Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi(livehistoryindia.com) |
Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi(livehistoryindia.com) |
One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".
When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.
Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.
Pollution is an issue in majority of rivers in the world, especially in developing countries but doesn't justify or discount radioactive waste in there.
"Nuclear device" does not refer to a nuclear weapon in this case, it was a radio signal capturing device powered by a RTG.
They had to abandon the first one when trying to install it due to bad weather and couldn't find it again. Maybe it was stolen, maybe it just melted its way under many meters of ice and snow.
They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.
I usually write them when I feel like an article is grossly disrespecting my time, either by being clickbait, obfuscating the topic at hand, or including ridiculous amounts of useless filler (particularly popular: describing faces, living rooms of interviewees, weather when it isn't relevant to the story, etc.)
In this case, the title is clickbait because "Nuclear device" is usually used to refer to nuclear weapons, to the point where Wikipedia has a redirect from "Nuclear device" to "Nuclear weapon". It implies a Broken Arrow/Empty Quiver incident, not a "yet another lost RTG".
Then the article refuses to reveal what it is about for a long time: The first mention of the actual topic is in the fifth paragraph. Until then, I've been fed background information without having any idea which of it is relevant and how, finding it hard to concentrate because I'm trying to figure out WTF the article is even about in the first place.
Long form articles can be good. One of my favorite articles is https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...
It starts by getting to the point: Ship, hurricane, sank, 32 dead. Within the first five sentences, you know the gist of the story. That not only gives you the information you need to decide whether this is worth your time, it is also a promise: It shows that the author is trying to provide information instead of writing as much prose with as little content as possible. Then it dives deep into the topic. At every moment, you know why the stuff you're reading is there.
The Internet too full of garbage to read several pages just to determine whether something is good or garbage.
The story mentions this as being a concern at the time, but if we take the story to be substantially correct, the idea that a foreign government would learn about the device, and then mount a secret expedition to find and recover it during the season climbing is regarded as infeasible, just seems to be paranoid nonsense.
I’m not pretending any of this is likely in this case; I’m just giving us fun things to google and start reading about :)
I can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.
Moreover, I believe they were well instructed on the nature of the device, and knew by that time that dirty plutonium from few years old civilian fuel is useless for nuclear weapons. For weapons, you need as pure 239 as possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...
(1/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/2/1)*100 % of original or .19% of its original radioactivity. Also keep in mind radioactive decay is not even. The faster, thus more dangerous, particles inherently decay faster and will be even more degraded, I'm not going to do the math on it, but, probably another order of magnitude or three.
Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?
Also, if it worked like <date> you'd have to put the value in a standardised unit (eg SI units) which would also annoy the Americans and they'd refuse to do it.
"An astonishing 8000 meters" is about as astonishing as 7,817
Machines are already 'correcting' our spelling, do we really want to lose our estimation skills too?
Nobody has kind of died. And yes, we do have a semblance of a free press in India. Which is fairly strange - 12 researchers working on nuclear devices in the past decades dying is not a big deal. But how come not even a few thousand died downstream? Plus this place is religiously significant. Given Indian religious beliefs are around dunking your children in holy waters...it's very surprising really.
The other "not so popular" theory is that India has an active base towards China positioned here. Which is a diplomatic shitfest because of Nepal, Pakistan, China..etc. However most of India's strategic advantage is about geography - we have higher peaks on our side overlooking roads. So it's kinda advantageous to have nobody poking here.
Nanda Devi could be the "Devil's Tower gas leak" of India's nuclear deterrence towards China.
India has a pretty awesome mountain climbing culture and a huge tourism industry (fueled by the best weed in the world).
You can climb everywhere...except Nanda Devi.
And it doesn't release more radiation than a bomb. Pu-238 is an alpha emitter--and alpha emitters can only hurt you if they get inside your body (or from simple heat--pick up one of those rods and you'll get burnt just like if you picked up any other hot piece of metal.) The decay product is U-234, also an alpha emitter and with a quarter of a million year half life.
Likewise, it's Pu-239 contaminant is an alpha emitter and decays to U-235, likewise an alpha emitter, this time with a half life of three quarters of a billion years.
You also don't understand about half lives--you get one decay per atom. If one isotope has a half life a thousand times as long as another you get one thousandth as many decays per second and thus one thousandth the radioactivity per unit of time.
A bomb converts material with a long half life into material with short half lives and thus greatly increases the amount of radioactivity.
I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
Gandalf sent Bilbo on a suicide mission into the lonely mountain to get burnt by a dragon to melt the ring avoiding the war of men and orcs entirely.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...
At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.
Given the vibe of story, I'd wager the climbers weren't given specific instructions for an abandonment scenario.
https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...
This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the world at one point, and it was given to people such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Whitey Bulger.
Absolute frikken insanity:
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...
https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...
I also don't even want to imagine what the Soviets got up too - they'd probably laugh at Enhanced Interrogation.
When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.
During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.
At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.
The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)
The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active measures and the Russians.
It's Career Inertia.
For half a century CIA hired people who had invested massive resources in becoming completely fluent in Russian, well versed in Russian culture, and who had cultivated contacts in Russia. These are the sorts of skills that take a lifetime to develop. All of the most senior staff at the intelligence agencies fall into this category.
This is why the intelligence agencies stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALALALA... I can't hear you" every time Chinese intelligence humiliates them. They're a one-trick pony: anti-Russian operations. That's all they know how to do. They're just trying to get to retirement, no matter what it costs the country.
