61–70 of 129 posts
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It's not switched on, so it wouldn't be hot. It was supposed to be switched on and activated at the peak which they never reached.
You can't switch radioactive decay on and off. The heat source is always on.
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> (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me) 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 st…
I had a thought that it could be something worse than that. 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 pow…
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…
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.
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I had a thought that it could be something worse than that. 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 pow…
For any reasonably big operation, there would statistically be a lot more opportunities for the secret to “leak”. So this sort of control over complete departments is highly unlikely.
They retrieved the second device by flying there! Why not to place it on the mountain by flying there in the first place instead of climbing?
In a nice bit of symmetry, another RTG is lost in an ocean trench: The fuel cask from the SNAP-27 unit carried by the Apollo 13 mission currently lies in 20,000 feet (6,100 m) of water at the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the Pacific Ocean. This mission failed to land on the moon, and the lunar module carrying its generator burnt up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, with the trajectory arranged so that the…
So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?
The more one learns, the more it seems like the CIA spent the whole cold war poorly executing silly stunts,
UK too. Bond movies give an impression of British intelligence intelligence that is unwarranted. Riddled by KGB spies with very little inside Moscow themselves.
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…
> Maybe it was stolen. 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 can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.
They retrieved the second device by flying there! Why not to place it on the mountain by flying there in the first place instead of climbing?
Helicopters don't do great at high altitudes like that. Honestly I'm a little surprised that they even attempted to recover the second SNAP with a helicopter.
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10 half lives means it will have reduced radioactivity to (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.
True but plutonium is pretty poisonous too. 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.