[Assam] “Making A Billion Hindus Glow in the Dark"

[Rajiv Baruah]

   Not related to Assam but netters might find this interesting.

   Cheers

   Rajiv


                                                            June 30, 2008

   Did A Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges?

   Making A Billion Hindus Glow in the Dark"

   By PETER LEE 

   For  the  U.S.  intelligence establishment, the Cold War was a time of
   certainties:  Communism  had  to be stopped; no cost was too great, no
   technological obstacle was insurmountable. And, in the case of gaining
   information on China's missile program, no mountain was too high.

   A  legendary  CIA  mission  -  employing  some of the world's greatest
   mountaineers - sought to place a nuclear powered listening post on Nanda
   Devi and Nanda Kot, two of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, to eavesdrop
   on  Chinese  missile  tests  at Lop Nor. But in planning its Himalayan
   adventure, the CIA apparently disregarded the dangers and unpredictability
   of  the  element at the heart of its certainties - plutonium - and the
   consequences haunt the mission and its survivors to this day.

   In  1966,  four  pounds of plutonium were lost on Nanda Devi, a sacred
   Himalayan peak at the headwaters of the Ganges, and to this day nobod~ knows
   where the plutonium is, what it did to the mountaineers and Sherpas on the
   expedition, or what it n-tight do to the hundreds of millions of people who
   live and die along India's sacred river.

   The Himalayan expeditions and their aftermath are chronicled in An Eye on
   Top of the World by Pete Takeda (Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 20o6).
   Takeda,  himself a mountaineer, won the cooperation of the US. mission
   members  and  journeyed  to  the Himalayas to retrace the steps of the
   expedition almost forty years later - and to share with his readers the
   suffering, terror, and exaltation that high altitude climbers risk their
   fives to experience.

   Conceptually, the mission was quite simple. Simple enough to be pitched,
   cocktail-napkin  style,  to Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay by a patriotic
   mountaineer Barry Bishop at a reception in Washington in 1964.
   In those pre-satellite, pre-digital days, missiles fitted with simple radio
   devices and instruments transmitted unencrypted telemetry data on speed and
   altitude during their test flights to base stations for analysis. Anyone
   with a line-of-sight radio receiver could listen in.

   To  shield their program from prying electronic ears, China tested its
   missiles in the western wastes of Lop Nor. The only place for outsiders to
   access the signal was on top of the Himalayas.

   So, the CIA took on the project and decided to place a radio receiver in one
   of the most inhospitable and inaccessible locations on earth, 25,500 feet
   above sea level, on top of Nanda Devi.

   Obviously, the station would be unmanned. And, obviously, there was no place
   to  plug it in. Given the immense difficulties of a Himalayan assault,
   replacing a battery every few months, as had been done with unmanned weather
   stations during World War II, was unworkable.

    A solution was found in the radioisotopic thermal generator, or RTG, which
   had already been proven as a power source for satellites in the US. space
   program.

   The  RTG exploits a characteristic of bimetallic circuits, the Seebeck
   effect, that has been known since the 19th century. Passing electricity
   through a bimetallic circuit can generate cold ... and passing heat through
   the circuit can generate electricity. If the heat is coming from the natural
   decay of plutonium 238 (a highly radioactive isotope - with a half life Of
   87  years  -  that  can produce surface temperatures of 1050 C in some
   configurations),
   a generator that can operate for decades at high power without refueling or
   service is created.

   The CIA commissioned the construction of an RTG-powered radio transceiver
   and recruited a high-level team of six American mountaineers to place it on
   Nanda Devi. It also reached out to the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) for
   assistance. The Indian IB, suspicious of the Chinese, agreed to cooperate
   informally with the United States despite the Indian government's official
   non-aligned policy.

   Captain M. S. Kohli of the Indian navy, who had become a national hero as
   the first Indian to reach the top of Everest in 1965, was given the immense
   task of handling the logistics and recruiting the Indian climbers, porters,
   and Sherpas needed to push a piece of equipment the size of a decent-sized
   refrigerator to the top of a Himalayan peak.