Just saying the CIA wasn't the only one acting crazy. Of course this was all before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear tech was really viewed as less dangerous than it is now.
Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted.
Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.
After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered.
I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne).
I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.
I've elaborated a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556812
Trace amounts were detected in the melt water. Plutonium does not exist in nature, all significant amounts are man made. I think it's likely that that plutonium came from the lost RTG fuel rods. The article explicitly mentioned that the American climber was tasked with handling the fuel rods and loading and unloading the device. They lost it at their base camp, not where they intended to deploy it. I believe that would mean that most likely the fuel rods were not yet loaded and sealed into the device and were instead still inside whatever lead lined box they were transported in. I don't know what the actual fuel assembly would have been for a plutonium RTG fuel rod from the 60s but I have a feeling it wouldn't stand up to 60 years worth of corrosion in a wet and warm environment outside of the generator it was supposed to be assembled in.
As for the radiation amount, I meant in the hypothetical scenario of comparing it to a lost but undetonated nuclear weapon which would be substantially less radioactive. I'm well aware of what a half life of an isotope is. The half life of Pu-238 is basically as bad as it gets because at 87.7 years it'll take a substantial amount of time for the radioactivity to subside yet as far as half lifes go that's pretty low and would still be highly radioactive. Pu-238 in a water source is pretty bad and while it might be trace amounts now, if the fuel rods are compromised after all that time they're only going to get worse and start leaching out more and more.
It's neither an admission nor a denial. But I get your perspective on it being funny, and it is. Just like there's data in there on UFOs and aliens even tho CIA doesn't officially confirm those.
I think the FOIA reading room is basically like a library of interesting things. I'm surprised more people don't see the value of the stuff in that library. It's one of the best digital collections online, I think. And the search through scanned PDFs is pretty great...I suppose you can expect that from an intelligence agency.
Heavy metals take months, to years to debilitate, or kill.
Your point being? What do you think water treatment plants are for?
Finding plutonium would be nowhere near as hard as thousands of sources of untreated sewage.
In a normal war, you don't start off with your military at full strength before the war. Most of your people are new and drawn from your general population, and it's hard for anyone to predict who it will be. Makes it hard to infiltrate ahead of time.
But if you've been fighting a cold war using a wartime-sized apparatus for decades, in which adversarial powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight.
Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.
A new mythology, social network and way of life are born. Once you can't remember life without it, it becomes life.
Such a status quo robs those of us who were not there to choose it of our opportunity to choose. We are not able to choose a road of peace because we are already on the road of war and our system abbores change.
Don’t know, but they had the brilliantly named “Operation Hope Not”, preparations for the funeral of Winston Churchill. It started in 1953; he died in 1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hope_Not)
There also is “Operation London Bridge”, a plan that has been updated for over half a century, for when queen Elizabeth II dies (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...). That will be a momentous event because because she’s the queen of a very large part of the world (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom and various smaller islands), and because most of the population of Britain wasn’t born when her predecessor died (making it a rare event)
The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.
SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.
5994
104
6
2904
482117
12.8
15.0
3.48
1.9
6280920000 (717,000 years!)
[0] https://application.wiley-vch.de/books/info/0-471-35633-6/to...
As is the planets atmosphere, which for the longest time served as a justification to pump it full with emissions, that now leave us with a run-away problem at a scale that's still difficult for most people to wrap their heads around.
Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter.
I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.
My quip was based on the fact that under proper set and setting LSD has the ability to "open the mind" beyond the "normal world" and its associated conventions.
It sounds like the device was being transported in pieces. Each piece would be warm. Assemble it and you have far more concentrated heat. RTGs also work on temperature differential--when operating there's going to be a system to eject that heat to get a maximum temperature gradient. I can easily picture something like a fan blowing air over a radiator to maximize the power output--and there's your "wave of heat".
The manual also warns, when checking it out, against letting the temperature change too fast: no more than 35°F (19.5°C) in 15 minutes. And don't have it assembled without an electrical load, or it will overheat.
Then there's the question of whether the electronics were fan-cooled, but an RTG is so thermally inefficient that its own waste heat must dominate that dissipated by any device it powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Probably not, ever since RoHS in 2002 lead has all but disappeared from electronics. Even though it’s an EU law, most suppliers have just decided to only provide RoHS-compliant parts, and PCB manufacturers only have options for RoHS-compliant solder.
The amount of lead in an electronic is probably measured in grams, and only if the device was manufactured prior to 2005 or so.
Fukushima is leaking into the Pacific to this day even with Tepco collecting vast amounts of it to store in tanks. The US is dumping the majority of its PFAS into the Atlantic completely untreated, large parts of the world use the oceans as their dumpster, for agricultural, industrial, plastic and all kinds of other waste, to such a degree that we are running out of great coral reefs but instead have great garbage patches.
Yet for the longest time we only worried about oil spills, which are also an still on-going issue in addition to all the aforementioned ones, old ones like the vast amounts of munitions dumped into it, which also includes chemical weapons [0] and possibly upcoming ones like deep-sea mining.
It's mind-boggling to me how we as a collective species can be so unbelievably short-sighted to only recognize these problems once they've already run so far away from us that any attempts at solving them are borderline impossible.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
Which is another version of "the solution to pollution is dilution", but that ignores that dilution doesn't scale indefinitely and if overdone can also lead to saturation.
morsch said: "The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]"
nafizh asked: "So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?"
It was a question about the Apollo 13 SNAP-27 unit, which was spilled in a freak accident that is unlikely to be repeated.