Plutonium Mountain: The 17-year mission to guard remains of Soviet nuclear tests (2013)
belfercenter.org

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86 points

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jmillikin

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3 days ago

51 comments

acc_297 ・ 3 days ago

Funny anecdote from the full article

"Equipment provided by Raytheon as part of a multi-million dollar contract broke the winter after it was installed. One U.S. official said most of the detectors had been designed by Raytheon for the desert environment of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Kazakhs, on their own initiative, sourced equipment designed to withstand Siberian winters from a Russian military supplier; it cost half the amount of the U.S. contract, and easily survived the winter."

  • alistairSH ・ 3 days ago

    We overpaid for equipment not fit for purpose... Not sure I'd call that "funny". Depressing or maddening, maybe.

    • soneil ・ 2 days ago

      Possibly. We'd need to know whether the Siberian equipment could survive Nevada to make that call.

      • alistairSH ・ 2 days ago

        I don't follow - the problem stated was the purchase of desert-spec sensors for use in the cold. Unless there's more context, we didn't buy Siberian-spec items for use on the Mexico border.

voidUpdate ・ 3 days ago

The russians left a scary amount of radioactive material in random places after the union fell :/ I'm reminded of the Lia Radiological Incident (three men irradiated by the remains of soviet RTGs) and the 1997 Tbilisi, Georgia incident where 11 servicemen were irradiated by a radioactive source in a jacket, left over from soviet training

  • jodrellblank ・ 3 days ago

    Similar accident in 1980 when a lost Caesium-137 capsule in a quarry became mixed into a concrete wall of a bedroom in an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing several people and making others ill, for 8 years before it was found:

    https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kra...

    • e2le ・ 3 days ago

      Not entirely related. Some scam health products are made with radioactive material[0,1] (thorium dioxide) and can be found in wands, baby clothing, pendents, cards, wristbands, face cream, toothbrushes, and more.

      Even more concerning given that these products will shed that radioactive material into the environment and be ingested by humans. The "quantum wands" as shown in the YouTube video are filled with a sizeable quantity of thorium dioxide powder and is possible to forcibly open.

      They are illegal but continue to be sold.

      [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

      [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

      • lupusreal ・ 3 days ago

        Somewhere in China is a businessman incredibly pleased with himself that he found a way to sell the toxic waste left over from rare earth processing to new age hippies.

    • voidUpdate ・ 3 days ago

      If you ever want to have a worrying afternoon, have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

      • boringg ・ 3 days ago

        Thats a much smaller list than I would have expected considering it covers the entire planet.

      • cogogo ・ 2 days ago

        Wonder what it is about these sources that compels people to pick them up put them in their pocket and surprisingly often keep them in their kitchen. Do they visibly glow or look cool?

    • m4rtink ・ 3 days ago

      Yeah, this one is super scary...

  • perihelions ・ 3 days ago

    Don't forget the space nukes [reactors]! Some of them exploded, and stringed the planet with Saturn-like rings of nuclear dust[0]; others are slowly oscillating towards Earth like the blade from the Poe story, to impact sometime a few centuries from now.

    [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status" (.pdf))

    • lupusreal ・ 3 days ago

      To be clear, nuclear reactors, not nuclear bombs. It's droplets of the liquid metal they used as coolant in their nuclear powered ocean radar recon satellites.

      • perihelions ・ 3 days ago

        It's both nuclear fuel and droplets, although the clouds of metal droplets are much easier to track by radar. Several of the space reactors did explode (were observed to break up and fragment).

  • mseepgood ・ 3 days ago

    Or the 2006 London incident, where a Putin critic was irradiated by a radioactive source in his stomach.

epistasis ・ 2 days ago

This reminds me of the massive risks that Chernobyl presents to this day, as Russia has attempted to destroy the newly installed $2B protective sarcophagus, on Feb 14 with a drone:

https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective...

The highly engineered protective cover was designed to carefully maintain air pressure to confine the site. The hole caused by Russia threatens all of that, as the Russia's drone lit a fire in the waterproof insulation. The destruction of this basic weatherproofing threatens the entire structure, which was meant to last for 100 years without anybody being required to get close to it. Repairs are, well, difficult. A more detailed examination of the structure and its risks is here in a 12:39 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4BEqDS_wM

  • jxjnskkzxxhx ・ 2 days ago

    Classic russian. Target something for no reason other than psychological impact. Same reason why they bomb civilians etc. The Ukrainians meanwhile bomb Russian bombers.

nancyminusone ・ 3 days ago

I'm kind of surprised that if there was enough plutonium left they were worried about someone taking it, they never recovered it themselves. In the Manhattan project, plutonium was so valuable it made the value of gold look like a doorstop. I guess by the 50s, plutonium would have been available at every corner drugstore then?