   Kohli  wrote his own memoir of the expedition, Spies in the Himalayas,
   together with Kenneth Conboy, a writer on security affairs affiliated with
   the Heritage Foundation. Kohli's account differs strikingly in some details
   from Takeda's in terms of who messed up during the disastrous mission, but
   the overall narrative is the same.

   In the fall of 1965, the joint AmericanIndian expedition trekked to the base
   of Nanda Devi, where it received helicopter delivery of the transceiver/RTG
   assembly and four pounds Of PU 238 fabricated into seven jacketed rods. A
   team Of 31 - one of the largest climbing teams ever fielded in the region -
   toiled up the mountain for three weeks with the fueled RTG and five boxes of
   antennas and radio gear.

   just as a team of American and Indian climbers and Sherpas was about to
   reach the top with the transceiver, bad weather, that bugbear of Himalayan
   expeditions, set in. The climbing season was over, and installation would
   have to be attempted again in the next year. To spare the team the extremely
   onerous task of hauling the transceiver down the mountain and back up again,
   it was decided to secure the device to a rocky outcropping and return for it
   next year.

   When the climbers returned in the spring of 1966, they discovered to their
   horror that the transceiver - and the entire ledge it had been secured to -
   had been swept off the mountain by an avalanche.

   Somewhere, thousands of feet below, were the transceiver with its RTG.
   Somewhere down there, probably in the immense glacier that uncoils lazily
   from the foot of the mountain toward the Indian plain, where its melting ice
   feeds the headwaters of the Ganges. Frantic efforts were made, on that and
   subsequent  expeditions, to locate the RTG. But it was never found and
   eventually the CIA gave up.

   The CIA was defeated by the RTGs salient characteristic - the heat of the
   plutonium inside it. When the RTG struck the icy surface, it simply melted
   its way out of sight into the heart of the glacier.

   Best-case scenario is that the RTG is intact, happily sitting on bedrock and
   burbling like a giant, million-dollar Slushee machine, while the glacier
   melts and slips around it. Worst case is that some combination of ice and
   rock crushed the hardened casing of the RTG and swept plutonium grit down
   into the melt zone and into the Ganges.

   The  worst case was very much on the Indian government's mind when the
   reporter Howard Kohn picked up on U.S. mountaineers' gossip and broke the
   story in an article entitled "The Nanda Devi Caper" in Outside magazine in
   1978.

   India's prime minister had to reassure the nation that everything was OK,
   and backed it up with a government report that provides the only official
   confirmation of the whole incredible affair. (The US. has never declassified
   the mission; when I corresponded with one of the principals concerning the
   affair, he remarked, "Officially we can only consider [Takeda's and Kohli &
   Conboy's] books out on the subject as science fiction or other types of
   fiction:')

   As the Indian report pointed out, any released plutonium - twice as heavy as
   lead - would probably settle out of the water into the gravel riverbed of
   the upper Ganges before it entered India's most populous areas. If it did
   enter the Indian plain, the plutonium would be so diluted by the immense
   volume of the water flowing in the Ganges that the likelihood of serious
   health  problems  for a great many people who drank from the river was
   relatively small.

   So, in theory, there was no big problem. In practice, it's hard to be sure
   with plutonium -especially PU 238 in its early 1960s incarnation as RTG
   fuel.
   Plutonium is perhaps the most protean of elements. First created in 1941 by
   a team headed by Glenn Seaborg, it really doesn't belong on this earth. And
   plutonium acts like it's really not very happy to be here.

   Atomically, a single lump of plutonium exists as a stew of twenty different
   isotopes ceaselessly decaying and splitting, forming different elements,
   recombining to its original form, changing again, ticking with radiation as
   it swirls impatiently through its permutations.

   Physically and chemically, plutonium is equally problematic. A plutonium
   advocate,  David  Fishlock of the UK group SONE (Supporters of Nuclear
   Energy), described his favorite element:

   "It has six allotropic forms or crystal structures; more than any other
   element.  One  is  so  brittle it shatters like glass. Worse, it has a
   perplexing  tendency  to switch from one to another with significantly
   different properties, as the temperature changes. Finely divided, as swarf
   or fillings, it can catch fire spontaneously. No one seems to know the color
   of the flame, but magenta is a good guess. All this makes it infuriating to
   work with. Too much in one place can 'go critical; a weak but deadly kind of
   nuclear explosion that releases gamma rays.

