[HN Gopher] Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contamin...
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Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium
137
Author : geox
Score : 38 points
Date : 2025-10-11 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| trebligdivad wrote:
| I found this article a bit better than Reuters one;
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioacti...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far
| as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste
| contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?
| hinkley wrote:
| We will likely never know. Once you melt the evidence and stir
| it with tons of other molten metal there's not much to track.
| m4rtink wrote:
| IIRC all sources are tracked at manufacture and it migh also
| be possible to try to match the isotope ration to the
| original source material ? Not to mention the whole "spraying
| deadly radiation all over the place" that can be detected
| with modern sensitive detectors, possibly tracing back all
| places where the original source was miss-handled.
| hinkley wrote:
| If the metal is still radioactive they can probably narrow
| it down to a couple of train cars of scrap that were likely
| sources, but short of adding sensors to prevent a repeat,
| and auditing their partners...
| Sanzig wrote:
| Cs-137 is commonly extracted from fuel used as a source for
| radiation therapy, although less so these days, due in part to
| incidents with misplaced sources.
|
| The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiania accident
| where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an
| abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of
| radiation poisoning, including a six year old.
|
| My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone
| didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended
| up in the scrap metal stream.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| It's also used as a gamma source for metallurgical testing.
| Which is what the sources that caused the recent Thai and
| Russian incidents were used for.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Officials from Indonesia's nuclear energy regulatory agency
| have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer
| in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology,
| or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in
| the area were reportedly found in the company's furnace, which is
| about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the
| shrimp was processed.
|
| > It's unclear how it may have become contaminated with
| cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear
| forensics, told CR that the "easiest explanation" is that a
| medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was
| inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive
| material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace
| and then been released from the facility's smokestack, he said.
| bn-l wrote:
| Imagine the lead contamination also
| hinkley wrote:
| I saw a How it's Made-esque show on aluminum recycling just a
| couple years ago, which is when I learned that aluminum-lead
| alloys are a thing, and have to be separated. They used a
| pneumatic blast picker, an x ray machine, and real time image
| processing to separate the lead from the other alloys. I've
| seen other such systems before, and in those the camera was
| usually around 30ms up the conveyor from the picker and it
| pushes the targeted materials into a separate hopper. The
| scan is parallelized to keep it real time.
| lima wrote:
| "Released from the facility's smokestack" sounds bad.
|
| Is it even possible to clean this up, if true?
| hedgehog wrote:
| Depending on where it went, maybe. Scrape and remove topsoil
| and everything on top of it downwind where the particles
| settle. Dredge any waterways. Etc.
|
| Edit: You can read about one such cleanup after the incident
| linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contam
| ination_from...
| lima wrote:
| This article is talking about relocating residents, doesn't
| sound great: https://kbr.id/articles/indeks/membongkar-
| ancaman-paparan-ra...
| Sanzig wrote:
| My guess is it'll eventually be traced back to improperly
| disposed of Cs-137 source. This wouldn't be the first time [1]
| [2].
|
| There was also a famous case in the 80s where a scrapyard in
| Mexico sent some steel contaminated with Cobalt-60 to a foundry
| where it was melted down into rebar. It was detected when a truck
| transporting rebar to a construction site took a wrong turn and
| ended up at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it triggered
| contamination alarms. By that point, the rebar had been used in a
| whole bunch of construction that had to get torn down.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Wow, what a lucky fluke to have caught it. Makes me wonder how
| much construction material has contaminated materials in it
| that go undetected.
| moltar wrote:
| So much that in post Soviet countries it's common to bring a
| Geiger counter to buy real estate. Usually the contamination
| is from natural sources like stone quarry that hasn't been
| properly inspected.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| There was the Kramatorsk radiological accident in the
| Soviet Union (Ukraine) where a cesium 137 source used at a
| gravel quarry was lost. Ended up in the wall of an
| apartment. Four people died of leukemia over 9 years.
| mkfs wrote:
| You should know that Mexican steel was circumspect for years
| after this, with shipments regularly being checked at the
| border for contamination.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| No need to go that far back, Wikipedia lists seven incidents
| just in 2020s. It happens pretty often.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
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(page generated 2025-10-11 23:00 UTC)