Rumors pop up from time to time that all around the world, but especially in Russia,

nuclear generators called RTGs, have been left abandoned by the superpowers, spreading

radioactivity and causing both human and environmental damage.

If there's any truth to this most cautionary of tales, you can bet that Skeptoid will get

to the bottom of it.

And in our extended content for premium members, a closer look at the most notorious case

of an American RTG left in a foreign country.

All of this and more is coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Radioactive relics, the missing

RTGs. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction,

science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life

decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. The Arctic coast of Russia is about as

remote and unforgiving a place as there is.

Go east from Norway and you'll follow 24,000 kilometers of coastline, with countless

inlets and peninsulas, from the Barents Sea to the Kera Sea, to the Laptev Sea, to the

East Siberian Sea, to the Chukchi Sea, until you reach the Bering Strait,

beyond which is Alaska. Along that whole stretch are fewer settlements than you can count on the

fingers of one hand. And yet shipping traffic has had to navigate the Northern Sea route

for a century, hauling millions of tons of cargo from one end to the other

of the world's largest country, most of it long before the invention of satellite navigation.

Shore-based radio beacons were the primary navigational aid, which raised a problem. Without even a

single road along the coast, let alone a power grid, how could the

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