2 comments

  • profsummergig 1 hour ago
    Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that - *checks notes* - has the potential to poison most of North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
    • ninjin 1 hour ago
    • krasin 48 minutes 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.

      • krasin 31 minutes ago
        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.

        • onion2k 6 minutes ago
          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.
      • khuey 25 minutes ago
        Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.
    • s5300 35 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • adrianN 50 minutes ago
    It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
    • jmward01 18 minutes ago
      Arguably Iran is seeing turmoil, at least partially, due to drought.

      https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...

    • netsharc 43 minutes ago
      Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...