Last week, I went into the rabbit hole and researched about the whole incident as my drinking water comes from one of the tributaries of Ganga river and this device has polluted a source glacier of the river - with plutonium. Great.
One of the climbers, Jim McCarthy claimed he got cancer due to the time he spent in close proximity of the device and according to him, the local people who helped them in the trek are long dead because they spent much more time huddled close to the device. They were not cautioned about the dangers as the mission was "top secret".
When this story came to light back in 1978 after an article was published in a magazine and someone in US congress wrote a letter to the president, Indian govt. finally felt the need to assess the consequences of their blunder.
Researchers hypothesized that the device melted through the snow before reaching the mountain rock surface where it remains stuck to this day. They tested water samples from the river for a year or two while the story was hot and public pressure was on. Ideally, they should have continued periodic testing forever and annual search missions to locate the device.
What's worse than radioactive isotopes that can't possibly be filtered out in conventional water treatment plants?
Pollution is an issue in majority of rivers in the world, especially in developing countries but doesn't justify or discount radioactive waste in there.
Boycott Apple completely. How did we go from open development to some overpriced, only half decent and walled mess that's now worth $2 trillion? Shame.
Because that’s the solution that resulted in my parents not suffering from malware and various toolbars in their browsers. There is no way they or a significant portion of the population was going to learn how to discern good programs from bad, and a walled garden is apparently the option that works.