  • rdtsc ・ 3 days ago

    Once they had a process to make it and enough to fire off hundreds of tests it probably wasn’t worth to waste time to dig through the rubble and then separate it all out again.

Arainach ・ 3 days ago

The link to download the article seems broken.

  • wffurr ・ 3 days ago

    It wasn’t immediately obvious, but the article is on the site as html if you scroll past “the latest from Belfer”. The article body is weirdly far from the title.

    Ah the article is also not the paper. It’s a long summary.

    • raddan ・ 3 days ago

      Actually it’s just the paper’s introduction.

richardatlarge ・ 2 days ago

My novel set partly in the Polygon (Semipalatinsk) is “State of Matter”

Havoc ・ 3 days ago

Who would be crazy enough to go into soviet tunnels full of questionable radioactive stuff? I'm sure there is fun glowy stuff down there but surely that is a rough risk ratio for even desperate people

  • 542354234235 ・ 3 days ago

    >In the post-Soviet vacuum of the early 1990s, the conditions at Semipalatinsk-21 resembled the apocalypse that nuclear weapons have long portended. A city of 40,000 that was once serviced by two daily direct flights from Moscow had been transformed into a dystopia of a few thousand stragglers and feral dogs whose main challenge was finding food and warmth…In the winter of 1995, Kairat Kadyrzhanov, a metallurgist living in Semipalatinsk-21, confronted the scavengers at Degelen to alert them that radiation might be present in the tunnels. “My wife and children are starving,” one of the scavengers told Kadyrzhanov, as he recalled it. “What am I supposed to do?”

  • rdtsc ・ 2 days ago

    Anyone desperate to make a buck on scrap with no other jobs around. Especially in 90s things were pretty bleak in post Soviet states.

    Now imagine the appeal of selling any of this radioactive stuff to a shady buyer. Now it's even more appealing.

  • kibwen ・ 3 days ago

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident . It's not implausible.

    • oersted ・ 3 days ago

      Weird how we ended up making real-life objects that "curse" everything and everyone they touch with "invisible evil death magic". It's right out of a fairy tale.

      • BoxOfRain ・ 3 days ago
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        I think as well as the obvious connection to nuclear warfare, part of the public fear of nuclear technology comes directly from how highly radioactive objects mimic the idea of a "curse".

        In reality there's many forms of industrial pollution that are arguably scarier than nuclear waste, but none are quite so eerie in how their harm is caused. Even though it represented the very worst practices for these materials, the idea of a place like Lake Karachay where even half an hour on its shore would have killed you without you even knowing you were doomed is really unsettling. I don't think nuclear technology should be avoided, but there's definitely a formidable image problem here I think.

        • lupusreal ・ 3 days ago
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          Chemical pollution is a lot scarier in a way, since it's much harder to detect. Even absolutely tiny amounts of radioactive contamination its existence to cheap widely available detectors. But I think chemical pollution is easier to ignore since it's harder to detect.

          • wat10000 ・ 2 days ago

            A lot of chemical pollution lasts literally forever, too. It's kind of funny the way the mind works. "This will remain dangerous for ten thousand years" somehow sounds scarier than "this is always dangerous."

      • HPsquared ・ 3 days ago

        Germs are already a bit like that. A lot of these superstitions were not bad for infection control, even if the underlying mechanism was not understood (much like the Standard Model, incidentally).

      • pyrale ・ 3 days ago
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        Lead and abestos have been in use since antiquity.

        • wildzzz ・ 3 days ago

          Unless you work with lead or eat off of leads plates all day, the risk of exposure is low. Even lead pipes are not as scary once they have been mineralized. Same with asbestos, it's the workers that handle it that are at the most risk. An asbestos tile or insulation just sitting there is not a huge risk.

  • ivl ・ 3 days ago

    There are many people who die every year going into tunnels without knowing if the air is safe to breathe where they're exploring.

    Do you think they'd be worried about radiation?

  • voidUpdate ・ 3 days ago

    Because it almost certainly isn't actually glowy, they just look like tunnels, maybe with some scrap inside that can be sold off, and not everyone knows that it has radioactive waste inside or what it can actually do to you. The average person knows a lot less about radiation than you do

    https://xkcd.com/2501/

  • Cthulhu_ ・ 3 days ago

    People looking for bomb grade plutonium, of course. But also scavengers who have no idea, there's been plenty of incidents with abandoned nuclear material.

1oooqooq ・ 2 days ago

dunno about you, but if i was trying to steal something that was left in the open i too would not alert any of the competent authorities, and fill everything with concrete after i was done.

very sus.