Comment by wkat4242
2 days ago
Um but smoke detectors don't contain plutonium. Usually americum 241.
Edit: ah so it was a soviet one. They also played loose and fast with nuclear safety. We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day. One already did and contaminated a big area in Canada, though luckily a very remote one.
Plutonium from soviet smoke detectors is a common item for the element collectors subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/comments/w557i6/2...
- "We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day."
To be fair that's multiple centuries away, so there won't be very much radiation left. And since they were relatively low-power reactors, there wasn't that much to begin with.
It is but these reactors use U235 which has a half-life of 700 million years. So yeah they will still be pretty much radioactive when they come down. Also, the decay products tend to be radioactive too and have their own half lives on top of that.
one good shove with a sattelite designed to sweep orbits free, will put one down. this could happen tomorrow, evil willing.
You think if someone was evil and willing, they’d design and launch a satellite designed to seek out another satellite and take it out of orbit in a way that causes it to drop randomly into the atmosphere?
All this instead of simply launching a satellite that does what they want? Or skipping the satellite and doing it with terrestrial solutions?
Some people’s threat models are very upside down.
2 replies →
A good shove being about 250m/s of delta v? Perhaps more to be certain of where you’re landing. Not exactly trivial or stealthy.
Why not just load up some nuclear waste on your “shoving device” and launch that exactly where you want?
3 replies →
I’m surprised you know this but didn’t think further about the situation.
Where was anericum used in smoke detectors, and was there perhaps some other region where plutonium was used?
Perhaps somewhere colder, more, soviet-ey?
I don't have much knowledge of soviet society, that's why. Just their cavalier attitude to nuclear safety.
Though to be fair, America wasn't much better in the 50s. Nor was Britain if you read about the "procedures" surrounding the windscale meltdown. Uranium rods would get stuck and people would just poke it with a stick.
The smoke detector in question was created in 70s.
1 reply →
back in the 50s "fire" detectors had a block of uranium and a vacuum tube to detect smoke or ionized combustive particles