It’s been 81 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan

[Owen Hoffman]

• When:  Aug 6, 2026 at 5:45 AM

  
  
• Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is asking all those who are interested to help ring the International Friendship Bell at Bissell Park 81 times at dawn (6:48 am ET) Wednesday, August 6th to commemorate the number of years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 

  
  

  In addition, an hour before dawn park rangers will light luminarias that have been decorated with messages of peace by community members. The luminarias will remain lit throughout the commemoration event. An Oak Ridge Civic Music Association quartet will be on site throughout the event to provide accompanying music.

Members of the public are invited to take turns ringing the bell. Each person can ring the bell for whatever reason that speaks to them. They can ring the bell for lives lost; they can ring the bell for social justice; they can ring the bell for service and sacrifice; they can ring the bell for peace. 

After each bell-ringer has rung the bell, they are invited to record the reason why they rang the bell. Small pieces of paper and pens will be provided. Bell-ringers will then place the paper in a receptable, and park staff will later catalog the papers for historical purposes.

The Park understands that not everyone who wants to ring the bell will be able to come to the August 6 event. Therefore a virtual bell ringing option will be available on the park’s webpage  from 6:00 am EDT on August 6 through midnight PDT on August 9. The International Friendship Bell is a symbol of unity and will carry the message of peace and international friendship into the future. 

At nearly seven feet tall and five feet wide, this 8,300-pound bronze bell hangs at A. K. Bissell Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium for the world’s first atomic weapons was manufactured. Designed in Oak Ridge and cast in Kyoto, Japan, the relief panels on the bell show peaceful imagery inspired by Tennessee, Japan, and the tragedies of war between the two nations.  

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Owen Hoffman

Sent from my iPhone

Owen

Sent from my iPhone

[hankschoch]

A couple of summers ago, some friends and I visited an abandoned uranium mine near the head of Devils Canyon, about one mile west of Colorado National Monument's boundary.  The mine is located in a basal sandstone of the Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation.  Guiding our hiking party was a retired uranium geologist who had worked at the DOE office in nearby Grand Junction.  He came equipped with a scintillation counter (about fifty times more sensitive than a Geiger counter), and the instrument indicated that the site remains highly radioactive, which it will for the rest of eternity.  Uranium has a very long half-life.

As might be expected, there are abundant exposures of that Salt Wash sandstone in the 20,450-acre national monument.  It occurred to me that, because the monument was closed to all forms of appropriation when established in 1911, it likely would have been ignored by prospectors during the uranium craze of the 1940s and '50s.  Accordingly, I've acquired a rather compact but fully functional scintillation counter and, as a lapsed geologist, plan to do a bit of informal prospecting in the monument.  Of course, I'll share my findings, if any, with the monument's resource management staff, as I have regarding the 460 or so cultural sites I've discovered in the monument since my retirement as chief ranger there several decades ago.  The only thing holding me back is a bum knee.  Replacement surgery is scheduled for November 16.

Grand Junction was a focal point for the gathering of fissile materials for the Manhattan Project.  The so-called Legacy Cabin in the DOE's compound in Grand Junction houses a superb museum dedicated to that history.

Hank

[Ed Rizzotto]

Thanks Hank including perhaps for reviving our use of the word scintilla in some of our speech!

Good luck on November 16 and hope they have you on a good PT program in preparation. It will likely make the results better and less painful! 

My partner does research on knee replacement and the top three things on picking a surgeon are all finding someone who has done a lot of it (your operation).

Ed

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[Hank Schoch]

Ed:

My understanding, at least as regards this use of scintilla is that, when a gamma ray/particle impacts a cesium iodide crystal which has been treated somehow with thallium, it produces a scintilla -- a tiny flash of light.  A photo-multiplier amplifies the flashes, and a counter tabulates the scintillations.  Thus, a scintillation counter.  Uranium is not a gamma ray emitter, but many of its decay products (radon, radium, etc.) are.  Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Via Bluetooth, the device communicates with my Android tablet to graph the energy level (in electron volts) of each emitting element and isotope, so it's also possible to identify them.

I earned my geology degree before the advent of plate tectonics (we called it continental drift back then but had no clue as to its mechanisms), so much of this newer-fangled stuff is rocket science to me.  How the device works isn't as important as the fact that it does work and that I halfway understand what it's trying to tell me.  Similarly, I'm content to press a button to start my car and drive it without having to understand the intricacies of electronic fuel injection or ignition mapping.

I was originally scheduled for knee replacement surgery on June 1, but my pre-op risk assessment physical revealed a heart murmur, and a subsequent echocardiogram a pretty serious aortic valve stenosis, so they pulled the rug out from under me four days before the surgery.  I was asymptomatic, but first things first.  I just underwent a transcatheter aortic valve replacement procedure on August 12 and am back on the calendar for the knee job.  

I feel grateful to live in these times.  Not so very long ago, a defective aortic valve or a deteriorating knee would have been untreatable and the consequences less than favorable.

Meanwhile, the knee hasn't spontaneously fixed itself, and the pain worsens.  My knee surgeon, who looks to be about the same age as my eldest granddaughter, is highly regarded.  I have several friends, including a local NPS alumna, who've endured recent knee replacement surgeries, and they all rave about him.  

I look forward to the time when all of this business is in the rearview mirror.

Hank

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[Ed Rizzotto]

Hank,

I am slow responding but grateful for the physics and/or geology lesson. I also particularly noted your “I feel grateful to live in these times”. 

I agree that medicine has come a long way despite some current and serious funding hiccups and pleased that it is working for you. 

I also agree that it is good to be alive at all (I tend the mailing lists for my high school and Army officer classmates and many are no longer with us). 

I further think of the opportunities of the moment and hope that everyone will make an effort to vote (others are working on making sure those voters will be counted and fairly implemented). It was frustrating to me that in my recent local primary apparently only slightly over than 40% of the eligibles bothered  to vote and, while that may not be unusual, it should be unacceptable.  

Lastly, I enjoyed this little burst of Parklandlwatch activity. Given that no one has apparently stepped up to fully revive that process, I have been investigating the possibility of an alternative. It would potentially involve a blog/sharing point behind the ANPR website firewall for members (noting that membership is currently free and open to all career interests). It would allow users to post articles, ask questions and share comments.  It would hopefully also be mostly automated so that we wouldn’t need to depend on finding a new Art or Rick (as if we ever could). I wonder what people think of that and if they’d support it?

Ed

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