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9 comments
Michael Busch

@Junco @graydon @cstross Plutonium RTGs do not have that particular problem, since they emit alphas rather than betas.

But engineers only figured out how to make them sufficiently sturdy after a kilo of plutonium got scattered across the landscape.

Graydon

@michael_w_busch @Junco @cstross The space-rated ones wound up with a "direct lunar return velocity into a steel mill" spec. Which didn't happen (though it would have been an interesting report from the night shift about the hole in the roof...) but Apollo 13 did, and as I recall they fished those out of the Pacific and flew them again.

Which does seem like "sufficiently sturdy" was achieved.

Michael Busch

@graydon @Junco @cstross Apollo 13's RTG was never recovered - it was deliberately dropped in 10 km of water. The RTG from the Nimbus B launch failure in 1968 was recovered from a few hundred meters down - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_B .

The redesign was after the Transit 5BN-3 launch failure in 1964, where the older RTG disintegrated on re-entry.

Graydon

@michael_w_busch @Junco @cstross Thank you!

I do find it kinda silly to be paralytically worried about 4 kilos of Pu in the atmosphere given the amount scattered about by weapons testing.

Wolf_Baginski

@michael_w_busch @graydon @cstross @Junco

So has anybody actually checked a Tesla for radiation sources? It would be a bit unlikely for power but the computers might need some sort of RTG back-up.

Michael Dwyer

@Wolf_Baginski

So... funny story. Tesla has already lost at least one source... and maybe three of them. THIS YEAR ALONE.

duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Awww.n

@michael_w_busch @graydon @cstross @Junco

Malcolm Herbert

@michael_w_busch @graydon @cstross @Junco totally coincidentally, I went along the highway on the other side of that valley in 2014 on the way to Mestia ... was a definite "huh" moment when I read about the accident earlier this year ...

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