On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.
On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.
In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.
There’s another scary Goldilocks aspect too, which is what I thought your comment was going to be about when I started reading it.
Stuff with a really short half life is horribly radioactive, but not for long. Stuff with a half life of millions of years sticks around forever, but it’s not throwing off that much radiation. But stuff in the middle (a half life of perhaps decades to a thousand years) can be very dangerous and remain that way for a long time.
I wish phones had radiation detectors(Aside from camera based ones that aren't accurate and use battery). If 100M people had radiation detection, I'm sure we'd get a few hits every once in a while.
Plus it can probably be done in roughly a headphone jack sized spot.
There were also several incidents from the russian army just up and leaving orphan sources in the wild when the URSS failed e.g. Lilo and Lia (both in Georgia).
Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004.
Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.
This also happened in Taiwan. A metalworks reused Cobalt-60-contaminated rebar and then hundreds of apartment buildings were constructed with it in the 80s. The government tried to find and buy them, but it seems that some people didn’t want to sell because of the amount offered. There are still some of them around.
It seems like an amazing coincidence that they were able to work out so much about how this happened. It makes you wonder how often this happens and noone finds out.
Nah, I think it would be more surprising if you couldn't track this stuff down. In the industrial and construction world, everything works off of POs and work orders. When a company buys or sells anything, there's almost always a paper trail, and usually some internal records showing what material went where. If you have the money to spend on the investigation (and an easy-to-detect signature in the material itself, like radioactivity) you can probably trace contamination all the way back to the hole in the ground it came out of.
My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.
It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident.
Yes! apparently the only reason why this thing was discovered and talked about was because a trailer taking contaminated rebar to the US passed near a military airbase that had reactive material detector and detected the contaminated material. Then the US blew the whistle and pushed Mexico to do a proper investigation.
Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...)
Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.
This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.
I think putting it this way absolves the Brazilian government too much. What happened is 100% their fault.
The hospital moved to a new site but as there was disagreement with their previous landlord they were prevented to move equipments by the police despite trying to secure the source which was later stolen and having repeatedly warned of its danger.
That is an extremely cavalier take, especially considering:
> His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
Yeah, tragic. They are no less human than you are. They had no clue what they were doing, like all of us in general. What fraction of the population is aware of the effect of radiation and the toxicity of medical sources? How would they go about assessing the risk in this situation?
Uncontrolled contamination can also harm innocent bystanders, in this case children.
I know that low-empathy privileged commenters are to be expected on HN, but I nonetheless find it impressive that such a short comment can illuminate so many biases in one go.
Flip take : using social media to feign empathy for abstract contexts - ones that you actually have zero emotional connection to - is merely how left leaning people signal their bona fides.
I hear what you're saying but it's helpful to look at this with an additional layer of abstraction.
This is not just virtue-signaling in combat with edginess-signaling for their respective audience. It's more importantly a testament to prevailing sub-ideologies within portions of the population.
Edgy comments in tech forums like these are a signal of larger-scale class warfare (a loaded term, but bear with me). White collar techworkers think nothing of building skinner boxes and ad services all day as they are rewarded handsomely for it. In combination with all sorts of other factors, you end up with worsening social conditions across the board.
Some guy being nonchalant about dead Brazilian families and taking pleasure in signaling it is just a manifestation of overall societal nonchalance about rights and negative externalities among high-skilled workers and capital owners. These are real phenomenons that have consequences regardless of whether I myself might virtue signal about rejecting them.
Right, they are so poor that they are using their what little knowledge they have to scavenge an abandoned building for scrap they can sell to feed themselves and their children.
If you had never been taught about radiation, you wouldn't know what to do about it either. It is not like radioactive materials are a common everyday occurrence for everyone.
What is wrong with you that you cannot see that they are also humans just like us, and were born into horrible circumstances that they never got the education to learn about this, through no fault of their own whatsoever?
There are so many things we could have if we actually could somehow have faith that the required (for safety, pollution mitigation, etc.) full lifecycle was actually honored.
Instead, everything is dominated by lazy jerks. The other day, I noticed my neighbor's house painter digging a hole. I said hello and asked what was up, and he said "Yes, I need to dispose of the water and paint from my sprayer, so I dig holes and pour it in. Don't worry, I will fill the hole back in when I'm done." This was in the bay area.
People just will not do the right thing by default if it is even remotely more work and for most people, thought is the hardest work there is.
I was curious, because I know SF has a high enough population:water ratio that stricter treatment is required, but on the other hand modern non-oil paints are relatively chemically safe (at worst, probably the off-gasing parts).
"People just will not do the right thing by default if it is even remotely more work and for most people, thought is the hardest work there is. "
My theory is simply low education.
Since aeons we burried our garbage and it was never a problem. It only started quite recently, that our technology is so advanced, that it simply will not decompose. But rather contaminate.
But only a very low percentage of people actualy understands this.
So sure, that painter surely was "educated" at some point, that doing this is bad. But they simply do not believe it. "Not a big deal, you know". Same with plastic bags, same with climate change.
Maybe we should start proper science education a lot earlier?
Is something less tragic if the victims weren’t fully participating in capitalism at the time of injury? If they’re performing a societal function that you obviously think is beneath you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident