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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

Now, this is probably nothing. The sensors are doing their thing and from time to time there is a spike. On the other hand, this is how Chernobyl first was reported...

For more radiation horror pease read about the ”Goiânia accident”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident (Learned about it recently and wow. What a story.)

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Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

In 1989, a small capsule containing highly radioactive caesium-137 was found inside the concrete wall of an apartment building, with a surface gamma radiation exposure dose rate of 1800 R/year.

The source, originally a part of a radiation level gauge, was lost in the Karansky quarry. The gravel from the quarry was used in construction. The cesium capsule ended up in the concrete panel of Apartment 85 of Building 7 on Gvardeytsev Kantemirovtsev Street, between apartments 85 and 52.

Over 9 years, two families lived in Apartment 85. A child's bed was located directly next to the wall containing the capsule. By the time the capsule was discovered, 4 residents of the building had died from leukemia and 17 more had received varying doses of radiation. The accident was detected only after the residents requested that the level of radiation be measured in the apartment by a health physicist. Part of the wall was removed and sent to the Institute for Nuclear Research (NASU), where the cesium capsule was removed and disposed of.

The total number of deaths is alternately reported as 2, 4 (3 children and one adult), or 6 (4 children and 2 adults).

It looks like China(and potentially other places) are willing to accept incredibly dangerous(and expensive to recycle) material and melt it into their main steel supply. After all, cobalt diluted into a supply of steel is harmless, right?

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/radioactive-metal-tiss....

I would really like to know how much of a problem is it, how much of global steel supply is tainted. Can we be buying cars and other items made with steel that's contaminated?

And copper. People stripping contaminated cabling out of old soviet nuclear test sites and selling it as scrap was a major problem in Kazakhstan in the 90's through to the early 2010's. Everything has since been backfilled with concrete, but not before the majority of the cabling entered the supply chain. A long-distance haulier I know found himself surrounded by police with machine guns at Dover, after his truck lit up like a Christmas tree on radiation detectors - he was carrying scrap copper from Romania, which had apparently come from Kaz. That load got stopped, because it went through a radiation detector at a port - but you've got to wonder where the other tens of thousands of tonnes that were lifted ended up over the years.

Here's an article on the cleanup, which mentions the copper theft as an aside:

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/one-greate...

The article you linked to said the shipment came from India...

Either way, this is a legitimate concern that's happened in scrap metal processing all over the world: https://web.archive.org/web/20060614013429/http://www.iaea.o...

Another interesting tidbit (and how I found the above pdf): all steel made after 1940 is slightly radioactive due to nuclear testing, and unsuitable for high sensitivity applications. Some ships sunk in WWI are the primary source of all low-background steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

The references there mislead - The article concerning the ships states "minor salvage is still carried out to recover small pieces of steel" - "Primary" is an overstatement. In reality, a steel manufacturer can produce low background steel by using virgin ore for the smelting, but must know in advance of the run and be advised not to incorporate recycled material (including alloying agents). Some are willing to accommodate such requests for additional cost.

Back when the US was still interested in nuclear non-proliferation, they sponsored (together with the EU) the installation of radiation detection equipment at borders and other chokepoints, mostly in poorer countries.

These are fixed installations, monitoring mostly truck traffic 24/7, so their effectiveness doesn't depend on available manpower or current interest. Eastern Europe from Poland to the -stans has a lot of them, because former soviet republics had a lot of radioactive material lying around that was suddenly less important and even less guarded after the Cold War.

(Scientists were also suddenly out of work, and feared to be receptive to corruption. Fun fact: George Soros spent dozens of millions of his own money to empty a bunch of nuclear physicists in the 90s).

The point being: if it were a widespread problem, it would definitely be noticed.

Can you provide a source for this claim that Soros employed nuclear physicists? After spending a few minutes searching online I can find no evidence of such a thing happening.

Google [soros physicists] and it's full of documentation. I. e. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199708/soros.cfm

How, exactly, does one “empty” a person?

Psychologically abuse them for months or years, place impossible to meet expectations in front of them and tell them that any attempt to meet them is wrong before they've even started to make an effort. Let them be open and vulnerable with you and punish them for it, then later demand they be open and vulnerable and only randomly punish them for doing so. Oh and the entire time you are putting them through this, trivialize their emotions and show them that they're wrong for having them.

