[HN Gopher] Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand
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Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand
Author : quanto
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-03-20 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationthailand.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationthailand.com)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Someone could have been very unlucky if that smelted piece of
| nuke ended up as one of their chairs
| Finnucane wrote:
| You'd be in the hot seat for sure.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Personally, I find radiation sources used in (medical) imaging
| way more terrifying than nuclear power plants.
|
| That doesn't mean I want them to go away, but small, highly
| mobile, _clumps_ of radiation that could just show up anywhere
| give me the willies in a way the elephant foot of Chernobyl or
| the ocean leak of Fukushima don 't.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation are easy to detect
| and to collect. The 1.5 million litres of contaminated water
| that leaked in November from Monticello's nuclear plant are
| not. Actually this is so common that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in
| the US have had leaks of tritiated water in the past. It does
| not taste differently, it does not smell differently and it
| does not make you sick immediately but it sure is a health risk
| that frightens _me_ more than a lost medical source.
| VLM wrote:
| tritium is quite expensive, makes gold look cheap, runs about
| "one new car" per gram. Its quite valuable. It would be like
| accidentally losing some gold coins in my backyard, that's
| not anti-enviro garbage dumping that's an accident. So if its
| a substantial leak they don't need govt regulation to clean
| it up, the financial market will force them if they lost a
| hundred million bucks or similar crazy amount.
|
| I was unable in a short google search to find any information
| on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've
| cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a
| percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there
| is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either
| incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a
| financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be
| incredibly small.
|
| Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans,
| runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ...
| substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot
| of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That
| and time, the half life only being around a decade.
|
| Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard
| that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something
| like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to
| paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big
| LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500
| TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels.
| 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic
| kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig
| fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth
| the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that
| large.
|
| So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at
| Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to
| contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have
| much to worry about.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Nuclear plant tritiated water is not concentrated to
| saleable quantities. The expense is from concentrating it.
| Sadly that doesn't help when it's mixed into the
| groundwater when a concentrated leak and a diffuse leak
| would both mix in about the same way.
| pfortuny wrote:
| 1.5 million liters contaminated by how much? The former
| number is meaningless without the latter.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Nuclear reactors produce small amounts of Tritium during
| normal operations. It's released into the environment as
| standard procedure because the amount is so negligible that
| it doesn't matter, but it must be closely monitored and
| reported. Any time it escapes in an unplanned manner, it's a
| "leak". That doesn't mean it's dangerous, though.
|
| You could drink water from a well contaminated by a titriated
| water spill for a year and only get about 1/10th the
| radiation dose of flying cross country in an airplane. It
| also decays rapidly with a half life around 12 years and it
| doesn't accumulate in the body.
|
| Radiation exposure is a huge spectrum and we can detect tiny
| amounts with modern equipment. There are a lot of detectable
| amounts of radioactive material out there that just don't
| matter at all to your health: Bananas, smoke detectors,
| tritiated water from nuclear reactors, etc.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Indeed, nightmare fuel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juarez_cobalt-60_contam...
| ugjka wrote:
| Goiania accident
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
| xp84 wrote:
| With both of those, the people drilling into and roughly
| disassembling this equipment mystifies me. I can't imagine
| the thought process that went into it. I mean, I'm not a
| 'professional' scrapper either. But I'd like to think that
| if I were, I'd stay away from pieces of medical equipment
| of unknown purpose, not try really hard to crack it open
| like a walrus with a shellfish.
|
| And that's assuming that there were no big fat yellow
| radiation warnings anywhere on this equipment. Which even
| in 1977 equipment I find hard to believe.
| kneebonian wrote:
| The Goiania accident would validate that concern
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
| sneak wrote:
| The mention of the film has since been removed from the
| Wikipedia article. It may be urban legend.
|
| https://commonplacefacts.com/2015/05/08/how-herbie-goes-
| bana...
