Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi | Hacker News Reader

Lost nuclear device atop of Nanda Devi

livehistoryindia.com

209 pointshudvin126 comments

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 long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".

When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.

Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.

There are already things way worse than plutonium in Ganga.

What are you referring to?

dead bodies

Pollution of the Ganges: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/pollution-on-river-ganga?s...

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.

Intestinal tract infections can kill you within days after a single gulp of polluted water.

Heavy metals take months, to years to debilitate, or kill.

> Intestinal tract infections can kill you within days after a single gulp of polluted water.

Your point being? What do you think water treatment plants are for?

My point is, even with plutonium in water, India would have much bigger, and harder to fix problems that that.

Finding plutonium would be nowhere near as hard as thousands of sources of untreated sewage.

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.

They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.

"We could use a power orb."

https://xkcd.com/2115/

> 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.

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.

You will not find people wandering around near the summit (or in the avalanche chutes, where the device probably ended up, buried in snow and ice) of Nanda Devi in the season when even the accomplished mountaineers who left the device there considered it too dangerous to climb - this is one of the tallest and more lethal of the Himalayan peaks.

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 :)

“are all British code names better?”

Don’t know, but they had the brilliantly named “Operation Hope Not”, preparations for the funeral of Winston Churchill. It started in 1953; he died in 1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hope_Not)

There also is “Operation London Bridge”, a plan that has been updated for over half a century, for when queen Elizabeth II dies (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...). That will be a momentous event because because she’s the queen of a very large part of the world (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom and various smaller islands), and because most of the population of Britain wasn’t born when her predecessor died (making it a rare event)

Now I'm wondering how many of get subjects are older than her. Gladly will accept percentages!

About 85% of the population of the UK wasn’t born yet when she became queen. 0.9% of the population of the UK is over 90 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...). If I interprete the data in https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... correctly, about ⅔ of those are over 94 (seems a bit high to me)

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.

It is military grade and hence the material itself is weapon? plutonium is weapon?

Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.

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.

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.

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

It's both about the clickbait title and bad long-form writing.

I've elaborated a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556812

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.

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 cask would land in the trench. The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...

So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?

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

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.

Yeah but we’re talking about a small amount of material. There’s probably more lead in the electronics you use. Dumped in the ocean, it’s nothing.

> There’s probably more lead in the electronics you use.

Probably not, ever since RoHS in 2002 lead has all but disappeared from electronics. Even though it’s an EU law, most suppliers have just decided to only provide RoHS-compliant parts, and PCB manufacturers only have options for RoHS-compliant solder.

The amount of lead in an electronic is probably measured in grams, and only if the device was manufactured prior to 2005 or so.

> 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.

That's a problem because we're still pumping out emissions. RTG losses have been a small number (under 5) accidents that have probably emitted in total under 10kg of material.

But RTG losses ain't the only emissions of pollutants into the oceans.

Fukushima is leaking into the Pacific to this day even with Tepco collecting vast amounts of it to store in tanks. The US is dumping the majority of its PFAS into the Atlantic completely untreated, large parts of the world use the oceans as their dumpster, for agricultural, industrial, plastic and all kinds of other waste, to such a degree that we are running out of great coral reefs but instead have great garbage patches.

Yet for the longest time we only worried about oil spills, which are also an still on-going issue in addition to all the aforementioned ones, old ones like the vast amounts of munitions dumped into it, which also includes chemical weapons [0] and possibly upcoming ones like deep-sea mining.

It's mind-boggling to me how we as a collective species can be so unbelievably short-sighted to only recognize these problems once they've already run so far away from us that any attempts at solving them are borderline impossible.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...

Sure. But the question was about the environmental impact of RTGs, which is many orders of magnitude smaller than other problems.

There wasn't any question, there was the statement that plutonium couldn't be that harmful because "the ocean is very big".

Which is another version of "the solution to pollution is dilution", but that ignores that dilution doesn't scale indefinitely and if overdone can also lead to saturation.

There was absolutely a question.

morsch said: "The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]"

nafizh asked: "So after 870 years, it begins to pollute the water?"

It was a question about the Apollo 13 SNAP-27 unit, which was spilled in a freak accident that is unlikely to be repeated.

