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.

  • gibmiser@lemmy.world
    851·
    9 months ago

    Sounds like climate change is a national security threat. Bring on the DOD spending!

    • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      29·
      9 months ago

      Welp, we’ve bombed the fires. it didn’t really put them out but it completely cleared all land of any vegetation. So…win, I guess?

      • Badabinski@kbin.social
        131·
        9 months ago

        You joke, but using air dropped bombs to put out fires is a tactic that’s been used for quite a while. probably not the best thing to do next to a site with nuclear materials on-hand, but it’s absolutely been done before.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
    434·
    9 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·
      9 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·
        9 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·
          9 months ago

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

          • DarkMessiah@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 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.

  • tyler@programming.dev
    63·
    9 months ago

    Wait what. We still are producing nuclear weapons? I thought we had agreed not to do that.

        • protistEnglish
          19·
          9 months ago

          They do maintenance on existing weapons, which require regular maintenance

        • nymwit@lemm.ee
          17·
          9 months ago

          Maintenance and disassembly are the other things listed. Also apparently ongoing remediation of contaminated perched groundwater, possibly soil work.

            • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
              61·
              9 months ago

              Yes? The US wanted to downsize after the cold war to save on maintenance. Not give up nukes entirely. Why the HELL would the US give up nukes entirely? At what point in US history have we ever given up a game changer like nuclear deterrance (as dumb as it is, war itself is dumb)?

            • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
              51·
              9 months ago

              What, you think taking apart nuclear missiles is something you do fast?

              We have like 3000 of them that are still active as well that this company maintaines too.