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.
No, it's a play on the "superhero whose best/close friend is an unpowered but helpful colleague to the main character gets killed/maimed by the villain" trope.
No, I genuinely thought you were spoilering the upcoming Spider-Man Far From Home (where the guy is put to sleep by Nick Fury in trailers, but by the end of the movie, who knows?). The previous Spider-Man has the guy-in-chair joke, so...
Don’t get why everyone’s been so precious about spoilers for the latest crop of superhero films.
As they’re built on such well-established tropes and character beats, it’s probably possible to guess 90% of the story up front. Also these films are so huge that the actual plot isn’t really that important compared to everything else.
I vote that if the twist is so cliche that someone jokingly riffing on tropes can accidentally "spoil" it, then it's not really a twist and hence not a spoiler.
Ah yeah, they were riffing the same trope and that’s why I phrased it like that initially heh.
But I certainly hope Ned doesn’t meet his demise in Far From Home. He’s such a loveable character, though the “Missing Mission Control” trope is well manifested in the superhero genre
Short answer: Peter Parker's best friend. He (excellently) serves as the audience's vehicle into the narrative, many of his responses and reactions to things are written to be the John Everyman along for the ride.
I'm probably a little biased in that Spider-Man (respect the hyphen, darnit!) is my favorite super-hero, but Homecoming is just a really nice and charming 'coming of age' movie that even people who aren't comic book/super-hero fans would enjoy if you like a little bit of Die Hard with your Ferris Bueller--I appreciated that Homecoming showcased far more of Parker's raw intellect and creative thinking than what we've gotten previously.
Spider-Man has been rebooted twice in live-action movies since the Raimi version. The last and current incarnation, starring Tom Holland, debuted in Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is getting a sequel this year (Spider-Man: Far From Home). The other reboot, starring Andrew Garfield in two movies, was eminently forgettable.
"Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse" is an alternate-reality version (where SM is a black/latino teenager) in animated form. Somewhat surprisingly, it's also qualitatively better than any live-action version to date. It will probably get a sequel, again in animated form, in the next few years.
There's technically two more...from a certain point of view. Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest live action Spider-Man film and there was a brilliantly done (both story and the use of CGI and visual effects to enhance and supplement the story) animated movie "Into the Spider-Verse". Coming soon is the sequel to said live action movie.
They're not connected to each other, beyond the two live action movies, and none of the above are connected to the Raimi Spider-Man movies--if that helps your frame of reference.
Sometimes he is promoted to part-time sidekick when the hero needs help, then proceed to hang on to a ledge in an elevator shaft, or zipline down from a tall building and reconsider their life choices. A variation of the Peter principle.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a human impactor would give it an atmosphere of dust, then said atmosphere would already have been created by one of the dozens of similar-sized impactors the moon gets per year.
Incredible that revealing that would be considered a violation of national security, conceiving it should have been considered a violation of national security. The dumbasses that came up with this idea were fortunately overruled by people with a bit more sense of what the public response to such vandalism would be.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were August 6+9, 1945. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was published in 1950. Bikini Atoll was March 1, 1954. We already had a really good understanding of the consequences of nuclear weapons without needing to tow the Independence back to SF, sandblast it and sink it off the coast nearby. This was just stupidity. This was just the military ignoring what we already knew at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads was in July 1947, so chances are fairly good its data was used to write “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (couldn’t find a first edition online to verify that)
March 1, 1954 was 3 years after this ship was scuttled, so mentioning it is irrelevant.
Also, dumping waste in sea may be stupid, but it was the norm for decades. And yes, that includes dumping nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...: ”From 1946 through 1993, thirteen countries (fourteen, if the USSR and Russia are considered separately) used ocean disposal or ocean dumping as a method to dispose of nuclear/radioactive waste“
I couldn't find it either and I finally figured out why. The name changed between editions. The first edition was named The Effects of Atomic Weapons. The revised first edition is from Sept 1950. Searching the Google Books scan mentions the Independence. So you are correct on that.
I still think these tests and towing the Independence back to SF were stupid. But I'll grant that I got the timelines wrong.