That should be a good start.

employ

>George Soros spent dozens of millions of his own money to empty a bunch of nuclear physicists

Is there anything this monster won't do?

Sorry for the autocorrect-induced confusion: he "employed" these people, obviously.

The purpose being to keep them busy and well-fed, preventing them from handing over nuclear material to terrorists for cash.

If it wasn't the mixed-up word or irony, I'd be really confused how this could be likened to the actions of a "monster".

I'm no fan of Soros but in this particular case I was imagining the process of emptying scientists indeed

Interestingly, they (unwittingly) did experiment on this in Taiwan [1]. Smaller doses efdect is nowere as clear-cut as large ones.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/

There's also this place with very high (naturally caused) background radiation, and the residents have also remained quite healthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran#Radioactivi...

It should be easy enough to check with a geiger counter, right?

ctrl-f for "china" on your source doesn't even turn up any results. You're spreading FUD.

Jesus, I've said "China and other places" for a reason, there were plenty of examples of exactly this happening with Chinese steel[0], but this was the most recent example of contaminated steel entering consumer products that I could find.

[0] https://recyclinginternational.com/business/radioactive-elem....

You said: "China(and potentially other places)". You explicitly put it in a seperate category when the source you linked didn't.

Notice the weasel word "plenty", you're still trying to imply there's something special going on there when this whole thread is full of people talking about steel contamination going on globally.

You also claimed they "are willing to accept incredibly dangerous(and expensive to recycle) material and melt it into their main steel supply." when your own article is about radioactive contamination being tracked down in a way that indicates that it's not the norm.

Here's an article about China explicitly denying radioactive scrap. None of the examples involving other countries in this thread seemed willful either.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1996/07/03/China-demands-check-...

Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Or this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident

In May 1998, a caesium-137 source managed to pass through the monitoring equipment in an Acerinox scrap metal reprocessing plant in Los Barrios, Spain. When melted, the caesium-137 caused the release of a radioactive cloud. The Acerinox chimney detectors failed to detect it, but it was eventually detected in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The radioactive levels measured were up to 1000 times higher than normal.

How harmful is 1000 times higher than normal?

This makes me want to get a radiation detector to test the places where I hang out.

How expensive is something like this?

You already have your smartphone, most probably: https://phys.org/news/2014-06-smartphone-detector-app-positi...

Smartphone cameras are sensitive to radiation (radiation produces additional spurious reading in camera sensors - additional noise over thermal one) and it is possible to use these cameras to more or less accurately measure radiation levels.

Couldn't someone make an app?

I looked into this once because I live near a reactor. There's a wide range of quality, but these restored classic ones have a good reputation for $250.

http://www.prepguard.com/prepguard-geiger-counter-radiation-...

$130 or less, shipped.

https://soeks-usa.com/collections/radiation-detectors/produc...

you can build your own https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14209

That's cool, and cheap at 70. But it doesn't detect alpha radiation. Unless I missed something.

You can shield yourself from alpha with two sheets of paper.

You can still inhale and swallow it, internally it is more harmful than beta or gamma.

What about washable face masks?

You can inhale those too but it's much harder.

Hardyhar

So they said in about the paper hat conspiracy.

My favorite radioactive contamination story is the truck in Juarez that was unknowingly contaminated with Cobalt-60 pellets. The truck died (for unrelated reason) and was scrapped and melted down in an iron foundry. The contamination was only discovered by accident when a truckload of rebar made a wrong turn in Los Alamos National Laboratories and set off a radiation alarm. They managed to track down the truck, find the source of the radiation, and get rid of the contaminated metal. Fortunately, nobody died.

https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/accidents/juarez.htm

I live near an aluminum foundry and everything going in goes through a radiation detector.

Same with waste incineration plants, for the same resons - apparently it is sensitive enough to detect even diapers with radio contrast therapy residue inside a full garbage truck.

Some airports got these post-911. They were called "granny detectors" because rather than finding dirty bombs they always found the old person who just underwent a scan using radioactive tracer.

They reality is that many medical procedures irradiate patients. Many dead bodies, if they were not human, would be radioactive enough to be considered hazardous.