After it decays, it's no longer plutonium; instead it's uranium-234. Uranium's heavy-metal toxicity is quite well-established, and uranium-234 is more radioactive than the natural isotopic mix, but at the low-single-digit-kilogram scale involved in the SNAP-27 RTG it's not a major concern.

The connection between half life and decay energy isn't so linear. Looking at a table of gamma ray energies [0] one can see that the lowest-energy distinct five have half lives in hours:

with the highest-energy distinct five in hours:

          12.8
          15.0
           3.48
           1.9
  6280920000    (717,000 years!)

However since the output power is the product of the activity and the decay energy it certainly follows a diminishing curve since fewer decays as time advances.

[0] https://application.wiley-vch.de/books/info/0-471-35633-6/to...

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.)

Adding Fukashima and dozens of nuclear tests. It's like we tried to chemo the ocean for 30 years.

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.

And then we get Godzilla.

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

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.

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.

The complete failure of British Intelligence to predict the fall of the USSR shows they might have gotten better at counter espionage, but still failed at their primary job.

The tricky bit isn’t collecting intelligence, the tricky bit is being able to turn raw data into something worth all the effort of collecting it.

True, but economics predicting 2*n of the last n crashes and Noam Chomsky predicting 17 of the last 0 revolutions indicates that it's an impossibly difficult problem than mere incompetence.

SIS do not publish their archival material so we'll probably never know exactly which side of that argument they deserve to be placed.

Predicting the timing of a crash is basically impossible, but predicting instability is more straightforward. To use a recent example the US stock market basically ignored COVID until mid February, but in January people where talking about an economic risks of a possible pandemic and the signs just kept getting worse.

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

The KGB were definitely the shrewder operation (this is why people effectively giving their modern counterparts the benefit of the doubt via blind equivalency irks me). The CIA did some absolutely insane things during the Cold War (and after), but the KGB was in some ways the backbone of the Soviet Union - it doesn't even begin to compare.

The saying "No one does it better" is apt when it comes to things like active measures and the Russians.

> (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.

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 powers have been trying to infiltrate your organizations the entire time, what happens if they succeed? Get someone into the clandestine organizations in a position to direct hiring. Then hire their own people. They're career bureaucrats, not political appointees, so once they're in, they're in. These organizations are expected to operate in secret, so there is no oversight.

Hanlon's razor and everything, but I'm not sure that applies in a situation where strong attempts at malice are actually expected. It would explain a lot about their behavior in recent memory.

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.

In order to leak that way, the scope of the compromise would have to be known to the bulk of the conspirators. But only <1% of them could have the complete list of all of their spies, and the other country/countries would be pretty dumb to do otherwise.

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.

Imagine what happened that WASN'T documented.

This is totally off-topic but related to your post: The CIA LSD testing was completely off the books. The journalists who uncovered it relied on hundreds of interviews. The CIA simply hired Sidney Gottlieb to do whatever he wanted to with zero oversight because the CIA wanted to achieve mind-control before the Russians. Gottlieb literally bought all of the LSD in the world at one point, and it was given to people such as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Whitey Bulger.

Absolute frikken insanity:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-ci...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/buried-treasure-the-ci...

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

Not necessarily. LSD reduces the influence of implicit priors. What gets reintegrated depends on context ("set and setting").

Brainwashing doesn't need drugs for that, and has been far more successful.

Definitely. Just pointing out that LSD is not guaranteed to be a psychologically liberating experience.

Yep. No guarantees. I had a friend that that fried his brain on it.

It's a powerful tool that has been unfairly demonized.

Agreed!

I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of “set and setting.” The environment can greatly influence the character and content of a psychedelic experience.

Mind control can be as simple as attaching trauma to a particular ideology, or invoking a spiritual experience with some specific subject matter.

I think it could probably be done although it would be wildly unwieldy and unethical.

Yes, I'm very aware. The CIA was engaging in torture in the name of research.

My quip was based on the fact that under proper set and setting LSD has the ability to "open the mind" beyond the "normal world" and its associated conventions.

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.

This is quite funny. Testing LSD on British soldiers:

https://youtu.be/ziqpwkhqTRs

The Russians put multiple nuclear reactors in orbit and crashed one on Canada. Many of their nuclear cores are still in storage orbits. Look up RORSAT :)

Just saying the CIA wasn't the only one acting crazy. Of course this was all before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear tech was really viewed as less dangerous than it is now.

Its not just the CIA its almost everyone else at the time. I just finished Rise and Kill first, a book on Mossad's targeted killings ops. Its full of really silly and clumsy stuff. My favorite story from the book is that back in the 60's Mossad tried to do the Manchurian candidate routine with a PLO guy, they hired a hypnotist and gave it a few months. The PLO dude eventually got smart, started playing along, acting as if he got hypnotized and they believed it and let him go with a gun. Once he crossed Israel, he handed his gun to his PLO folks and told them about it. Intel agencies back in the day were more like startups.

I'm starting to suspect there this is something pretty widespread thought history. I've been reading The Anarchy, which is a history of the East India Company (EIC), and it is full of blunders on all sides.

When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.

During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.

At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.

The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)

> towering at an astonishing 25,646 feet

Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?

SI units

Because the kind of American that understands that not everyone knows how big a foot is already puts the actual length in brackets so the people that cause problems wouldn't use it even if it was a feature.

Also, if it worked like <date> you'd have to put the value in a standardised unit (eg SI units) which would also annoy the Americans and they'd refuse to do it.

24/3 = 8

"An astonishing 8000 meters" is about as astonishing as 7,817

Machines are already 'correcting' our spelling, do we really want to lose our estimation skills too?

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.

At the mention of the word "nuclear", otherwise rational people turn into bumbling idiots.

What do you mean?

This wasn't a nuclear weapon, it was a poorly contained RTG and from the sound of it the fuel rods weren't even inside the device yet. A good sized hunk of Pu-238 in the glaciers feeding the Ganges is cause for concern to say the least. The half life of Pu-239 like what would be used for a nuclear bomb is 275x times as much so even just the small amount present for the RTG is releasing many many times more fission products and radiation than a sizeable nuclear weapon.

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.

>It doesn't sound like there was a containment breach.

Trace amounts were detected in the melt water. Plutonium does not exist in nature, all significant amounts are man made. I think it's likely that that plutonium came from the lost RTG fuel rods. The article explicitly mentioned that the American climber was tasked with handling the fuel rods and loading and unloading the device. They lost it at their base camp, not where they intended to deploy it. I believe that would mean that most likely the fuel rods were not yet loaded and sealed into the device and were instead still inside whatever lead lined box they were transported in. I don't know what the actual fuel assembly would have been for a plutonium RTG fuel rod from the 60s but I have a feeling it wouldn't stand up to 60 years worth of corrosion in a wet and warm environment outside of the generator it was supposed to be assembled in.

As for the radiation amount, I meant in the hypothetical scenario of comparing it to a lost but undetonated nuclear weapon which would be substantially less radioactive. I'm well aware of what a half life of an isotope is. The half life of Pu-238 is basically as bad as it gets because at 87.7 years it'll take a substantial amount of time for the radioactivity to subside yet as far as half lifes go that's pretty low and would still be highly radioactive. Pu-238 in a water source is pretty bad and while it might be trace amounts now, if the fuel rods are compromised after all that time they're only going to get worse and start leaching out more and more.

That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems?

I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal

RTGs like this are made to withstand orbital reentry, pressure from the bottom of the ocean, etc. It's fairly unlikely it's gonna leak in the snow.

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.

Yes; even the Earth-bound ones are made to withstand major vehicle crashes, corrosion, etc. Ignorant humans dissembling them is a bigger concern.

Yes, this has happened many times with medical radioisotopes. People find them in a scrap yard, get amazed by the glowing blue powder, and leave a deadly trail of contamination until it's discovered what happened.

Yeah like the Goia incident. Terrifying and that wasn't material nearly as dangerous as Plutonium

No, plutonium is nowhere near as dangerous as the medical stuff. The capsules out of a therapy unit can easily kill, Pu-238 and Pu-239 can't hurt you unless they get inside your body or unless you're cooked by the Pu-238.

