News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
For anyone who hasn't read the article it wasn't a bomb and isn't enough nuclear material to make a bomb. You could maybe use it to make a dirty bomb, but there are almost certainly better options for that (E.G. scavenged radioactive sources from medical devices). It was a fairly standard radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) of the type used on many deep space probes and rarely on satellites as well as somewhat famously by the USSR in a lot of their remote installations. It's not enough material to really make anything out of, but frustratingly it is enough to be very dangerous to anyone that found it and didn't know what it was. There was a famous case some years back where some scavengers found one of the old Russian RTGs in an abandoned base and carried it off before they all became too sick from radiation poisoning and died.
speak for yourself. if it was me, I'll turn it into a laptop battery and will never have to charge my laptop. and if used on my lap, I wont need birth control.
Per the article:
Reminds me of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
If you ever find an inexplicably warm object in the middle of the snowy wilderness, don't cuddle up with it no matter how tempting it may be.
I notice how the article casually mentions that there were like 300 lost in Georgia alone
That's how you get mutant babies.
x-men theme song begins to play in the background
Sr-90 that was involved in cases you mention is strong beta emitter, but Pu-238 isn't, it's mostly-alpha emitter, so it'll only get dangerous if somebody ingests it, but it's a piece of ceramic inside a strong case
Your Russian story is a little off. It was strontium-90 isotope from the rtg and of the three guys who found it, only one of them died, after like 3 years of pain, suffering, and surgeries. One of the others took surgeries and like a year to recover. It's known as the Lia incident. The poor guys were out in the winter snow way up in some woods and snow and found the two containers of strontium after seeing steam rolling off of them and no snow anywhere around them. Then decided these magical lil containers that looked old as hell and were still literally too hot to hold would be great to carry around and camp up against to keep nice and warm. It happened around 2001, but I'm sure a lot of people around the globe wouldn't put two and two together about not messing with mystery hot boxes found in bfe.
-Used to be an emergency haz mat tech.
Don't worry though, we have lost plenty of nuclear weapons that were never recovered. Due to how SAC preferred readiness in the 50s and 60s, there's at least a dozen American nukes in the world that have never been accounted for after their planes went down or they needed to be dropped without arming for one reason or another. Those are the ones we know about that haven't been covered the hell up by the Air Force.
Behind the Bastards did a 5-parter on nuclear brinkmanship, it's well worth the listen.
That's honestly even more infuriating, as RTGs are in short supply now.
it's not the type of plutonium that is fissile, 40% of it decayed by now, and it was formed into hard, chemically resistant ceramic in the first place
No, you're totally right. This is fine.
'Scampered' lol.