    And, of course, plutonium is very dangerous.

   In the early years of the nuclear age, plutonium displayed an alarming
   propensity for confounding, eluding, and even killing its human captors.
   Beyond the destruction of Nagasaki and the notorious deaths in two separate
   incidents of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin while "tickling the dragon's
   tail", i.e., manipulating blocks of plutonium in order to ascertain its
   critical mass during the Manhattan Project, the annals of early plutonium
   health physics are an alarming litany of blue flashes, exploding
   glove boxes, irradiation, and the occasional emergency amputation,
   If incinerated, injected into the atmosphere as microparticulates, inhaled
   and lodged in the lung, a few micrograms can cause cancer.

   U.S. government documents from the 1960s also reveal that Pu 238 slurries
   displayed an alarming tendency for radiation excursions while stored in
   tanks. This led to guidelines that limited the quantity stored in one place
   to no more than four pounds - the amount of plutonium loaded into the RTG on
   Nanda Devi.

   Nevertheless, in the 1950s and 1960s, before it had a vested interest in
   hyping the dangers of the "dirty bomb," the government was just as eager to
   employ plutonium in defense, power generation, and terrestrial and celestial
   RTGS, and convince the public that enhancing the environment's meager bounty
   of transuranic elements was not a particularly dangerous or reckless thing
   to do.

   Plutoniunfs defenders debunked the canard that "plute" is, gram for gram,
   the deadliest substance on earth - radium, sarin, and ricin are reputedly
   worse. To support their case, they cited the manageable risk of plutonium
   238's routine emission - the alpha particle.

   Alpha particles are deadly but lumbering. Basically the nucleus of helium
   atom, their positive charge drives them away from other nuclei and limits
   the damage they can do. Alpha particles can be stopped by paper, plastic, or
   the thin layer of dead skin covering the human body and will wreak havoc
   only if inhaled or ingested. In an RTG, they are safely buttoned up inside
   the fuel cell's tantalum and alloy cladding.

   When the young Queen Elizabeth visited the UK Atomic Energy Establishment at
   Harwood, a physicist there, Dr. Eric Voice, offered her a lump of plutonium
   in a plastic bag. The queen is one of the few people to have experienced
   plutoniums unique tactile signature - the warm, heavy mass pours heat into
   the hand "like a live rabbit. " There was no report of any ill effects
   suffered by the monarch as a result.

   A dedicated plutonium evangelist, Voice had himself injected with plutonium
   in the 1990s to demonstrate that safety concerns were overblown. Over the
   next few years, he went the extra mile and inhaled plutonium in a series of
   tests, Indeed, Mr. Voice died in 2004, five years after the tests concluded,
   of motor neuron disease, i.e., non-plutonium causes. He received the thanks
   of a grateful nation - but not the cremation he desired. Cautiously, the
   British government entombed his remains in a lead-lined coffin instead.
   However, theoretical plutonium 238- a dependable, single-minded emitter of
   alpha particles - and real world plutonium 238 are two different things. I
   discovered this in a trove of nuclear-related documents once made publicly
   by the Los Alamos National Laboratory but withdrawn in 2002. Thanks to the
   efforts of researchers Gregory Walker and Carey Sublette, they are now
   available on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.

   Real-world plutonium 238 - especially in its early 1960s incarnation - was
   abuzz  with neutron radiation. Neutrons are everybody's least favorite
   particles because they are heavy, carry no charge, aren't stopped at the
   skin,  and can pingpong freely through the human anatomy colliding and
   combining  with nuclei, eliciting secondary radiation and cell damage.
   Neutron radiation is classed as highly penetrating, demands an immense
   amount of shielding, and is subject to a lox health effects multiplier.
   Exposure to the same energy of neutron radiation is considered to be ten
   times more dangerous than beta and gamma radiation and as dangerous as
   inhaled alpha particles.