> Many dead bodies, if they were not human, would be radioactive enough to be considered hazardous.

I'm curious, can they be (safely) cremated?

Well... they are. A more interesting question is whether such people should be allowed out of hospital. For all the people afraid of letting thier kids play near cellphone towers, perhaps they shouldn't hug grandma for a while after such procedures.

So, it seems to come from nuclear fission, likely of civilian origin, and perhaps originating from fuel elements:

> The Netherland's public health agency said Friday it analysis of Nordic data showed that radionuclides had come "from the direction of Western Russia," indicating "damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant."

> On Friday, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) tweeted that its sensors had detected "harmless" isotopes, identified as Caesium 137, Caesium 134, and Ruthenium 103, "very much probably of civilian origin." > > According to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency based in Vienna, Western Europe has 108 reactors and Central and Eastern Europe 73 reactors.

https://www.dw.com/en/slight-radioactivity-rise-in-nordic-co...

The presence uf Ruthenium-103 indicates that these are fresh fission products because it has a half-life of only 39 days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_ruthenium).

So, it is not impossible that it is a leak in a civil reactor.

Or the Church Rock incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill...

Thank you for this. It's my first time learning about it. I'm almost happy it's unknown since this is such a better argument against nuclear power than 3 Mile etc. Although I suppose for it to be an effective scare tactic you'd have to ask yourself some tricky questions about how much you value indigenous lives over corporations...

Not exactly:

> Approximately one month after the spill, the Puerco River had regained normal levels of salinity, acidity, and radioactivity at low flow levels, with contaminants being detectable only after heavy rains.

Natural uranium is mildly radioactive, but it was a uranium mine. The radioactivity was there before they started. They managed to move it around some. The damage was at least as much attributable to the chemical contaminants which would be present in any similar mining incident regardless of what they were mining.

Saying that it was worse than Three Mile Island is a low bar. Three Mile Island wasn't exactly Chernobyl.

Take a look at the hanford site if you want to be scared. And look at where it is, note that's the Columbia river, which rolls right through northern portland. Or if you don't care about people, it also powers most of the data centers in the northwest. And is right near where most of the hops are grown (won't someone think of the beer!).

https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/AboutHanfordCleanup

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hanford+Site/@46.5656811,-...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Portland+International+Air...

Note that Hanford Reach and the Savannah River site are some of the most ecologically successful areas in the United States, much better than National Parks and National Forests. That's because they're surrounded by razor-wire fences and contaminated enough that no sane persons wants to go near them.

Go Nuclear!

Yup, I've visited the site and walked up to the reactor face! I think the thing about Church Rock that struck me was the absolute negligence demonstrated throughout. There's certainly neglect at Hanford, but to my understanding none of that is due to the design of it when it was active.

That area also has lots of Bitcoin mining operations. All of society is at risk over here.

Definitly, the world would be much worse off without the blockchain!

Highly radioactive materials are couriered around all the time for medical purposes.

Edit: my point being, dangerously radioactive materials are valuable products of nuclear power, not just pollution that comes as a side effect.

> how much you value indigenous lives over corporations...

Why is this the dichotomy for supporting modern nuclear power plants? Or in this case a uranium processing plants?

Especially compared to burning burning and mining coal.

It's not. The point is that antagonists of nuclear power need scary scenarios to make it effective, and "poisoning tons of people that you don't care about" isn't one of them.

If you want an argument against new nuclear power, you need to look no further than at the costs of production:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

That's a projected 92£ per MWh, with likely further costs increases.

Compare that to currently around 60€ / MWh for new solar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

It’s too bad that the anti nuclear green activists succeeded. We could be on our way to achieving a realistic 0 carbon future by now.

Wow.. Never heard of it before, thanks.

That heavily reminds me the "Roadside Picnic" (1972) novel of Strugatsky brothers (that same novel, that coined term "Stalker"). The only difference that the heroes of the novel dealt with consequences of alien civilization visit, and ”Goiânia accident” is purely our's own...

