from Hacker News

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

by jmillikin on 6/3/25, 10:06 AM with 46 comments

  • by acc_297 on 6/3/25, 3:38 PM

    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."

  • by voidUpdate on 6/3/25, 11:49 AM

    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

  • by epistasis on 6/3/25, 8:03 PM

    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

  • by r721 on 6/3/25, 1:46 PM

  • by HelloUsername on 6/3/25, 1:10 PM

  • by nancyminusone on 6/3/25, 4:28 PM

    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?

  • by johnshades on 6/3/25, 10:36 PM

  • by Arainach on 6/3/25, 10:41 AM

    The link to download the article seems broken.

  • by richardatlarge on 6/4/25, 8:06 AM

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

  • by Havoc on 6/3/25, 11:53 AM

    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

  • by 1oooqooq on 6/3/25, 11:13 PM

    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.