Just how much information does the bombing of Japanese cities provide about the survivability of US naval assets against a nearby nuclear detonation? Ditto for an H-bomb on an island? Ditto for decontamination procedures?
Between your post calling the military stupid when it was just as likely a political decision (money?, who knows.) and the top level parent expecting people in the '40s and '50s to have the knowledge we do in 2019 I'm not sure what to think of this current generation. A very Clintonian version of US history...
My 13 year old often has issues putting himself in the position of those with less knowledge than him. He somehow thinks young children should know as much about things they should and shouldn't do as he does.
Or that animals have a cognitive ability similar to humans "I don't know why the dog wants the cookie, he knows chocolate is bad for him"
I don't know what to make of it. I hope it's just the age, but since it seems to be a wide-spread problem....maybe it's something in the water.
I don't remember having those kind of gaps in understanding at that age.
I agree. But it seems to be something lacking in the general population today. They're unable to grasp the theory of the 1945 mind that had just seen one world war and was in the middle of a second world war that involved the wholesale slaughter of an entire population.
The world was a different place then yet people are passing judgement on decisions made then but colored with the 20/20 vision that hindsight provides and a life lived in the mostly stable world we have today.
Feel free to rewind to nearly any known history period and the entire world would be barbaric compared to today's standards, but that doesn't make the people that lived and fought during that time wrong.
When it comes to dropping the bomb twice on Japan, the people making the decisions and those advising them knew exactly what they were doing. Japan was already defeated and everyone knew it. The selection of civilian targets and especially the decision to drop the second bomb was known to be completely unnecessary with respect to Japan. It is hard to think of them as anything but atrocities perpetuated by people who know exactly what they were doing, the difficulty being that even if they were only done for political strategy they might have been entirely necessary to prevent something much more disastrous than WWII.
The reasons those bombs were dropped were to scare the fuck out of Stalin and keep his armies away from Japan. Perhaps unstated, but pretty obviously so. There are so many ways the world could have been very much worse after WWII, all in all it went very well (despite what many people think).
As for the testing there were people actively protesting it's beginning and continuation, but the effects and persistence of effects were not fully understood for some time. That is what you're getting at it seems. It wasn't so much about the world being a different place but that the consequences of radiation being unknown.
I won't pretend to know what was in the minds of the people at the time. Maybe there were multiple reasons and not one single "real reason."
Looking at the world today I think most people would prefer that a device that can cause such massive destruction simply not exist. I can only imagine what will happen once the ones that have been 'lost' start showing up in the wrong hands. The destruction was bad enough when in the 'right hands' (scare quotes, because I don't feel so great about what we(USA) did either.)
We can play what-if all day but we will never know what would have happened if things didn't happen as they did. I just hope that the actual version of what happened doesn't get 'corrected' in history books so that our future descendants can learn from our mistakes.
Unfortunately the bomb is obvious. It is not some eldritch construction which could be forgotten and lost forever without great effort to recreate. Once you have developed atomic physics the idea of a bomb is inevitable and once you know it can be done building one is trivial requiring only mundane resources (but a lot of them). You could explain how to build one to a child.
Increasing power is a consequence of expanding knowledge.
- Adm. William Leahy (President Truman’s Chief of Staff)
- Henry Arnold (US Army Air Forces commanding general)
- Adm. Chester Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet)
- Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, (head Bomber Command)
- Gen. Dwight Eisenhower
are all on record as acknowledging that "Japan was already defeated". [1]
[2] Japan knew they could not win and were concentrating on obtaining the best possible terms of surrender, hoping that Stalin might be convinced to mediate a settlement between the United States and Japan.
This hope was dashed by the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island, which happened at 1 minute past midnight on August 9, 1945 [3].
Another important factor is that Japan had good reason to be wary of USSR military might [4].
It's arguable that Japan's fear of fighting the USSR is the reason Japan went east (to Pearl Harbour) instead of west (to eurasia) in Dec. 1941 [5].
[2] and [5] are thoroughly researched and make compelling arguments.
Seaborg called it the first nuclear disaster. The test yield was off by a factor of 1000 and disasters are never smart.
