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Lessons from Soviet Russia on deploying small nuclear generators.
The Soviet Union had an engineering problem. Thousands of miles of remote frozen arctic coastline in need of lighthouses and radio towers which require power. Those locations were too cold and too remote for human operators in the winter months. So, the Soviets created a plan to deploy small Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's). Radioactive Strontium-90 heats an array of metal fins, the fins cool, and a semiconductor turns that energy into electricity. The RTG's design was the same tech the Soviet Union used to deploy radio to areas without power.
It's worth noting that this was the beginning of the nuclear era, the pre-Chernobyl era. There had been no nuclear disaster previously, that would have made them question this strategy. It's also worth noting that Americans and NASA used and still use RTG's on satellites zooming through space and rovers on Mars.
The Soviets deployed over 2500 of these "Beta-M" generators across a variety of locations. All they had to do was to send someone out to service them on the warmer months. Fast-forward to 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia fell into bankruptcy, which is a terrible situation for a government funded nuclear device program. With no money to send people out to maintain the machines, the machines fell out of maintenance. The haphazardly deployed devices failed and radiation leaked out. Further complicating the issue, the organizational chaos meant Russia lost track of the location of these devices.
This would not have been an issue if humans had avoided contact, but unfortunately they did. Curious onlookers and thieves stumbled upon them, they poked and prodded at the curious objects. These tales don't always result in death, but there are countless stories we'll never hear. The Soviet RTG program is a foreboding engineering parable about the cost of deploying an idea with no plans for future maintenance, and no regard for the consequences it might bring.
