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Mystery Nuclear Incident Detected


OverSword

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51 minutes ago, aztek said:

ussr have used small nukes more than once. to stop oil spill from damaged wells under water. not unreasonable to assume rusia is doing same thing. 

if we nuked gulf of mexico spill, it would be stopped a lot faster, i'm not sure what would do more damage, small nuke, or millions of barrels of oil in the water, along with chemicals they used to brake it up

But even small nuclear weapons create isotopes other then iodine 131 which would be detected.  Since it would be at or below ground instead of an airburst it would create far more radioactive isotopes, both in amount and type of isotopes, then iodine 131.  The fact no zirconium 97, strontium 90, or the near 200 other isotopes from a nuclear blast were detected rule out a nuclear bomb entirely.  Even then there would be seismic detection of a bomb blast around the world.

As for the USSR, while they attempted to use nuclear weapons for non warfare purposes, same as the United States, neither program proved to be particularly successful.  Most attempts either proved to be not cost effective or produced too much radiation to be viable.  The few actually successful uses they had were mostly in stopping petrochemical fires and leaks but from the 5 reported cases none of them were done underwater but instead at ground well sites.  The significance is that it's far easier to drop a nuclear weapon down a bore hole and detonate it then trying to get a nuclear weapon to the bottom of the gulf of Mexico.  To get a nuclear weapon to a bottom of the gulf of Mexico a special casing would need to be designed that could survive the immense pressure and be small enough to get far enough down the bore hole while an above ground well you largely just got to drop a nuclear bomb down the bore hole.  As for the size, they were not small nukes that the USSR were using, they were using 10 kt warheads which is 2/3 the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and orders of magnitude more powerful then tactical nuclear weapons.  They are small to modern nuclear weapons but they still fall within the strategic weapon category.

For environmental concerns, detonating a nuclear weapon deep underwater is more or less completely harmless.  It would create more radioactive fallout from tossing up the sea floor but the water would keep the fallout mostly concentrated entirety near the blast site and since water is one of the best radioactive shielding agents known, it's comparable to lead for radiation shielding, so only a few yards beyond the immediate blast site/fallout zone would have significant radiation levels which would drop to safe levels after somewhere around 10 or so days at most.

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On 2/21/2017 at 2:06 PM, DarkHunter said:

This isn't from a nuclear explosion or a melt down from a nuclear reactor.  If it was from either of those other isotopes besides Iodine 131 would be detected, each of those would produce dozens of isotopes of various quantities.  Plus a nuclear bomb test, no matter the size, if done underground would be picked up my seismic monitors around the world.

The fact that it's just Iodine 131 and in small amounts it has to be from a medical facility that produces Iodine 131 for medical treatments.

Pretty much exactly this. A nuclear test, no matter how small, would be detected by seismographs and would create a large array of radioisotopes. Iodine 131 is produced for medical purposes and also as a tracer in industrial uses such as fracking. Given where it appeared I'd actually lean towards an accidental release from an oil or natural gas operation. 

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