Dirty Bomb Ingredients Go Missing From Chornobyl Monitoring Lab (science.org) 78
Insecure radioactive materials are the latest worry as Russia continues occupation of infamous nuclear reservation. schwit1 shares a report: When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi's worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant's emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete "sarcophagus" that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl's Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident.
Although power was restored to Chornobyl on 14 March, Nosovskyi's worries have multiplied. In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village -- apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a âoedirty bombâ that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: "powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation" used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so "the fate of these sources is unknown to us."
Although power was restored to Chornobyl on 14 March, Nosovskyi's worries have multiplied. In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village -- apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a âoedirty bombâ that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: "powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation" used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so "the fate of these sources is unknown to us."
Chornobyl??? (Score:5, Informative)
Per the Wikipedia article, [wikipedia.org] it seems that "Chernobyl" is the Russian spelling, and "Chornobyl" is the Ukrainian spelling.
Re:Chornobyl??? [To justify a tactical nuke!] (Score:2)
Well, I had the same reaction to check the spelling, but it's still a disappointing FP. No mention in the current comments (about an hour after the story was posted) about how Putin is likely to use these "missing ingredients" as an excuse to drop a "tactical" nuke in Ukraine. Not so much to show he's serious as to make sure everyone understands he is not planning to be prosecuted for any of his other war crimes.
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Both Russian and Ukrainian use non-latin alphabets, and thus Chernobyl or Chornobyl aren't the spelling in either of those languages. They are romanizations / latinizations. The Wikipedia article has a recording of the name in Ukrainian, but not in Russian. Perhaps Chernobyl, when read aloud by an English speaker, sounds closer to Russian, and Chornobyl sounds closer to Ukrainian.
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Well, at least that should be the last of the Ukrainian spelling "reforms", as Kiev and Chernobyl are the only places in that country we've ever heard of.
But what is next? Will we need to start writing local spellings for Muenchen, Schweiz, Genève, Athini, Nippon ...
Or is it only underdog/victim identified places who get that privilege?
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what is a "âoedirty bombâ"? (Score:1)
no idea what this is
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A Dirty Bomb [wikipedia.org] is where you strap nuclear material to a conventional explosive in order to distribute it across a large area, thereby contaminating it and rendering it uninhabitable. And wikipedia is where you would naturally go to find out, if you didn't have google
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I think he meant literally " "Ãoedirty bombÃ" "
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I know what he meant, but I don't know how else to handle anyone who isn't sick of making jokes about Apple smartass quotes already
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How is this Apple's fault if slashdot is literally the one single website out of billions with this bug?
Go ahead and find me another one.
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Do none of their engineers ever read Slashdot? They could drop in a quick check to prevent Safari from sending fancy quotes to Slashdot APIs, since they know the site doesn't support it (and clearly never will).
Maybe we should all open bug reports for it every time it shows up. Nothing like a little bit of light "customer screaming" soundtrack to help grease the wheels of "progress".
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How is this Apple's fault if slashdot is literally the one single website out of billions with this bug?
It's Apple's fault because the default when entering text outside of a word processor should be that you get the character that matches the keycode that you pressed.
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Slashdot supports “smart quotes” just fine. Go ahead. Try. it. They’ll work.
Just not from Apple phones.
Because Apple encodes the request wrong and can’t be bothered to fix it.
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Slashdot supports “smart quotes” just fine. Go ahead. Try. it. They’ll work.
Just not from Apple phones.
Because Apple encodes the request wrong and can’t be bothered to fix it.
Apple encodes it according to the doctype on the page, which says:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
So it seems to me that Slashdot's scripts generate their web page's doctype incorrectly, and they can't be bothered to fix it.
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You are quoting it wrong.
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By Jove, you're right!
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Well, under some circumstances it might be Microsoft's fault, instead.
But why use fancy, curly "smart" quotes when you can use the tried and true typewriter quotes, instead?
One of the things I always turn off in MS Word is smart quotes:
One, straight quote marks look better to me.
Two, I'm probably typing ' for feet and " for inches (or occasionally for minutes and seconds, either time or angles) and W
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If you can't turn them off in Appleland, then that's a problem
Perhaps you can, perhaps you can't; most people have no easy way of knowing, because settings are features are not discoverable. It isn't one of things they were taught to memorize, so they can't do it.
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It's because back in the day people used to troll Slashdot with unicode. Things like the text flow direction marker (making subsequent text go right to left), or using symbols that widened the page too much, or trying to evade the lameness filter to post spam.
Taco and the guys started filtering input, and in the process broke some legitimate stuff.
Re: what is a "âoedirty bombâ"? (Score:2)
Umm... what exactly are these 'curly' quotes & "straight quotes" ?
Is it to do with the backticks ` `` ?
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Do you talk like this in person or only on the internet?
I talk like this in person when people talk to me like this in person, which is almost never but does happen occasionally. It generally works out very well for me, because nobody respects a pushover. Most people don't address me in person the way the average Slashdolt chucklefuck does. Maybe that's because I'm two meters tall, or maybe it's because they're not suffering from internet bravery.
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That's a style of latin dance.
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It's a combination of the following:
1. the phrase "dirty bomb" where the person who wrote the sentence did so on an iPhone or iPad with "smart quotes" turned on;
2. a shitty web site that doesn't account for unicode characters that have been in common usage for over 20 years;
3. a shitty "editor" that doesn't even read the summary before putting it on the front page.
So, essentially, the status quo around here for the last decade or longer.
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When it comes to dirty bombs, most common substance is cobalt-60. Same stuff we use in sterilizing food and medical imaging. People have a tendency of occasionally stealing a truck that has it being moved to either a food preparation facility that does sterilization or medical facility that has imaging services, opening up to see what it is they managed to steal and dying of acute radiation poisoning in a day or two.