Eisenhower himself advocated for the Pacific Proving Grounds site when he was Army Chief of Staff [1]. It had 105 tests, atmospheric and underwater. It really was a military decision; you are just supposing it to be political. American Exceptionalism doesn't make stupidity smart.
Assuming you are talking about the Castle Bravo test, it was 2.7 times larger than predicted not 1000. I can't think of any test offhand that was 1000x off the predicted yield, unless you count the fizzles that might have been 1/1000th predicted yield.
Castle Bravo was a terrible disaster, but more from the fallout than the actual explosion. The models of fallout and its propagation were much more inaccurate than the problems with the yield calculations, and the source of the tragic consequences.
He may have called it that, but it certainly wasn't. There were numerous nuclear accidents at Los Alamos predating that test. There were also numerous civilian incidents, particularly the famous 'Radium Girls'.
> to end World War II to attempt to defeat fascism and save democracy.
I realize this is what people were told during the war, but it's kind of hard to accept that that was the real reason for WWII when Eastern Europe ended up controlled by the Soviet Union, which was, by any reasonable historical standard, a worse totalitarian government than Nazi Germany. Not to mention that by the time the tests referenced in the article took place, China had also been taken over by a worse totalitarian government than Nazi Germany.
"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.
"
Fascism and WWII were created by humans. If you were an alien species and observing the earth from afar it's pretty insane how foolish we look.
We've built the worlds greatest nuclear arsenal, then pointed them at each other.
The Fermi paradox plays into this. If life is possible throughout the galaxy where is everyone?
It's worth noting that European fascism was mostly defeated by the Red Army at the expense of millions of lives, not the US which got into it late. In the Pacific sphere, there is fairly convincing evidence that the bomb was not at all necessary to convince Japan to surrender that is worth reading about:
this reminds me of the documentary "the fog of war"[0] in which robert macnamara talks about the conventional type bombing of japan's cities with firebombs before using any atom bomb.
You don't actually mean aliens. You're talking about 'advanced' aloof beings that basically share your values but in a more sophisticated form.
I really hate this 'aliens would be disgusted at out foolishness' meme.
There's no reason to think that. That's how you, with your particular disposition that some proportion of humans share, would react if you were teleported to a flying saucer in orbit- shake your head and cluck your tongue.
You're projecting on to aliens to make your own view look more sophisticated by comparison.
Now, I don't know how aliens would think. But when we look at bacteria, or ants, we don't point moral judgements on their actions and get annoyed when the microbes acy a certain way- and to do so has a term associated with it, anthropomorphisation, that's generally seen as a foolish mistake.
You don't get emotionally charged at the actions of microbes when you observe them because, in part, you can kind of understand what they're doing. You have a bird's eye view. You don't get angry at them for not banding together and solving their toxic waste problems. You don't shake your head and cluck your tongue at their foolishness. If we're going to anthopomorphise aliens, we should at least get the situation to something of comparable scale.
> If you were an alien species and observing the earth from afar it's pretty insane how foolish we look.
There's no reason to actually believe that those very aliens aren't just as foolish and survived, competed and advanced in part through a process of killing their fellow tribes of aliens to reach supremacy.
In fact, if game theory is something to go by, these problems aren't "human stupidity", but they're inherent in any system that has thinking agents who have values, and no way to immediately, simultaneously and fully meet all of them. The hypothetical aliens would have some of those issues too.
> which were judged to be a necessary strategy to end World War II to attempt to defeat fascism and save democracy.
This is emphatically not true, and a common lie used by the US to justify atomizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that time in the war, Germany had already been defeated, the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor (who most Japanese view as divine) would not be harmed.
The US (and specifically Truman and Leslie Groves) wanted to demonstrate the power of this amazing weapon that they had developed to the entire world.
The programs long predate the fall of Germany, and thus saying they were developed to compete with a German nuclear program are completely accurate and reasonable.
The Japanese were in the war, and a land borne invasion would have bore heavy casualties. There was no clear and obvious certainty of Japans will to surrender, and there was political infighting, an attempted coup against the surrender.
