Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi (opens in new tab)

What's worse than radioactive isotopes that can't possibly be filtered out in conventional water treatment plants?

Pollution is an issue in majority of rivers in the world, especially in developing countries but doesn't justify or discount radioactive waste in there.

What are you referring to?

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.

I agree with your sentiment but the GP’s comment has a long lineage: readers’ digest condensed books, “bluffer’s guides” and the like, stretching back into antiquity.

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

If you find great value in longer writing that’s fine. Some of us don’t want to spend minutes reading an article about something we don’t care much about and we would rather read a short summary with a few key points and be done with it.

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 :)

We have a long and rich history of people who have no idea about radiation finding something radioactive, taking it home, and showing everyone.

I can only imagine that some device that stays hot without any fuel would be of great interest to people who are habitually cold.

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.

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.

One RTG is nothing, a handful of whole nuclear reactors have been dumped into the ocean before (a few of the accidentally, and a few of the deliberately.)

Ocean water already contains 4 billion tons of uranium: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/gorin2/

And then we get Godzilla.

Most of it will have decayed into Uranium-234, which will pollute the water. If the container really contains it for that long. Fortunately the ocean is really big.

It's not impossible that British efforts along those lines are even worse because we know that they did play with (not quite as "move fast and break things" as the CIA) LSD, but there's no real pressure or habit of properly declassifying material from the depths like this (MI5 do publish a little, SIS do not at all, ever... no matter how hard you ask). What little MKULTRA material exists was preserved almost purely by luck, IIRC.

I also don't even want to imagine what the Soviets got up too - they'd probably laugh at Enhanced Interrogation.

Wow indeed. And oh, the irony -- LSD is the ultimate anti-mind-control drug.

> (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 staff at the intelligence agencies fall into this category.

This is why the intelligence agencies stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALALALA... I can't hear you" every time Chinese intelligence humiliates them. They're a one-trick pony: anti-Russian operations. That's all they know how to do. They're just trying to get to retirement, no matter what it costs the country.

British Intelligence was a complete clusterfuck roughly until Peter Wright's generation came of age within the services and were finally able to institute things like Vetting(!!!!!!!!!!).

After that, however, starting slightly dubiously with Polyakov (Possibly a dangle) and highlighted by Gordievsky they were "winning". I don't have a citation on hand, but I believe Gordievsky stated that a set of diplomatic expulsions in the mid 1970s absolutely crippled KGB operations in the UK and the station never really recovered.

I personally just about (70/30) believe that Hollis was ELLI, it's just too good to be true with the lack of offical resolution and correlation with SONYA. If he was really a double agent, then the Russian's would have nearly had the heads of both MI5 and SIS in their control (Philby was in line for the throne).

I am currently writing a hands on (Zachtronics-style even, e.g. build your own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)) dialogue-y game set roughly in this time period set inside MI5, I hope to be able to capture how crap they were.

Lecarre's works give a better portrayal of British Intelligence than James Bond.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Helicopter landing has since then happened even on the summit of Mount Everest.

Funny how they publish this on their own website given as they still don't officially confirm the operation according to the other article linked above