> "Roadside Picnic" (1972) novel of Strugatsky brothers

Before his death, Boris Strugatsky gave a license for writing a sequel to Finnish author Ville Vuorela. Vuorela published The Hollow Pilgrim in 2014 as ebook. Something went wrong with the deal between the small Finnish publisher and Amazon, and now the ebook is annoyingly difficult to find.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23354402-the-hollow-pilg...

The filming of Stalker[1] was itself fraught with industrial contamination — possibly with to the extent of eventually claiming Tarkovsky’s own life, by cancer.

Zona by Geoff Dyer is an excellent discourse on the work, which I heartily recommend, and where I first read about this and many other fascinating details.

[1] ...or ker-tan-kep as my own ignorant tongue insists on pronouncing it.

Roadside picnic didn't coin the term stalker. Stalker is a Soviet film based on the book.

Yes it did. "Stalker" is the name of their profession in the book.

The word "stalker" comes from the 1500s. Deer stalking is a profession that existed in the 1800s. Roadside Picnic came out in 1971.

Maybe you mean Roadside Picnic introduced the English word "stalker" to the Russian language? It certainly didn't coin the term (create a new word).

It coined the use of "stalker" to refer to a specific sort of post-apocalyptic profession, someone who is adept at navigating the waste left by some disaster or "forbidden" places. Dangers might be physical, radiological, or metaphysical.

In modern usage it has made its way into books and video games, and people who do tours of Chernobyl have been known to refer to themseves as such.

"Roadside Picnic" is a Russian book. The word "stalker" wasn't used in Russian language at all before it. Hence, it coined the term. The rest is demagogy.

That's not what coining a word means.

I'm not a huge film buff or anything, but I did watch Stalker. The music and cinematography was captivating in a way I rarely get in anything but video games or books. Usually movies don't capture me that way, they're far too fast, literal and descriptive. Stalker left so much to the imagination that I was constantly engaged in trying to figure out what they were thinking, where they were going, and what it was they expected to find. It gave me all the time I needed to think about it too.

Not SF, but watch "Ivan's Childhood", his first film. I saw it first on New Years Eve in Scotland. Me and my then wife went round to her friends house to pick her up for the usual celebrations. While the girls were getting made-up I started watching the film on the TV - I had never heard of it or Tarkovsky before, and I have no idea why it was on at New Year. They eventually came down and said "let's go" but I refused - "catch you later" - I just had to watch the film. Somewhat later friends mum came in and said "X why aren't you out with Y and Z" - I said "I HAVE to watch this". And I did, and then I went out and got pissed. It's a great film.

I highly recommend his other movies too - I love Solaris and Andrey Rublev, but others are great too.

And I think currently in his steps is following another great Russian director, Andrey Zvyagintsev. The Return was mindblowing.

If you like slow paced movies I would recommend checking out his (Tarkovsky) other works. Ingmar Bergman and Bela Tarr also come to mind. They are definitely slow and pretty far from being literal too.

> Usually movies are too fast

Stalker consists of 143 shots in just under three hours. A blissful pace.

It was interesting but much too slow.

Roadside Picnic is the equivalent of LOTR or Neuromancer when it comes to defining a genre of pop culture.

It was published 7 years before the movie Stalker.

It is a short novel and a great read, it is also a stark contrast to Western SciFi.

Both Roadside Picnic from Russia and the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy from China have made me interested in Science Fiction from non-western cultures. There's a freshness of view that's hard to describe.

Then definitely track down Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Macmillan%27s+B...

and:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107

Think Roadside Picnic x 100, because that's the quantity of really excellent science fiction stories and ideas you can expect.

A free (but bad) translation of 'Self Discovery' by Vladimir Savchenko is available if you search. I used this, together with my own physical copy, to make a proper ebook - let me know if you want a copy; I can't locate it at this moment...

And, in my opinion, the finest science fiction short story ever written (apologies to Asimov's Nightfall and Godwin's The Cold Equations): Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov https://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp

Not sure if you consider him non-Western or not but if you haven't read him try Stanislaw Lem.

You'd better read the book first before making such statements.

You've literally said a book from 1971 invented a new word. And I'm saying that the word already existed.

It's probably not a problem... probably... just a showing a small discrepancy. It's well within acceptable bounds.

Seriously, I’d be interested in some stats on how various nuclear accidents have been disclosed/reported. Feels like a good litmus test of transparency.

