector out you'll find some really big stuff maybe is it Radioactive no it is not Radioactive like I said the majority of them are not radioactive yeah it's getting kind of discouraged there for a second and it's like just walking around looking and not really finding anything and then all of a sudden I started finding little pieces of metal shrapnel because that's kind of how it goes you know if you're looking for something really small it's not until you start funding some of them do you start to see them everywhere huh see if I can find another hot piece sure looks like it got smushed pretty good not radioactive though so I found another piece that's hot doesn't look like much but it's Radioactive well I think that's going to do it for Bayo Canyon I gotta get out of here so that dude doesn't lock me in it was really nice of him to stick around until four o'clock so I could explore this area and I'm glad I had the opportunity to do that and so if you feel like supporting this channel if you like this type of content head over to my patreon become a member over there I'll post uh other stuff there as well that I don't post on my other social media accounts and it'll just be a great way to support this Channel and to help me fund uh trips like this where I go out to the Trinity site or Bayo Canyon and looking at contaminated sites but anyway I hopefully you enjoyed this video and if you did a like maybe subscribe to the channel and I'll see the next one take it easy

Channel: Radioactive Drew

Views: 128,416

Keywords: uranium mining, uranium, radiation, radioactive, dangerous, radiation area, atomic bomb, nuclear weapons, nuclear, nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity Open House, Trinity Site, ground zero, plutonium, Radioactive Drew, Oppenheimer, atomic test, nuclear test, implosion, radioactive area, Los Alamos, LANL, National Lab, contamination, exploring

Id: Tz_60qt6y0M

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023