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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

>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

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

employ

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.

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

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-...

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