   Plutoniums 238's natural decay emits few neutron particles - about 2,100 per
   gram per second. However, for the Nanda Devi RTG, hidden in the matrix of
   plutonium physics and chemistry was another, much more significant source of
   neutrons - the alpha-neutron reaction.
   Plutonium 238 fuel is considerably more complicated than pure plutonium 238.
   It hosts an admixture of approximately is per cent of five other plutonium
   isotopes formed during the creation of PU 238 in the reactor, each with
   their own radiation profile. It can also contain small but significant
   quantities - at the parts per million and parts per billion level - of fight
   element impurities such as fluorine, beryllium, boron, and aluminum.

   The alpha-neutron effect occurs when the alpha particles emitted by the
   decay of the plutonium 238 atom collide with susceptible light element
   impurities inside the metal itself The impurities absorb the alpha particles
   and release neutrons instead. Light element impurities were a fact of life
   in  the  1960s,  as scientists and technicians struggled with enormous
   challenges of physics, chemistry, process design and safety to generate
   plutonium 238 in reactor fuel rods and extract, purify and reduce it to
   metal.

   When the plutonium fuel cells destined for Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot were
   fabricated, apparently not all the problems had been licked. To a certain
   degree, fight-element contamination was built into the process. A key step
   involved reacting plutonium with fluorine - one of those light elements - to
   produce plutonium tetrafluoride. It also produced an abundance of neutrons,
   enough to justify the full radiation safety paraphernalia of counters and
   badges, remote handling equipment, and 16-inch thick Lucite shielding to
   protect the technicians.

   After the PU 238 was reduced to metal and the fuel went into space on probes
   and  satellites,  a certain amount of lightelement contamination - and
   neutrons - inevitably went with it. The RTGs had to be packaged in graphite
   containers attached to booms, so their radiation as well as their heat would
   attenuate before reaching the mission electronics.

   In 1967, Los Alamos evaluated existing RTG plutonium for use as a power
   source in heart pacemakers - and rejected it. Tests showed that the fuel
   emitted unacceptably high levels of neutron radiation due to light element
   contamination ' and the alpha-neutron reaction. How much radiation? As much
   as 150 times as many neutrons as should have been expected based on a pure
   Pu 238/PU 239 mixture. In a four-pound RTG fuel array, that's not enough
   neutron radiation to cause acute radiation sickness - but it's enough to
   present a genuine cancer risk to humans.

    So RTG radiation safety was not simply a matter of alpha particles buzzing
   harmlessly against the alloy cladding of the fuel cell like bewildered
   bumblebees in a jar. Neutrons were most certainly in the mix, and a goodly
   number would unavoidably have gone streaming through the minimal alloy and
   graphite shielding, into the atmosphere, and into the tissues of whoever was
   standing nearby.

   Clearly,  among  specialists in the RTG program in the 1960s there was
   knowledge of the neutron issue, but that awareness does not seem to have
   filtered down to the Himalayan expeditions.

   Accounts of fuel and radiation safety issues differ markedly between the
   Indian and American mountaineers (Captain Kohli declined to be interviewed
   by Pete Takeda for his book; nor did Kohli and Conboy interview any of the
   US. climbers for their book).

   Kohli and Conboy state that the American side distributed radiation badges
   "that changed color" -not a normal attribute of film badges, which normally
   have to be developed in a lab - but the US. team members interviewed by
   Takeda have no such recollection.

   Jim McCarthy, the American alpinist and lawyer who was trained at Martin
   Marietta to load the PU 238 fuel into the RTG, is mistakenly identified by
   Kohli and Conboy as an experienced Atomic Energy Commission technician and
   the mission's authority on radiation matters. McCarthy, on the other hand,
   has stated emphatically to Pete Takeda that neutron radiation hazards were
   never discussed during his specialized training or, for that matter, at any
   point in the mission.

   The  U.S.  team members interviewed by Takeda claim they received only
   rudimentary instruction and minimal information concerning the radioactive
   character of the device they were handling. Nevertheless, the other team
   members were expected to rely upon the purported experience of the Americans
   in matters of nuclear safety.