I'm tired of this inaccurate, revisionist, fringe crap coming up every time the atomic weapons program comes up. This is not mainstream history, but historical-fiction entertainers like the irresponsible Oliver Stone keep promoting it and people lap it up.
There was a moral argument to be made in favor of atomic bombing for political effect. However, that argument was not very influential on military decision making at the time - generally, the military philosophy was "we have a weapon, why would we not use it to the greatest extent possible?" This disconnect was so strong that when the civilians who were making these sophisticated moral calculations saw the manner and (more importantly) the rate at which the bombs were used, they put on the brakes.
>This disconnect was so strong that when the civilians who were making these sophisticated moral calculations saw the manner and (more importantly) the rate at which the bombs were used, they put on the brakes.
Those civilians names were not auto-penned at the bottom of letters that started with "The United States Army regrets to inform you...". Those civilians had not seen what kind of end conventional warfare had lead to on inner islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They did not understand how committed to their cause the people we were fighting were. The disconnect goes both ways.
On the contrary; they knew exactly what kind of relentless bombing the Allied Armed forces were willing to undertake, completely leveling non-military cities with conventional munitions just to break the will of the “enemy”. The civilians rightly feared that with these new weapons of war, the similar indiscriminate use of them could result in efficient wiping out of cities in days rather than years.
At the time of their invention, nuclear weapons were seen as more effective munitions and not necessarily the civilization ending tools that they are now considered to be.
> The programs long predate the fall of Germany, and thus saying they were developed to compete with a German nuclear program are completely accurate and reasonable.
The existence of the atomic program is not the question. It is their _use_ against a nation that was on the brink of surrender.
I'm sorry that the truth does not fit your neat model of the US. It stands to reason, that the only nation in the world to use atomic weapons against dense human populations needs to be scrutinized appropriately, and not hailed as the "hero", the decision to do so being "inevitable". Nothing about the use of nuclear weapons was inevitable, and their use simply egged on similar development in other nations and a general increase in the probability of nuclear holocaust.
> By that time in the war, Germany had already been defeated, the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor (who most Japanese view as divine) would not be harmed."
Assuming that "by that time in the war" means prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this is false. Even after the bombing of Nagasaki 3 of the 4 military members of the Supreme War Council wanted additional terms that would never have been acceptable to the Allied Powers (among them, no occupation of the home islands). It took the intervention of the Emperor himself to break the deadlock.
The idea that the armed forces were amenable to a surrender with the sole condition that the emperor remain in power before Hiroshima is simply not true.
Japanese surrender was not prompted by bombings of 6th and 9th August -- they had endured already much worse bombings of their cities during that summer, and were not particularly scared of atomic weapons.
However, Japan was very scared of USSR, who up until then was neutral against them.
All that changed rapidly and hugely, when USSR declared war on Japan, and attacked Manchuria on 12:01am 9/August.
Check the timelines -- the argument is solid and much more compelling than "Japan surrended because nuclear bombs".
"Japan was ready to surrender before the atomic bombs" and "Japan surrendered because of the USSR's declaration of war, not the atomic bombs" are two completely different arguments.
Both these arguments are true.
"Japan was ready to surrender" should be interpreted as "Japan wanted to surrender if the terms were acceptable".
To spell it out for you:
Japan was ready to surrender before atomic bombs, but held back because the allies terms were unacceptable, and Japan were hoping to get better terms, using USSR to mediate them.
Only when that hope was removed (by USSR declaring war on Japan) did Japan realise they had no other choice. And then they actually surrended.
The post I replied to very specifically says "Japan was ready to surrender" should be interpreted as:
"[Before the atomic bombs were dropped], the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor ... would not be harmed."
I don't know why you're trying so hard to read things that are not there.
I disagree. Humans are inquisitive. Long term goal and planning orientated. Nuclear technology was new at that time and nobody knew much about it.
Just the other day I was wondering how to decontaminate Chernobyl and Fukushima. If we could do that, that would remove all doubts for the nuclear technology. I'm glad I saw this article because it demonstrates a problem that nobody has figured out yet. Huge opportunity to whoever does.
