Several wildfires are scorching the Texas panhandle with thousands evacuated

Several wildfires are scorching the Texas panhandle with thousands evacuated

Wildfires sweeping across Texas briefly forced the evacuation of America’s main nuclear weapons facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blaze.

Pantex Plant, the main facility that assembles and disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal, shut down its operations on Tuesday night as the Windy Deuce fire roared towards the Potter County location.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
    434·
    4 months ago

    Well that’s fucking alarming. For all of the money the DoD vacuums up, they can’t handle a wildfire near a nuclear weapons factory where they should absolutely expect a wildfire? What’s next, a California nuke factory that wasn’t built to withstand earthquakes?

    • protistEnglish
      45·
      4 months ago

      Someone only read the headline…

      "We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution,” Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Pantex, said during a news conference on Tuesday night.

      But we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios, that is on-site and watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site.”

      Pantex re-opened and resumed operations as normal on Wednesday morning.

      Also all of this is run by the Department of Energy, not Defense

      • DarkMessiah@lemmy.world
        95·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, for some god forsaken reason, nuclear bombs fall under the jurisdiction of the government’s power plant branch, rather than the military one.

        • protistEnglish
          15·
          4 months ago

          The reason is because DOE contains all of the nuclear experts, since they also regulate nuclear power production

          • DarkMessiah@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 months ago

            I mean, true. It’s just a little weird that a bunch of people whose job it is to keep things from exploding also have the job of making things that explode.