   Sifting through the conflicting accounts, it is difficult to avoid the
   conclusion that the CIA should have and would have been aware of radiation
   safety  issues surrounding the RTGs - but chose to discount them as an
   unnecessary complication and distraction to the urgent and Herculean task of
   pushing a transceiver up a Himalayan mountain to eavesdrop on Lop Nor.
   In a telling indication of what the CIA knew, and what its priorities were,
   neutron detectors were sent to Nanda Devi,  but not for radiation safety
   reasons.

   After  the disappearance of the RTG had horrified Indian intelligence,
   threatening to trigger a diplomatic incident and public relations fiasco,
   teams were mobilized in 1966 and 1967 to scour the slopes of Nanda Devi for
   months in an intensive effort to recover the expensive and embarrassing
   device.

   Both teams were equipped with metal detectors-and with neutron counters.
   They were instructed to search for neutron radiation at a rate of 1,000
   counts per second-about ten times above background. They found nothing and
   in 1968 the search effort was abandoned.

   When the hurriedly planned and hastily executed scheme unraveled, humor was
   the antidote to failure - at least at CIA headquarters. In the embarrassing
   aftermath of the loss of the Nanda Devi RTG, the project was reputedly
   referred to at Langley as "Making a Billion Hindus Glow in the Dark." Of
   course, it was not the Indians - or the Americans - who bore the brunt of
   the radiation. The people who were closest to the RTGs for the longest
   period of time were the Sherpas, the Nepalese villagers whose experience,
   stamina, and determination have been crucial to every Himalayan assault -
   including the ridiculous task of pushing a nuclear-power transceiver to a
   mountaintop.

   The Sherpas packing the RTG up the mountain conceived a strong affection for
   the device. It was very warm, a welcome characteristic in a high altitude
   environment that afflicts climbers with cold, hypoxia, low metabolism, and
   accelerated loss of body fat. They called the RTG Guru Rinpoche, in a joking
   reference to its mysterious heat energy and supposed divinity. They argued
   over who would carry it, as the team inched its way up the slopes of Nanda
   Devi during the three-week assault. While the rest of the transceiver froze
   outdoors through the Himalayan nights, the RTG was welcome in the Sherpas'
   tents.

    Jim McCarthy, the mountaineer in charge of fueling the RTG, recalled: "They
   had no idea of what it was '. After it was loaded, they'd put the thing in
   the middle of their tent and huddle around it" [Takeda, P. 2001
   The ad hoc and apparently haphazard nature of the radiation precautions can
   also be seen from Kohli and Conboy's account contrasting the silent, wary
   caution of the American and Indian climbers with the Sherpas' enthusiastic
   and unwitting embrace of the RTG. "Oblivious to any danger, the Sherpas
   snuggled up to the device, warming their hands and patting their faces.
   Despite Jim's assurances that the chance of dangerous radiation exposure was
   minimal, the friends and members [the mission euphemism for the American and
   Indian climbers, respectively] were not inclined to join the Sherpas."
   (Conboy & Kohli, Pg. 78).

   For some of the Sherpas, the Nanda Devi RTG was just the beginning of their
   exposure. Because losing an RTG on Nanda Devi did not end the CIA's interest
   in a listening post on top of the Himalayas.

   Further review after the first botched mission convinced the CIA that a
   lower, more accessible summit on the mountain of Nanda Kot - lower than
   Nanda Devi, perhaps, but still a major peak at 22,500 feet - would be a
   suitable  location for the transceiver. So, in the following year, yet
   another team - including Captain Kohli and using some of the same Sherpas -
   hauled a second RTG-powered device up Nanda Kot.

   This time, they successfully installed it. However, after a few months the
   signals  stopped.  Another arduous assault revealed the presence of an
   insidious countermeasure - snow. It had completely buried the transceiver
   and its antennae, rendering them useless.

