The Secret Effort To Clean Up a Former Soviet Nuclear Test Site 74
Lasrick writes "The Plutonium Mountain report has just been released by the Belfer Center at Harvard. It describes the remarkable effort the U.S. made to get the Russians to recognize the nuclear proliferation risk they left behind at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test when the Soviet Union collapsed. In this interview with Siegfried Hecker, he describes how he and other scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory recognized the risk to world security as the Semipalatinsk site became overrun with metal scavengers. Quoting: 'The copper cable thieves were not nomads on camelback, but instead they employed industrial excavation machinery and left kilometers of deep trenches digging out everything they could sell. We were concerned that some of that copper cabling could lead to plutonium residues.'"
I know a guy... (Score:2, Funny)
His name is Borat and he is from The Great Khazakstan...
Re:Original article worth a read (Score:4, Funny)
That was back in '85. I'm sure that in 2013 plutonium is available in every corner drug store, but in 1985 it was a little hard to come by.