Fallout from Russia's mysterious missile disaster suggests a nuclear reactor blew up
Excerpt: A mysterious explosion at a Russian weapons testing site earlier this month released various radioactive isotopes, creating a cloud of radioactive gases that swept across a nearby town, the country's state weather agency said Monday, and experts said the mixture removes all doubt about what blew up earlier this month. The deadly August 8 blast at the Nyonoksa military weapons testing range released a handful of rapidly decaying radioactive isotopes — strontium-91, barium-139, barium-140, and lanthanum-140 — which have half-lives ranging from 83 minutes to 12.8 days, the Roshydromet national weather and environmental monitoring agency said in a statement. "These are fission products," Joshua Pollack, a leading expert on nuclear and missile proliferation, told Insider. "If anyone still doubts that a nuclear reactor was involved in this incident, this report should go a long way toward resolving that." [If true, this would have to be a reactor design very different from the ones in use in the USA, EU, France, Japan, or China as those older designs might possibly be able to melt down, but cannot explode as the fuel will never be able to be compressed enough to create the necessary density to support that rapid a reaction. Modern reactor designs (from MIT and others) aren’t even able to melt down, they simply stop reacting. Ron P.]
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