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Plutonium Mountain: The 17-year mission to guard remains of Soviet nuclear tests (2013)
- Arainach 1y agoThe link to download the article seems broken.
- brettermeier 1y agoI think it should be this PDF: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NunnLugar/2015/64.%202013.08.00%20Plutonium%20Mountain-Web.pdf https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NunnLugar/2015/64.%202013.08.00%2...
- wffurr 1y agoIt wasn’t immediately obvious, but the article is on the site as html if you scroll past “the latest from Belfer”. The article body is weirdly far from the title. Ah the article is also not the paper. It’s a long summary.
- raddan 1y agoActually it’s just the paper’s introduction.
- ItCouldBeWorse 1y ago[flagged]
- voidUpdate 1y agoThe russians left a scary amount of radioactive material in random places after the union fell :/ I'm reminded of the Lia Radiological Incident (three men irradiated by the remains of soviet RTGs) and the 1997 Tbilisi, Georgia incident where 11 servicemen were irradiated by a radioactive source in a jacket, left over from soviet training
- perihelions 1y agoDon't forget the space nukes [reactors]! Some of them exploded, and stringed the planet with Saturn-like rings of nuclear dust[0]; others are slowly oscillating towards Earth like the blade from the Poe story, to impact sometime a few centuries from now. [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20190033494.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status" (.pdf))
- lupusreal 1y agoTo be clear, nuclear reactors, not nuclear bombs. It's droplets of the liquid metal they used as coolant in their nuclear powered ocean radar recon satellites.
- perihelions 1y agoIt's both nuclear fuel and droplets, although the clouds of metal droplets are much easier to track by radar. Several of the space reactors did explode (were observed to break up and fragment).
- jodrellblank 1y agoSimilar accident in 1980 when a lost Caesium-137 capsule in a quarry became mixed into a concrete wall of a bedroom in an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing several people and making others ill, for 8 years before it was found: https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kramatorsk-radiological-accident/ https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kra...
- voidUpdate 1y agoIf you ever want to have a worrying afternoon, have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
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- Havoc 1y agoWho would be crazy enough to go into soviet tunnels full of questionable radioactive stuff? I'm sure there is fun glowy stuff down there but surely that is a rough risk ratio for even desperate people
- kibwen 1y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident . It's not implausible.
- oersted 1y agoWeird how we ended up making real-life objects that "curse" everything and everyone they touch with "invisible evil death magic". It's right out of a fairy tale.
- HPsquared 1y agoGerms are already a bit like that. A lot of these superstitions were not bad for infection control, even if the underlying mechanism was not understood (much like the Standard Model, incidentally).
- pyrale 1y agoLead and abestos have been in use since antiquity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wildzzz 1y agoUnless you work with lead or eat off of leads plates all day, the risk of exposure is low. Even lead pipes are not as scary once they have been mineralized. Same with asbestos, it's the workers that handle it that are at the most risk. An asbestos tile or insulation just sitting there is not a huge risk.
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- aenopix 1y ago[flagged]
- HelloUsername 1y ago(2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6257899 https://web.archive.org/web/20130822102920/http://thebulletin.org/thin-air-story-plutonium-mountain https://web.archive.org/web/20130822102920/http://thebulleti...
- r721 1y agoRelated story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41617207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41617207
- acc_297 1y agoFunny anecdote from the full article "Equipment provided by Raytheon as part of a multi-million dollar contract broke the winter after it was installed. One U.S. official said most of the detectors had been designed by Raytheon for the desert environment of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Kazakhs, on their own initiative, sourced equipment designed to withstand Siberian winters from a Russian military supplier; it cost half the amount of the U.S. contract, and easily survived the winter."
- alistairSH 1y agoWe overpaid for equipment not fit for purpose... Not sure I'd call that "funny". Depressing or maddening, maybe.
- soneil 1y agoPossibly. We'd need to know whether the Siberian equipment could survive Nevada to make that call.
- alistairSH 1y agoI don't follow - the problem stated was the purchase of desert-spec sensors for use in the cold. Unless there's more context, we didn't buy Siberian-spec items for use on the Mexico border.
- nancyminusone 1y agoI'm kind of surprised that if there was enough plutonium left they were worried about someone taking it, they never recovered it themselves. In the Manhattan project, plutonium was so valuable it made the value of gold look like a doorstop. I guess by the 50s, plutonium would have been available at every corner drugstore then?
- rdtsc 1y agoOnce they had a process to make it and enough to fire off hundreds of tests it probably wasn’t worth to waste time to dig through the rubble and then separate it all out again.
- epistasis 1y agoThis reminds me of the massive risks that Chernobyl presents to this day, as Russia has attempted to destroy the newly installed $2B protective sarcophagus, on Feb 14 with a drone: https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective-shelter-damaged-by-drone https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective... The highly engineered protective cover was designed to carefully maintain air pressure to confine the site. The hole caused by Russia threatens all of that, as the Russia's drone lit a fire in the waterproof insulation. The destruction of this basic weatherproofing threatens the entire structure, which was meant to last for 100 years without anybody being required to get close to it. Repairs are, well, difficult. A more detailed examination of the structure and its risks is here in a 12:39 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoClassic russian. Target something for no reason other than psychological impact. Same reason why they bomb civilians etc. The Ukrainians meanwhile bomb Russian bombers.
- johnshades 1y agoAlso see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/plutonium-in-the-hills-how-do-you-keep-nuclear-secrets-buried-forever-v22n11/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/plutonium-in-the-hills-how-d...
- 1oooqooq 1y agodunno about you, but if i was trying to steal something that was left in the open i too would not alert any of the competent authorities, and fill everything with concrete after i was done. very sus.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- richardatlarge 1y agoMy novel set partly in the Polygon (Semipalatinsk) is “State of Matter”