I guess that being stolen from Chernobyl makes it extra scary somehow. Because clicks. Or th
Nuclear power the green cheap energy (Score:2)
Re: Nuclear power the green cheap energy (Score:1)
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I don't think anyone calls nuclear "cheap" (Score:2)
And make no mistake I'm not a fan of nuke. Not for technical or money reasons but for social reasons. I don't trust businessmen to run it safely and I don't trust voters not to hand plants over to dodgy businessmen in exchange for the promises of lower power bills and taxes.
Fukushima was easily preventable if
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I mean I'd be pissed too if I were from the region. In the wake of the tsunami, the safest place to be was those power plants. No one died there, while over 20.000 people in the region were killed or missing.
We tend to blame the survivors in these kinds of events. Even survivors themselves tend to lay blame on themselves for surviving while so many died.
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You should pitch this big brain idea to Comrade Xi.
Oh who am I kidding. Idiot who failed gaokao so hard, that they have to work as a propaganda bot on slashdot can at best access some local CCP apparatchik. But you should pitch this great idea of yours to him. Maybe they'll finally take you off this job you hate so much!
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Note that the USA still loses more people to traffic accidents DAILY than nuclear power accidents have killed in all of history....
Note also, that natural gas kills more every year than nuclear has in all of history as well. Admittedly, gas kills less than 1% as many people as coal does....
Oh, and looking for more numbers about power related fatalities, I find that solar
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If not for the nuclear scaremongers, Germany would be running on nuclear power like the French, Spaniards, Swedes, etc., not dependent on Russia, who now would never have invaded.
This outcome is orders of magnitude worse for Ukraine than the "worst nuclear accident ever". And the greenies have blood on their hands (not just for global warming).
None of these are good (Score:2)
Looking at today's headlines, Russia is pulling troops back to Russia and there was a suspected chemical attack on Ukraine peace negotiators. I would expect Russia to pull it's troops back if it was planning large scale chemical attacks or the use of dirty bombs.
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Given Russia's track record on the war so far I expect their dirty bomb to go off in someone's face Looney Toons style.
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Well, given that their president originally came to power via a false flag bombing of his own people [wikipedia.org], a fact the Russian government has effectively acknowledged by banning the book about it for containing state secrets, you should hardly be surprised.
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Looking at the headlines in China there is NOTHING on that and they are the only relatively neutral ones with teams on the ground. True, the map has moved little in the last 3 days, but it is not expected too. Russians have three sacks to digest - Mariupol (14000 troops), Kramatorsk (60000), Chernigov (10-20K).
Looking at Russian headlines, they are about to finish Mariupol which will free a whole army
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because in 2 days all gas, oil, etc for Europe stops. Completely. For non-payment.
You meant "breach of contract on part of Russia", right?
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Didn't you say a WEEK AGO that Mariupol would be finished that day?
Perhaps you should stop parroting Russian propaganda.
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"The time is not yet ripe to say what happened. When historyâ(TM)s ready, then we can talk about it." - kot-begemot-uk
"We will get them stuck in the mud and we will certainly defeat them." - kot-begemot-uk
"They want to deceive their people first because now they are in a very shabby situation." - kot-begemot-uk
"They are achieving nothing, they are suffering from casualties. Those casualties are increasing, not decreasing" - kot-begemot-uk
No, wait, those were all Saeed "Baghdad Bob" al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi
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Let's assume for a moment that everything you said is true.
How the hell do we go from that to "world switches to rouble/yuan/rupee for commodities"? Even in your absolutely best case "US and EU are evil, stupid and incompetent and Russian is God tier country with very competent military and civilian leadership", what is the motivation for anyone in the world outside Russia and a handful of satellites to switch to rouble for commodoties? Yuan is just nonsense since it's not even a freely traded currency and
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Are you ok? You seem to have ran out of premade propaganda points to disseminate.
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because in 2 days all gas, oil, etc for Europe stops. Completely. For non-payment. Or of EU pays - the days of USA as a world power will end there,
Oh dear. You really have no clue what is happening. Europe has never stopped paying for oil and gas. Those are exempted from the sanctions. And Russia is unlikely to cut them off, as it desperately needs those payments. Both now, and in future - it does not want to make the supply appear unreliable.
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Looking at Russian headlines
Well there's your first mistake.
On the way to Moscow? (Score:2)
One can hope.
So, we have a picture of what the next phase.... (Score:2)
Doubtless, Russia will say that Ukrainian dissidents did it to their own country to try and frame Russia.
Send in the White Helmets /s (Score:2)
Most likely ... (Score:2)
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It has little to no resale value so it's more likely it was taken as a souvenir and will end up in someone's garage. Russian troops are really big on souvenirs.
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If that is true, then I predict several new Goiania incidents [wikipedia.org] in the coming years.
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I am far more afraid of that happening than I am of someone launching a dirty bomb.
something to ponder (Score:1)
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However, the "fingerprint" of the radiation would allow identifying the source of the radioactive materials after the fact, so using material from chernobyl allows them to do a false flag operation (as andot pointed out) and could give them plausible deniability if they used the material outside of Russia (say in a bomb in the EU or the US).
See: https://www.physicscentral.com... [physicscentral.com] for some more info.
Aaron Z
By that logic (Score:2)
...literally a handful of radioactive dirt from the area "could be included in a bomb to make it a 'dirty bomb'"
No, this is distractive alarmism. Let's get the fucking enemy ARMY out of Ukraine, then we can worry about trivialities.
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Nice to see slashdot lets Russian mouthpieces continue to post from Donetsk.
Make a throne (Score:2)
The elephant's foot would look great carved into the shape of a throne for Putin to rule from.