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krasin | 1 month 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.

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krasin|1 month 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|1 month 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|1 month ago

Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.