I'm thinking nanobot technology might be a solution. We aren't there yet.
Nanobots by definition have important/active parts with sizes on the scale of molecules. Doesn't matter what the molecules are exactly - if a radiation particle hits an atom and ionizes it, it's likely to break the molecule it's in and thus the mechanism. By break, I don't mean break apart - but a molecule that suddenly gains or loses charge in its structure starts interacting differently with other molecules.
(Except it's how ionizing radiation damages DNA; cells implement error detection, error correction and self-destruction mechanisms to limit the spread of DNA damage. Unless we go the biotech route and make our first nanotech by repurposing viruses and bacteria, our nanobots are unlikely to be as resilient.)
It's easy in hindsight to judge them, but you benefit from the knowledge they gained from experimentation. Radiation and the effects of background radiation was poorly understood. While no one contested the destructive impact of the bomb themselves, it was unclear what long term impacts, if any, might result.
Also around this time, soldiers were exposed to direct nuclear explosions, handling nuclear material with incorrect safety procedures, and all sorts of behavior we would consider to be insane.
To make a modern day comparison, future generations will surely judge us for our inaction on climate change or heavy use of PFAS and types of plastics.
Also, human life probably seemed relatively cheap, after a war where 10s of millions had just died and civilian targets had been firebombed. They probably just didn't get as worked up over threats that might kill someone in a few decades, when they had become used to the prospect of being killed at any moment.
You don't need hindsight, they were tickling the dragon's tail in Los Alamos right before Crossroads and physicist were dying. The experiments were less motivated by scientific enquiry and more rushed macho posturing to show the USSR they mean business
> 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)
Why the skepticism? Nuclear physics is enormously complicated, and without testing bombs we would have ridiculously imprecise and flat out wrong guesses about the effects.
We know of Nagasaki and Hiroshima but we don't acknowledge what a mess the U.S. West was made from nuclear experimentation. Hundreds more nuclear bombs were exploded in Nevada and then the Bay Area is surrounded by nuclear facilities leaching radioactive waste into the river.
I can understand why the U.S. government would like to litter Iraq with depleted uranium as they have a vested interest in making large parts of the world 'infertile' but the things the U.S. government does on the domestic population do not have such 'benefits'. But, if you lived in Washington D.C., got paid with the usual pork-barrel politics and had to connection to California, would you care?
Add up to the "human is stupid" part, where humans heat up the earth so bad, the Arctic melted and uncovers its surface where countries now target it for its "valuable" metals.
The Arctic is an ocean. Maybe you mean the Antarctic? Even so we're very far from uncovering its surface and there are international treaties prohibiting resource exploration there.
No, they meant the Arctic. The sea ice covering the Arctic has a natural cycle of growth and retreat with the seasons, but the overall trend in the last decade is one of unprecedented decline. This has led countries like Russia, Canada, and the US to start arguing about who gets access to the hydrocarbons, rare earth, and other resources that will be accessible as the thawing continues.
From a greenhouse perspective this is an incredibly dangerous situation because Arctic ice reflects a great deal of sunlight. Without that ice, the atmosphere will absorb more heat from the sun.
You could interpret surface as ocean surface, but then the parent talks of mining metals. So I don't think they really do mean the Arctic. But I agree with you about how silly it is that global warming is going to enable hydrocarbon extraction in the Arctic and thus more global warming. Us humans are really bad at long term collective good type of planning.
The Arctic includes parts of Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and Scandinavia. It’s not just ocean. Greenland’s ice cap is melting too, and China (for one) is very interested in mining there.
Radiation decreases sharply in water (although differently for the different types). You can for example take a swim in the cisterns which cool nuclear reactor rods, it only becomes a problem up close.
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.
Radioactive material + lots of water = good. You eventually end up with homeopathic densities of radioactive material, plus water itself is good at attenuating radiation.
Radioactive material + lots of water + lots of life in that water = bad. Small life eats the material, larger life eats small life, and after a while you end up eating cesium for dinner.
I'm still waiting for my superpowers to manifest.