That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems? I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
Yes, ingesting plutonium can cause serious problems. I’m surprised that the Indian Government hasn’t commissioned an exhaustive, multi year search for this device. Maybe the snow is too deep? But I can’t see why one couldn’t carefully skewer into the snow, tessellate the whole mountain with such probes and see if it picks up any radioactivity.
Wouldn't thermal vision be better at finding it? Presumably the thing is hot (especially compared to ambient) and should be visible with some advanced thermal imaging solutions?
RTGs like this are made to withstand orbital reentry, pressure from the bottom of the ocean, etc. It's fairly unlikely it's gonna leak in the snow.
Are you sure this one was like that? I'd assume RTGs are a small enough market that they would be pretty much all be custom-made and tailored to the current requirements, and given this isn't a space probe and must be covertly transported by people on foot I would be surprised if they have the same amount of shielding/protection than the ones made for space.
Yes; even the Earth-bound ones are made to withstand major vehicle crashes, corrosion, etc. Ignorant humans dissembling them is a bigger concern.
Yes, ingesting plutonium can cause serious problems. I’m surprised that the Indian Government hasn’t commissioned an exhaustive, multi year search for this device. Maybe the snow is too deep? But I can’t see why one couldn’t carefully skewer into the snow, tessellate the whole mountain with such probes and see if it picks up any radioactivity.
Wouldn't thermal vision be better at finding it? Presumably the thing is hot (especially compared to ambient) and should be visible with some advanced thermal imaging solutions?
The more one learns, the more it seems like the CIA spent the whole cold war poorly executing silly stunts,
Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented. 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 worl…
Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.
> 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?
That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems? I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
Yes, ingesting plutonium can cause serious problems. I’m surprised that the Indian Government hasn’t commissioned an exhaustive, multi year search for this device. Maybe the snow is too deep? But I can’t see why one couldn’t carefully skewer into the snow, tessellate the whole mountain with such probes and see if it picks up any radioactivity.
Since the stuff could well have melted itself into the snow and ice very slowly, and might have moved laterally considerably, I guess you'd effectively have to skewer a giant, largely vertical glacier down to the rock below, with rocks of all sizes peppered in, using heavy machinery that doesn't exist yet, at high altitude where just surviving at all is a challenge, with lots of very extreme weather, avalanches, rockfall, crevasses, icefall... in a remote area that is hard to access in the first place. That's absolutely herculean. That would almost certainly cost lives. That would be ridiculously expensive. Chances are that Pu won't become a big issue during your term, and it's just one of what must be hundreds or thousands of gambles any Indian (or any other) government must be taking on issues that possibly might become huge liabilities with some small-ish likelihood. Meanwhile, launching such an endeavor because of a few kg of poison at the very end of the world, because it might somehow endanger 200 millions, that's going to be brutally tough. That's a danger that is very far from intuitive. There are legitimate reasons to argue against the endeavor being worth the cost. Probably not the hill PM Modi wants to die on.
Wouldn't thermal vision be better at finding it? Presumably the thing is hot (especially compared to ambient) and should be visible with some advanced thermal imaging solutions?
Yes, it definitely could.
Under several (possibly dozens) of metres of snow, ice and possibly rock?