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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 28 2018, @01:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-ducks-here dept.

Note: This story is over four years old, but I just came upon it and thought other Soylentils might find it interesting.

5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion:

After most of the world's nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO[*]) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear tests:

In the course of the efforts to detect clandestine nuclear tests, these devices have also detected:

  • Space rocks
  • Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights)
  • Whales
  • Tsunamis
  • Nuclear-power-plant disasters
  • Medical-isotope manufacturing

[*] CTBTO: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:06AM (#779520)

    I betcha someone could have a ball with a jar of that "radium paint" you could get about 80 years ago. Stuff was radioactive as hell and I would think it would really clear out an area until they figured out they were chasing a painted wad of paper.

    Suspension of Radium Chloride. It was used for glow-in-the-dark stuff like clock dials and aviation instruments.

    Its use was promptly discontinued when it was noted that about everyone who used the stuff died of radiation poisoning.