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A comment on The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966. Parent comment

Re:The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in... by arethuza on Thursday October 02, 2014 @07:38AM (#8400298)
I would have thought that the detonation of a nuclear weapon near to the meteor (particularly an ABM which typically use "enhanced radiation" warheads) would have made the remnants fairly "hot" due to neutron activation.

I haven't seen any reports that the remnants of the meteor are radioactive?

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Re:The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in... by madaxe_again on Thursday October 02, 2014 @08:09AM (#8400393)
Yeah, they were:

1) Refers to fireball hot enough to blind and cause second degree burns, and references two nature papers which say the energy discharged is inconsistent with airburst models http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/06/chelyabinsk-m...

2) Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs, not uniquely in ABM systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb

Fine - it's not definitely the case that this happened, but there's enough information floating about to make it far more than plausible.

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Re:The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in... by arethuza on Thursday October 02, 2014 @08:19AM (#8400414)
"Residual radiation of fragments wouldn't be expected, as the Gazelle system uses neutron bombs"

"Neutron bomb" is another name for an "enhanced radiation weapon" - basically an H-bomb designed to give off large amounts of neutron radiation. So you would expect anything close to the explosion of such a device (and therefore exposed to a very high neutron flux) to have pretty clear indications that would be easy to test for.

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