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| What does a coal-fired power plant need that stuff for?
| jebr224 wrote:
| Presumably, they were measuring the level of coal (or other
| material) in a tank. Look up "ohmart radioactive level
| transmitter".
|
| It looks as if this type of device is still sold today.
| mikewarot wrote:
| So they took a vessel with a reactive alkaline liquid in it and
| smelted it? The vaporized cloud could spread far and wide.
| latchkey wrote:
| The container in the image has Ohmart on it. Looked them up...
|
| https://www.vega.com/en-us/company/vega-americas/our-story
| kube-system wrote:
| Looks like it is, more specifically, an Ohmart "SR" series
| "source holder":
|
| http://www.appliedmc.com/content/images/32867-US.pdf
| Fatnino wrote:
| You'd think the radiation symbol would be universally understood
| by even the least educated metal thieves.
|
| Apparently you'd be wrong.
| vidanay wrote:
| Very wrong.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > A 1992 episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers depicts
| a somewhat loosely-based version of this event in the episode
| "A Deadly Glow," albeit with a happier ending for all
| involved, and blaming the contamination of the town on an
| eco-villain. However, it did feature caesium-137 as the
| radioactive contaminant, as well as portrayed two young
| children unwittingly playing with it in a similar manner to
| Leide das Neves Ferreira, who, unlike the children in the
| cartoon, received a fatal dose.
|
| Fascinating
| farnsworth wrote:
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39u6p1
| duskwuff wrote:
| Which is one reason why the IAEA introduced a new symbol for
| use on interior components of radioactive sources:
|
| https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-symbol-launched-war...
|
| Even if you don't know what the radiation trefoil means (a lot
| of people interpret it as a flower or a fan), the added message
| of "death, run away" is pretty clear. And, unlike the existing
| radiation symbol, this one is reserved for use in places that
| most people should never see (like inside radiation therapy
| devices), so there's little risk of people becoming accustomed
| to seeing it.
| asddubs wrote:
| to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red
| background, GTFO!
| kube-system wrote:
| I think this is a good move, this symbol has the same problem
| that the biohazard symbol has. Not sure if the trefoil was
| designed under the same rationale as the biohazard symbol,
| but at least in that case, I think the idea to make a new
| symbol that is recognizable but with no existing meaning is a
| bad idea. People end up putting it on t-shirts because the
| symbol looks interesting but never learn what it means. It
| ends up both losing its impact and not conveying anything
| inherently.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But it's hard to gauge how dangerous something is.
|
| Radioactive sign? Is it on an old smoke detector? Sure, it
| technically is radioactive, the sign is there, but the
| danger is on "meh" levels. And the size of that is
| relatively similar to the capsule lost recently in
| australia, which indeed was a lot more dangerous.
|
| Biohazard sign? Could be a smallpox sample... also could be
| an old bag of used tongue depressors. Firs one would cause
| (another) global catastophe, and the second one can be
| safely cleaned in most dishwashers on the "normal"/high
| heat setting.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Meth is powerful and apparently common in Thailand. That said,
| the _scrap dealer_ ought to be informed and quickly run the
| other direction when a tweaker walks in with a radiation
| source.
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| If you felt that the featured article was weaseling, here is one
| with less ambiguous wording. They isolated 24 tonnes of
| contaminated dust, 70 personnel took blood tests.
|
| https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cyl...
| stirlo wrote:
| The key point being, Yes, it has been smelted.
|
| Initial reports seemed to suggest it was found before it was
| smelted but that is not the case.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Well this is telling you to have any metals that have been
| passed though Thailand ran under a geiger counter. At least
| in the US any major recyclers perform this operation to
| prevent radioactive materials showing up in the product
| stream.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Industrial smelters are big expensive bits of kit.
|
| Radiation monitors are pretty cheap - at least ones
| sufficient to identify a Cesium 137 source in a pile of scrap
| steel.
|
| Radiation in your steel is a hugely costly mistake - at a
| minimum, you're gonna have to give up all your costly
| smelting equipment and stock.
|
| Radiation isn't super rare either - major events may be rare,
| but every few weeks a big smelter will detect small things
| that ought not be smelted.
|
| So I don't see why any smelter wouldn't have a radiation
| detector on the input hooked up to warning sirens, for purely
| financial self interest.
| ISL wrote:
| It is my understanding that there are radiation detectors
| at the entrances to recycling furnaces (as well as
| elsewhere in the US transportation-chain) for just this
| purpose.
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(page generated 2023-03-20 23:01 UTC)