That special glow.

[Left]

This is old news, but it was news to me:

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.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/06/30/making-a-billion-hindus-glow-in-the-dark/
Basic summation:
CIA wants to put a plutonium-powered listening post at the top of Nanda Devi.
Team encounters bad weather, secures the unit to the mountainside.
Next year, they climb to where the device had been secured, only to find an avalanche had removed the entire slope.


In 2006,Peter Takeda climbed in the area.  He was actively looking for the lost RTG-powered unit.

During the course of that expedition, Takeda took a sample of coarse sediment 200 yards upstream from the confluence of the Rishi Ganga and Dhauli Ganga, due south of the town of Lata just outside the Sanctuary, a site so remote there are no potential industrial or human sources of pollution.

The Rishi Ganga is a stream flowing from the Nanda Devi Glacier out from the Sanctuary. The Dhauli Ganga is the river into which the Rishi flows, ultimately becoming the Ganges, Takeda said.

Boston Chemical Data Corp., a private environmental engineering firm in Massachusetts, analyzed the sample and detected plutonium 239 with 95 percent certainty.

"Just to have that level in a coarse sediment sample was a real surprise," said Marco Kaltofen, a civil engineer and president of Boston Chemical. "It definitely warrants more investigation."

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Proof-of-plutonium-in-climber-s-sample-1232287.php#ixzz2VNGPpCdL

In other things I didn't know:

In addition to spacecraft, the Soviet Union constructed many unmanned lighthouses and navigation beacons powered by RTGs.[5] Powered by strontium-90 (90Sr), they are very reliable and provide a steady source of power. Critics[who?] argue that they could cause environmental and security problems as leakage or theft of the radioactive material could pass unnoticed for years, particularly as the locations of some of these lighthouses are no longer known due to poor record keeping. In one instance, the radioactive compartments were opened by a thief.[5] In another case, three woodsmen in Georgia came across two ceramic RTG heat sources that had been stripped of their shielding. Two of the three were later hospitalized with severe radiation burns after carrying the sources on their backs. The units were eventually recovered and isolated.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

...And apparently, hydrofracking fluids in Pennsylvania are also pulling  radioactive materials out of the rock...

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?ref=drillingdown&_r=0