Last week, I went into the rabbit hole and researched about the whole incident as my drinking water comes from one of the tributaries of Ganga river and this device has polluted a source glacier of the river - with plutonium. Great.<p>One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".<p>When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.<p>Researchers <i>hypothesized</i> that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.
For people who don't want to slog through the long-form article for the few tidbits of actual information:<p>"Nuclear device" does not refer to a nuclear weapon in this case, it was a radio signal capturing device powered by a RTG.<p>They had to abandon the first one when trying to install it due to bad weather and couldn't find it again. Maybe it was stolen, maybe it just melted its way under many meters of ice and snow.<p>They placed a second one, realized that it melts itself into the mountain (who would have thought), and retrieved that one.
In a nice bit of symmetry, another RTG is lost in an ocean trench: <i>The fuel cask from the SNAP-27 unit carried by the Apollo 13 mission currently lies in 20,000 feet (6,100 m) of water at the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the Pacific Ocean. This mission failed to land on the moon, and the lunar module carrying its generator burnt up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, with the trajectory arranged so that the cask would land in the trench. The cask survived re-entry, as it was designed to do,[18] and no release of plutonium has been detected. The corrosion resistant materials of the capsule are expected to contain it for 10 half-lives (870 years).[19]</i><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliar...</a>
> towering at an astonishing 25,646 feet<p>Why does Web have localization for time values (date format, first day of a week, etc), but not for dimensional or weight measurements?
Funny counter-legend here. So this place is the source glacier for...well about a 100 million people of so.<p>Nobody has kind of died. And yes, we do have a semblance of a free press in India. Which is fairly strange - 12 researchers working on nuclear devices in the past decades dying is not a big deal. But how come not even a few thousand died downstream? Plus this place is religiously significant. Given Indian religious beliefs are around dunking your children in holy waters...it's very surprising really.<p>The other "not so popular" theory is that India has an active base towards China positioned here. Which is a diplomatic shitfest because of Nepal, Pakistan, China..etc. However most of India's strategic advantage is about geography - we have higher peaks on our side overlooking roads. So it's kinda advantageous to have nobody poking here.<p>Nanda Devi could be the "Devil's Tower gas leak" of India's nuclear deterrence towards China.<p>India has a pretty awesome mountain climbing culture and a huge tourism industry (fueled by the best weed in the world).<p>You can climb everywhere...except Nanda Devi.
That sounds like a complete disaster, can plutonium in the water supply of 200 million people cause real problems?<p>I don’t know better, but if I did I’d compare this to the DuPont C8 Teflon scandal
Spying...
It is fascinating how nuclear was not seen at he time so dangerous.
So much risk on the environment for 'just' listening the Chinese telecom.
Issue 63 of Alpinist magazine had a climbing history of Nanda Devi, that I recall included some discussion of the nuclear device: <a href="https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-issue-63" rel="nofollow">https://shop.holpublications.com/products/alpinist-magazine-...</a>
I wonder if they could locate it with an antineutrino detector? Though I suspect there isn't a lot of fission happening in a radioisotope thermal generator fuel cell, and maybe the signal would be too weak. Granted, I don't really know how antineutrino detectors work (and for that matter anything nuclear seems like a weird sort of magic to me).
Why on earth did they not turn on the telemetry system before abandoning the device?<p>At least that way you could ping the damn thing from a helicopter and triangulate the replies.
Another story source (2007):<p><a href="https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/" rel="nofollow">https://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-wor...</a>