Yes, ingesting plutonium can cause serious problems. I’m surprised that the Indian Government hasn’t commissioned an exhaustive, multi year search for this device. Maybe the snow is too deep? But I can’t see why one couldn’t carefully skewer into the snow, tessellate the whole mountain with such probes and see if it picks up any radioactivity.

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?

Yes, it definitely could.

Under several (possibly dozens) of metres of snow, ice and possibly rock?

hot and under hundreds of feet of very cold compacted ice

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.

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...

Yes, this was an RTG. An RTG is not a fission device. An RTG uses the heat from the radioactive decay (alpha decay, in this case, with some contribution from the beta decay of the daughter nuclides, once they have formed) of the fuel. As khuey said above, this cannot be started or stopped.

Actually, it makes a bit of sense.

It sounds like the device was being transported in pieces. Each piece would be warm. Assemble it and you have far more concentrated heat. RTGs also work on temperature differential--when operating there's going to be a system to eject that heat to get a maximum temperature gradient. I can easily picture something like a fan blowing air over a radiator to maximize the power output--and there's your "wave of heat".

I take your point about it warming up after assembly, though I doubt it was fan-cooled. This was a SNAP-19C device, primarily used for Nimbus satellites, where, of course, fans could not be used. A manual is available [1], where it mentions an operating temperature of 380°F (193°C) in space, and 260°F (127°C) in the atmosphere (presumably in an environment around standard sea level temperature and pressure; the air near the top of Nanda Devi is less dense but also colder, and presumably it is often windy.) I guess it would be like standing next to an operating stove (though, of course, in mountaineering clothing.)

The manual also warns, when checking it out, against letting the temperature change too fast: no more than 35°F (19.5°C) in 15 minutes. And don't have it assembled without an electrical load, or it will overheat.

Then there's the question of whether the electronics were fan-cooled, but an RTG is so thermally inefficient that its own waste heat must dominate that dissipated by any device it powers.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4513086

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.

Well I hope the renewed attention will drive some action. We have much more remote control capability now. Shouldn't have to cost lives I think.

I don't think anyone that has commented so far (or the article itself) really understands how problematic it really is. I don't either for sure, but it's a few 10s(?) of kgs of heavy metal. It's probably going to act like a rock in the glacier, eroding slowly over a long period of time. I don't know how much is problematic, but consider the concentration of naturally occurring Uranium as a point of comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment#Nat.... Even factoring in a few orders of magnitude for refined Plutonium vs. naturally occurring Uranium, it's still a relatively low concentration, and that assumes it erodes entirely and quickly, neither of which seems likely at all.

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?

Perhaps like in 'Lord Of The Rings', don't think too hard about Gandalf and the Great Eagles.

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 just for the joy of watching the ensuing catastrophe.

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

Éowyn's Law

They wanted the device to be secret. Once it failed, there was no need for secrecy.

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.

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

Spying... It is fascinating how nuclear was not seen at he time so dangerous. So much risk on the environment for 'just' listening the Chinese telecom.

People were aware of the danger at the time. Here's a collection of press clippings after the story was exposed by Outside magazine.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81M00980...

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

Well this is just a set of press clippings, and you could consider it's just part of their open-source collection of things relevant to them.

It's neither an admission nor a denial. But I get your perspective on it being funny, and it is. Just like there's data in there on UFOs and aliens even tho CIA doesn't officially confirm those.

I think the FOIA reading room is basically like a library of interesting things. I'm surprised more people don't see the value of the stuff in that library. It's one of the best digital collections online, I think. And the search through scanned PDFs is pretty great...I suppose you can expect that from an intelligence agency.

Issue 63 of Alpinist magazine had a climbing history of Nanda Devi, that I recall included some discussion of the nuclear device: https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-...

Some info: I found this story while reading Fallen Giants (Maurice Isserman) - history of mountaineering in himalayas.

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).

Why on earth did they not turn on the telemetry system before abandoning the device?

At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.

They would have had to assemble it during an imminently deadly storm.

Given the vibe of story, I'd wager the climbers weren't given specific instructions for an abandonment scenario.

Rest in Peace Homi J. Bhabha

Another story source (2007):

https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...

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