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Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

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Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#111

Post by freeflight »

azernik wrote: post #83
freeflight wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily the ocean is very big 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.

That's a problem because we're still pumping out emissions. RTG losses have been a small number (under 5) accidents that have probably emitted in total under 10kg of material.

But RTG losses ain't the only emissions of pollutants into the oceans.

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...

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#112

Post by Beldin »

Someone wrote: post #85
willvarfar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that there have now come to light some staggering espionage recovery missions eg Project Coldfeet which ransacked a soviet ice station, Project Ivy Bells to recover the missiles and stuff from soviet missile tests, and Project Azorian to raise a sunk soviet submarine. There was even a Project Barmaid (are all British code names better?) that had a claw fitted to HMS Conquerer to sever and capture the towed son…

“are all British code names better?” 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…

Now I'm wondering how many of get subjects are older than her. Gladly will accept percentages!

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#113

Post by 8bitsrule »

rossmohax wrote: post #23

> towering at an astonishing 25,646 feet Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?

24/3 = 8

"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?

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#114

Post by LorenPechtel »

MertsA wrote: post #90
doggydogs94 wrote: post #39

At the mention of the word "nuclear", otherwise rational people turn into bumbling idiots.

This wasn't a nuclear weapon, it was a poorly contained RTG and from the sound of it the fuel rods weren't even inside the device yet. A good sized hunk of Pu-238 in the glaciers feeding the Ganges is cause for concern to say the least. The half life of Pu-239 like what would be used for a nuclear bomb is 275x times as much so even just the small amount present for the RTG is releasing many many times more fission pr…

It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach. Pu-238 is hot, that's why it can be used for a RTG. That doesn't mean it's frying you.

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.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#115

Post by LorenPechtel »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #47
saboot wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this has happened many times with medical radioisotopes. People find them in a scrap yard, get amazed by the glowing blue powder, and leave a deadly trail of contamination until it's discovered what happened.

Yeah like the Goia incident. Terrifying and that wasn't material nearly as dangerous as Plutonium

No, plutonium is nowhere near as dangerous as the medical stuff. The capsules out of a therapy unit can easily kill, Pu-238 and Pu-239 can't hurt you unless they get inside your body or unless you're cooked by the Pu-238.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#116

Post by LorenPechtel »

mannykannot wrote: post #61
khuey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't switch radioactive decay on and off. The heat source is always on.

Indeed. Either this was some sort of fission device (utterly implausible, IMHO - where's the moderator, for just one thing), or the "wave of heat" mentioned in the article is, shall we say, embellishment.

Actually, it makes a bit of sense.

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".

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#117

Post by Qub3d »

getlawgdon wrote: post #95
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #11

For people who don't want to slog through the long-form article for the few tidbits of actual information: "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…

Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.

I see it less of complaining about long form writing and more assuaging concerned readers about a somewhat clickbait-y title.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#118

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

getlawgdon wrote: post #95
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #11

For people who don't want to slog through the long-form article for the few tidbits of actual information: "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…

Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.

Yes, my angry summaries usually do go to the other extreme and gloss over details.

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.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#119

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Qub3d wrote: post #117
getlawgdon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.

I see it less of complaining about long form writing and more assuaging concerned readers about a somewhat clickbait-y title.

It's both about the clickbait title and bad long-form writing.

I've elaborated a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556812

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#120

Post by Someone »

Beldin wrote: post #112
Someone wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“are all British code names better?” 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…

Now I'm wondering how many of get subjects are older than her. Gladly will accept percentages!

About 85% of the population of the UK wasn’t born yet when she became queen. 0.9% of the population of the UK is over 90 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...). If I interprete the data in https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... correctly, about ⅔ of those are over 94 (seems a bit high to me)
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