   In good news for the CIA, an intensive search over the featureless summit
   discovered the RTG, humming away blissfully under the snow in a glistening
   cavern five feet across that it had melted for itself. In bad news for the
   Sherpas, the CIA decided to abandon the Nanda Kot location (and RTG-powered
   listening posts in general - Nanda Kot was the last gasp), and the unwitting
   Sherpas  received  a  third  dose  of exposure in October 1967 as they
   laboriously lugged the RTG back down the mountain again.
   Captain  Kohli,  responsible for recruiting the Sherpas and, in a way,
   responsible  for  their  ultimate  well-being,  believes there were no
   radiation-related health issues. I corresponded with Captain Kohh about any
   problems the Sherpas might have experienced. He replied:
   "After the expedition they left for their hometowns. It is, therefore, not
   possible to find out whether there was any radio activity effect on those
   who carried it. According to nuclear experts, it is quite safe to carry. In
   fact, Sherpas were happy to use it because of its heat, they remained cozy
   while carrying it.

   "As for members, Sonam Gyatso died
   in  1968  from cirrhosis of liver. Some suspected some effect of radio
   activity, but I do not agree' "

   In his book, speaking in the third person, Captain Kohli movingly describes
   the death of Sonam Gyatso in an Indian hospital in 1968:

   "Kohli looked at his friend and began to weep. Barely alive, Sonaffs robust
   frame looked frail and shrunken. His face, normally burned a rich chocolate
   from the strong ultraviolet rays at high altitude, was waxy and lifeless,
   the color drained from his lips ... Kohh leaned forward and touched his
   friend's hand. As if by a miracle, Sonam opened his eyes, leveled a distant
   stare in Kohli's direction, and feebly tried to lift his right arm. Pointing
   a finger at his wife, his eyes grew slightly more focused. 'Look after her,
   Sonam whispered. He tried to say more, but nothing came out. His eyes and
   finger remained frozen, but his chest stopped moving.

   "His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa [the incarnation of Chenrezig, the bodhisattva
   of compassion, as head of the Black Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism] will
   accept you at his feet," said Kohli." [Kohh & Conboy, p.180]
   Kohli attributed Sonam's death to his lifetime of drinking. But Jim McCarthy
   has a different perspective. In 1971, five years after the expedition and
   three years after Sonam Gyatso died, McCarthy came down with testicular
   cancer. According to the weighting factors, developed over sixty years of
   observation,  the  gonads  are the tissue most vulnerable to radiation
   exposure. McCarthy adamantly attributes his cancer to exposure received
   while  directly  handling the plutonium fuel rods - alloy jacketed but
   essentially transparent to neutron radiation - before inserting them into
   the RTG.

   Takeda quotes him as saying:

   "I was the only guy who handled the actual plutonium and I'm the one who
   loaded the device. I had to straddle the f--- ing thing. Let me tell you,
   the  fuel rods were nice and wildly warm ... No question, there was no
   shielding at all and I got a large dose of radiation." [Takeda,
   pp.199-200]

   Regarding the Sherpas, McCarthy stated in 2005-. "If you challenge the
   Indians to prove any of those Sherpas are alive today, it cant be done. They
   are all dead" [Takeda, p. 200]

   McCarthy's claims can be challenged - but they can't be dismissed Too little
   is known about the circumstances of the climbers' neutron radiation exposure
   to draw definitive conclusions.

   The Sherpas were, of course, ignorant of the nuclear nature of the device,
   the radiation that may have poured out of the fuel rods and through the
   graphite casing, and what it might do to them. Even the
   names of the Sherpas who bore the brunt of the exposure are largely unknown,
   let alone any calculation, record, or recollection of who spent how much
   time how close to the RTG. What the neutron radiation did to the Sherpas is
   a matter of melancholy conjecture.

   The Sherpas carried the legacy of their nuclear encounter back to their
   mountain villages. When they died there, their remains were disposed of
   through cremation or sky burial, The answer to the question of how they died
   is literally not on this earth.

   We will probably never know what really happened. The answer is lost in the
   buzz of radiation and the hum of statistical noise, just as the RTG itself
   lies lost, remote, and deadly somewhere in the Himalayas.

   Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing,
   and writing on Asian affairs. He gratefully acknowledges the assistance of
   Pete  Takeda  in  preparing  this  article.  Lee  can  be  reached  at
   peterrlee-2000 at yahoo.