In the Australian outback, we're listening for nuclear tests | Hacker News Reader

In the Australian outback, we're listening for nuclear tests

abc.net.au

49 pointsdefrost5 comments

I ran into a guy (affiliated with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks) working on the Windless Bight infrasound array when I was at McMurdo this season. Really fascinating stuff that I had no idea existed. They also have arrays on remote Pacific islands.

"It is often emphasised that the data belong to the Member States. A State Signatory has the right of full access to all monitoring data and data bulletins, which can assist a country in exercising its prerogative to make the final judgement in the case of a suspicious event." https://www.ctbto.org/our-work/international-data-centre

Is there an open-source alternative that serves the same purpose?

SeiscomP could perhaps be used :

https://www.seiscomp.de/

It's mentioned here by the CTBTO

https://www.ctbto.org/node/9348

I guess OS seismic Ground-based Nuclear Explosion Monitoring (GNEM) is possible. Here's a high-level pdf slideshow about it and machine-learning processing. [0] Matlab-based MatSeis exists and the code part is FOSS. I guess it would take a moderate amount of software and hardware engineering effort to make a working, turn-key FOSS GNEM seismic detector. It seems prescient given the decline of warhead, missile, and test ban treaties.

Furthermore, in the proliferation arena, it's possible to map breeder reactors to rough regions using terrestrial antineutrino mapping like KamLAND and what was Borexino. These aren't really conducive to open source initiatives because of their civil engineering burdens of scale (unless one has a mine or a missile silo) and so need to be state/academic efforts until some clever engineering might make them possible (don't see how it's possible because of physics) on the surface and at smaller scales.

0. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1582524

This reminds me of the rumors of the cult Aum Shinrikyo testing nuclear weapons in the outback. They had previously released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

It was lightly detailed in Bill Bryson's book, "In a Sunburned Country", but I don't think there was any confirmation what they were doing was nuclear.

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