Deadly Plutonium Lost in Himalayan Avalanche

Four decades ago, the CIA planted a nuclear-powered spy camera at the top of a Himalayan mountain. Although it stopped functioning a long time ago, the device has never been recovered.

Four pounds of plutonium, enough to kill every person on the planet, could be moving inexorably toward the Ganges River.

At some point during the inhumanly cold Himalayan winter straddling 1965 and 1966, a peculiar collection of box-shaped objects — one sprouting a six-foot, insect-like antenna — plummets nine thousand feet down the sheer flanks of a remote peak.

Ripped from its moorings by an avalanche, the jumbled apparatus slides down a funnel-shaped hourglass of hard snow and shoots over a black cliff band, careening a vertical distance six times the height of the Empire State building. The boxes come to rest on the glacier at the mountain's base.

One, an olive-drab casing the size of a personal computer, begins to sink. Then, trailing a robotic dogtail of torn wires, it slowly burns through the snow, melting into solid blue glacial ice, eventually disappearing beneath the surface, and never seen again.

No one actually witnessed this event. But as you read these words, nearly four pounds of plutonium — locked in the glacier's dark unknowable heart — are almost certainly moving ever closer to the source of the Ganges River.

Eye at the Top of the World, provides a harrowing present-day account of Takeda’s expedition to solve the mystery of Nanda Devi.

Read large sections of this story on Google Books

Nuclear expansion is a pipe dream, says report

· Hope for new era of cheap, clean power is a 'myth'
· Building more stations would increase terror risk

John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday July 4, 2007
The Guardian

A worldwide expansion of nuclear power has little chance of significantly reducing carbon emissions but will add dangerously to the proliferation of nuclear weapons-grade materials and the potential for nuclear terrorism, says a leading research group that has analysed the possible uptake of civil atomic power over the next 65 years.

The Oxford Research Group paper, funded by the Joseph Rowntree charitable trust, says that the worldwide nuclear "renaissance" planned by the industry to provide cheap, clean power is a myth. Although global electricity demand is expected to rise by 50% in the next 25 years, only 25 new nuclear reactors are currently being built, with 76 more planned and a further 162 proposed, many of which are unlikely to be built. This compares with 429 reactors in operation today, many of which are already near the end of their useful lives and need replacing soon.

For nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the paper says, the industry would have to construct nearly 3,000 new reactors - or about one a week for 60 years.

"A civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate [of build] is 3.4 new reactors a year," says the report.

The paper - Too Hot to Handle? The Future of Civil Nuclear Power - comes as the UK government consults on a new generation of nuclear power stations and at a time of increased terrorist activity. It argues that worldwide stocks of high-grade uranium are expected to have run dangerously low within 25 years and that a significant increase in nuclear power beyond then will require a new generation of "breeder" reactor.

Though this will reduce the need for high-grade uranium, it says, it will also add immensely to the amount of weapons-grade plutonium being produced. "Even a small expansion in the use of nuclear power for electricity generation would have serious consequences for the spread of nuclear weapons to countries that do not now have them and for nuclear terrorism," it says.

The researchers say that nuclear proliferation is inevitable in the next decade. If all the reactors planned today are built, a further seven countries will have nuclear power. Nine more potentially volatile Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, have expressed interest in civil nuclear power, says the paper.

In addition, future demand for electricity will come from the world's poorest countries, which are expected to add nearly 3.5 billion to their populations in the next 60 years. "If nuclear power is to play more than a marginal role in combating global warming, then nuclear power will have to be operated in countries like Bangladesh, Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan, which at present have no nuclear reactors", it says.

"According to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, within 30-40 years at least 30 countries are likely to have access to fissile materials from their civil nuclear power programmes that can be used for nuclear weapons and competent nuclear physicists and engineers who could design and fabricate them.

"Future breeder reactors will be fuelled with plutonium and only a small input of uranium. The plutonium will be of a type suitable for use in the most efficient nuclear weapons. The normal operation of these reactors will, as a matter of course, multiply the amount of weapons-usable plutonium available across the world.

"If the decision to go with nuclear power is taken, then the UK will implement a flawed and dangerously counter-productive energy policy.

"The question is whether in the 21st century the security risks associated with civil nuclear power can be managed, or not? Society has to decide whether or not the risks of proliferation and nuclear terrorism in a world with many nuclear power reactors are acceptable."

Backstory

A scramble for uranium to feed the new generation of nuclear plants in China and Russia has led to a huge price increase: the commodity shot up 45% to $138 a pound in the past three months alone - as compared with $10.75 in early 2003, when atomic power was out of favour and nobody wanted to construct facilities. Nuclear is now seen as one way of meeting soaring energy demand while keeping greenhouse gas emissions low.

Nuke The Nuke - Run for the h... huh... nowhere to run to!

This morning the NY Post headline reads:
FEDS TARGET NUKE PHANTOM
The article goes on to say:

"Al Qaeda's so-called nuclear whiz kid - a "tantalizing terror figure" with a $5 million bounty on his head - was the radical big shot investigators had hoped to snag in their 18-month JFK-plot probe. The name of "invisible hand" Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, reportedly was the man Osama bin Laden tapped to lead a previous scheme to detonate nuclear bombs simultaneously in several U.S. cities..."

OK... that's one thing, now read the subtext, read between the lines... What if? What if some suicide nuclear bomber, decides to get close enough to Indian Point, and detonates a backpack nuke... in effect producing the largest dirty bomb one could ever imagine... spreading a cloud of radioactive debris and dust to all four winds, killing millions upon millions of people in a matter of weeks! Not possible you say? Think again!

Now, Mr. Newman, what kind of "security" force in the world, could prevent such a thing? I ask you... Not even "Wackenhut"... usually semi-retired broken down soldiers of fortune, now in their later years guarding McPrisons and not-so-secret bases like Area 51, could spot anyone in time who would venture close enough to the old plant and let off a bomb, with what could easily be a quarter mile, maybe a mile radius range.

And Mr. Newman, you know this possible, for back in '76, you endorsed John Phillips in Westport who, taking a page from "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee, designed his own nuke at Princeton, in his failed bid for Senate in Connecticut! Remember? He's now living in Switzerland somewhere we hear... been quiet all these years... perhaps knows too much for comfort!

In the 1997 issue of OUI magazine, cover featured above for your ocular pleasure, David Rothmann interviewed Ted Taylor, described as the wiz kid of Los Alamos who tells how to construct a homemade atomic bomb, describes what would happen if it exploded in the World Trade Center and makes 50-year projections that will scare your pants off.

Well, if anyone could read how to do this in a 1970's girlie magazine, in fact the OUI issue right after the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger professed his many sexcapades, imagine anyone getting their hands on some of that missing "plutonium" everyone says has gone awol from the old Soviet Union? Are you comfortable with the thought, someone could blow up Indian Point, and nothing any security force can do about it?