Set anti-mass spectrometers to 105%.

> *Now, this is probably nothing. The sensors are doing their thing and from time to time there is a spike.

I can't imagine that the engineers at that monitoring station wouldn't check for measuring errors before releasing such a statement.

I find something in this story puzzling - why were the IGR owners charged? Based on the story as published on Wikipedia, they tried to recover the unit, but they were officially barred to do so.

That part of the article is poorly phrased and leaves out some important information on the judgement. There's a link to an issue of Nuclear Law Bulletin that provides better detail.

The biggest charges were ordered to be paid by CNEN (since preventing this kind of accident is part of their job, and they were notified of the potential danger well in advance) and IPASGO (the new owners of the site, who were also aware of the danger and didn't really do anything about it). Finally as you say, two people from IGR (the clinic that moved out) were also charged, because they removed "gates, windows, timberwork and the roof" from the facility while leaving the radioactive device for later - which might also explain why the new owners eventually got pissed and decided to lock them out.

In short the whole thing was a collective train wreck, but the most obvious failure seems to be that CNEN should have taken action immediately after being notified of the danger. Hopefully they're a bit more reactive now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120318233148/http://www.oecd-n...

When faced with tragedy some people need to know "who was guilty", so this leads to lots of lawsuits like this.

Lack of education led to the trespassing of property, zero knowledge of radiation to believing it was supernatural, the justice system preventing the cleanup, etc. Means there is no single point of guilt and its hard for people to grasp this.

For anyone else interested in the topic of radiological accidents, check out the reports published by the IAEA. https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/pub815_web.pd...

Curiously like in the series Chernobyl, the first person to take radiation measurements at the scene in Goiania thought his equipment was faulty, because it measured at the maximum of the scale.

These sensors can be incredibly sensitive and can capture contamination from small technical or medical radiation sources over a long distance.

What is much more of a mystery is how little we understand about the effects of low-dose radiation. In Germany, there was a study started after since 1990 a cluster of leukemia cases appeared around a specific power plant near Hamburg. So, a large statistical study was done about the incidence of leukemia in all of Germany, and whether there is a correlation with distance to power plants. There was a correlation found (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939), the incidence of Lekuemia appears about 50% higher - but we don't know why. The classical radiation-dosis effect models do not explain what is observed.

As there were no significant contamination accidents in Germany, there is some suspicion about the effects of low-dose radiation. Of course, the largest case of low-dose contamination in Western Europe and Germany was the Chernobyl accident from 1986. There have been some statistical large-scales studies which observed (small) changes in sex ratios (that is, the quotient of male and female offspring) https://archive.org/details/pubmed-PMC3765590/mode/2up . But still, these are only correlations.

One train of thought has been that low-level radiation could effect the expression of genetic information. The field of study which looks at this is called epigenetics. It turns out that the working of the genetic "code" is surprisingly complex. It is not like a app package that gets installed on your PC, but it is rather a very complex self-modifying program which reacts to different environmental factors during installation. Now, there is some research of which factors could affect gene expression and how radation could play a role:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

This is by far not mainstream research, but the fact that we have no explanation for the correlation between incidence of leukemia and distance to nuclear plants points at that the classical models are missing something significant and we do not know yet the whole picture.

Another: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Well There's Your Problem did an episode on that: https://youtu.be/34rdxDgpaaA

Should probably add a disclaimer for people who expect a dry engineering history podcast! wtypp is truly excellent, but go in expecting irreverence

I remember seeing the Goiania accident on the news. I was seven years old. It was not scary for me back then as it is right now.

I could have been a poster child for the "Eu amo Goiânia" campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp8bq6kgCu8). I lived in Rio but had family in Goiânia and was visiting them when the accident happened.

School was tough for a couple of weeks...

I read about that story. it's incredible. love it (in a weird way I guess, but it was so fascinating)

The Goiania accident sounds like the source of the plot for Pu-239

> For more radiation horror

I'll skip, thanks. I already get enough horror stories and don't need wacky outliers leaning on my brain's various failure modes. Like, it took me less than ten seconds to find a news article from last month in a specific city titled "family of 5 killed in car crash". I can't spend my anxiety on things that are so much less dangerous than anything else I do in a given day.

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