Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).

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Guestmodinfo 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What's your opinion on a sudden flooding that happened some years ago in that region. I am an Indian so for some days our news were showing only that flooding news. It was sudden and super mssive and some news people suspected that same device or maybe one of the devices being accidentally going off. It was all speculation but the sudden and massive flooding was also unexplained to some extent. There has been several massive flooding in the region recently but all are due to extensive rain and cloud bursts. But one was unexplained in my untrained opinion. I remember it was some huge construction site. Wha they were building now I have forgotten that

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ninjin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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krasin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> that (checks notes) has the potential to poison most of North India.

How large is the amount of plutonium in there? I highly doubt that it has the claimed potential.

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krasin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I found the specs for the fuel source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...

The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.

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onion2k 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It decays to uranium-234 though, which still isn't exactly nice. It'll be a long time before it's a block of inert lead.

	▲	krasin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible. I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.

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khuey 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.

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hahahahhaah an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What notes did you check?

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s5300 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]