alt Hacker NewsUm but smoke detectors don't contain plutonium. Usually americum 241.
Edit: ah so it was a soviet one. They also played loose and fast with nuclear safety. We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day. One already did and contaminated a big area in Canada, though luckily a very remote one.
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- "We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day."
To be fair that's multiple centuries away, so there won't be very much radiation left. And since they were relatively low-power reactors, there wasn't that much to begin with.
I’m surprised you know this but didn’t think further about the situation.
Where was anericum used in smoke detectors, and was there perhaps some other region where plutonium was used?
Perhaps somewhere colder, more, soviet-ey?
Plutonium from soviet smoke detectors is a common item for the element collectors subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/comments/w557i6/2...