Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible.
I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.
It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...
What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanda_Devi_Plutonium_Mission
> that (checks notes) has the potential to poison most of North India.
How large is the amount of plutonium in there? I highly doubt that it has the claimed potential.
I found the specs for the fuel source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...
The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
It decays to uranium-234 though, which still isn't exactly nice. It'll be a long time before it's a block of inert lead.
U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible.
I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.
Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.
It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
Arguably Iran is seeing turmoil, at least partially, due to drought.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
But the drought was not caused by climate change, but by mismanagement ie complete neglect of the problem.
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
That, plus decades of mismanagement and corruption...
Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...
What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.