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krasin 3 hours ago

> 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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hahahahhaah an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What notes did you check?

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khuey 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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