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Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

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Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#71

Post by jacquesm »

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.

> Either this was some sort of fission device (utterly implausible, IMHO - where's the moderator, for just one thing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#72

Post by klodolph »

garmaine wrote: post #54
GekkePrutser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but plutonium is pretty poisonous too. Luckily the ocean is very big

Source? Other than the radioactivity, plutonium isn’t any more poisonous than other heavy elements, afaik. And it’s not a lot of material.

I think the comment is referring to the heavy metal toxicity, which is presumed but poorly studied in humans.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#73

Post by sandGorgon »

Funny counter-legend here. So this place is the source glacier for...well about a 100 million people of so.

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.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#74

Post by DubiousPusher »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58
octoberfranklin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

We have found spies at high levels over the years. But worse still than infiltration is the internally corrosive effects of such a multigenerational secret organization. There is boundless potential for corruption. All the while, the previous existence and acclamation of such a service becomes a justification for it's existence.

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.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#75

Post by willvarfar »

mannykannot wrote: post #63
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…

> 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.

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 sonar array from a soviet submarine while it was underway!

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 :)

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#76

Post by baybal2 »

mannykannot wrote: post #63
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…

> 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 don't think so, even Indians wouldn't have gotten anything from it, they were already years away from getting own plutonium, and they should've been at least smart enough to know that a single bomb wouldn't matter much in war.

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.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#77

Post by baybal2 »

wewake wrote: post #60

Last week, I went into the rabbit hole and researched about the whole incident as my drinking water comes from one of the tributaries of Ganga river and this device has polluted a source glacier of the river - with plutonium. Great. 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 lo…

There are already things way worse than plutonium in Ganga.

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#78

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

thombat wrote: post #41
smegger001 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that he sent a hobbit with the one ring into a mountain alone where one of the two thing that were capable of destroying the ring happened to be located. 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.

Except it's only after escaping from the Misty Mountains that Gandalf can have any idea that Bilbo possesses such a ring, but I don't remember him modifying the plan in response to that knowledge. Meaning that if it was a suicide mission, it was set up that way all along, so rather than this being Gandalf the realpolitik puppetmaster it's Gandalf the Rollercoaster Tycoon player, erecting a lengthy and complex scheme…

Is there a Godwin’s Law for discussions eventually leading to LotR topics?

Re: Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

#80

Post by elihu »

I wonder if they could locate it with an antineutrino detector? Though I suspect there isn't a lot of fission happening in a radioisotope thermal generator fuel cell, and maybe the signal would be too weak. Granted, I don't really know how antineutrino detectors work (and for that matter anything nuclear seems like a weird sort of magic to me).
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