The Cobalt-60 Accident of Ciudad Juarez (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Cobalt-60 Accident of Ciudad Juarez (2019)

culturacolectiva.com

116 pointsrespinal91 comments

There's a rather alarming photo of a Cobalt-60 source with the label "drop and run". This is a 3540-curie source (i.e. a lot). Someone did the calculations and figured if you followed the instructions quickly you'd probably survive.

https://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2018-august/...

Another related warning sign...

> On February 15, 2007, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—adapted a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.

> It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_iso_radiation.svg

More specifically, that graphic is reserved for use inside high-level radioactive sources, in locations that should normally never be seen. As such, most people who encounter it "in the wild" will never have seen it before, even on other surfaces of the equipment they're working with.

Interestingly, that could backfire. I've run into several people who point out that if they lacked context on it, it could be mistaken an angel smithing something else someone is running from, possibly leading some uninformed faithful person to see it as some sort of weapon for self defense.

I was rather amazed by the creative thinking required, but it did ram home the difficulty of getting an unequivocal, in ambiguous message across.

Most likely, that person isn't merely faithful but also in the midst of an acute psychotic break. And, yeah, they're going to be able to come up with some quite creative interpretations. The ideas you'll hear from these folks are wild, but to them, they're internally very logically consistent.

Imagine someone in that state, and they see a tattoo on their body of a "+" sign. Maybe that person normally just really likes math, and got a tattoo of the most unambiguous symbol to represent that that they could. It could take on a lot of different meanings in a psychotic episode, something like thinking there's a math and Christianity conspiracy/link, and maybe they think they had a bad childhood experience with the religion, so now anyone who supports math is part of that conspiracy, and obviously evil.

Something that basic and seemingly innocuous still has the potential send their mind spinning.

You might find "How to Send a Message 1,000 Years to the Future"[1] and "Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"[2] pretty interesting.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...

[2] https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/

That was in fact the exact thing we were talking about at the time during a Philosophy of Art course with regards to art as a medium of communication. Btw, in my original post smithing should have been smiting; but autocorrect.

I recall many guffaw from people at the time thatsucha project was even a subject of research, but every time I look back at code I haven't touched in 6 months or more, I tend to end up thinking about it again.

Id argue that the more obvious sign would be one in which all three drawings are present, but stacked vertically, with the radiation sign on top, followed by the death's head, but with an = sign between those two and no wavy arrow rays. Then below those two and their = sign, the person running with arrow. This would make it obvious that the radiation in the object means death and that running is extremely recommended. The triangle of graphics, with the radiation rays hitting both below almost seems to imply that X time is so deadly that you have no hope of escape even if you run.

I personally find equal style explanatory signs confusing. This might sound like a bad pun, but they literally don’t provide directions and I’d have to consider both expressions and it’s applicability w.r.t. situations and circumstances.

One example that comes off top of my head is Ubuntu installer disc’s “man = keyboard” sign.

I believe it is supposed to read “for universal access = hit any key on keyboard”, after seeing it for years, but for long I thought it could be “A keyboard is to hands and legs for a civilized person” or “use keyboard to see logs” or something.

I feel like that warning symbol isn't great. When you first look at it, you try to draw meaningful connections between the three items: radiation<->skull, skull<->person-running, radiation<->person-running, but what was intended was (radiation->skull)->leave immediately. A sign split in two, with (radiation->skull) on one half and a person running on the other might be clearer.

If anyone is wondering, I prefer blue paint on bike sheds.

Perfect clarity is difficult, but the IAEA (which designed that graphic) did their homework. The symbol was tested with 1,650 people from a wide variety of countries. I haven't been able to find details on their results, but I can't imagine they would have settled on this design if there were straightforward improvements to be made.

(With regard to your particular ideas, any graphical division between sections in the graphic could be misunderstood as a protective barrier against the danger represented by the skull. Wrong message entirely!)

And it's certain to be an improvement on the standard radioactivity symbol. In a global context, recognition of that symbol is poor -- it's frequently understood as a propeller or a flower.

This is a difficult problem. The US department of energy did a study on it awhile ago, but sadly the page was scrubbed a few years ago.

Fortunately, it was archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170910060455/http://www.wipp.e...

Some interesting excerpts:

>We decided against simple "Keep Out" messages with scary faces. Museums and private collections abound with such guardian figures removed from burial sites. These earlier warning messages did not work because the intruder knew that the burial goods were valuable.

>Note our use of irregular geometries and denial of craftsmanship. None of our designs uses any of the regular or "ideal" geometric forms, and only crude craftsmanship is sought, except for the precision of engraved messages. Why? the geometry of ideal forms, like squares and cubes, circles and spheres, triangles and pyramids is a fundamental human invention, a seeking of perfection in an imperfect world. Historically, people have used these ideal forms in places that embody their aspirations and ideals. In our designs, there is much irregularity both of forms and in their locations and directions, yet done by people with obvious knowledge of pure geometry. This shows as understanding of the ideal, but at the same time a deliberate shunning of it...suggesting we do not value this place, that it is not one that embodies our ideals.

>In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history.

>...it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.

That study was for signage and messaging that could last for ten thousand years and work across cultures, i.e. a drastically different problem.

This thread is about industrial safety signage set in, and for, our current time and culture.

DROP AND RUN works, to some extent.

"HBO’s Chernobyl gave us a raw glimpse of the devastating consequences a nuclear reaction can have."

It really frustrates me when a show that contains many significant factual errors [0] (e.g. the exploding like a nuclear bomb thing, a very harmful error) is then used as a basis for a factual column.

Now I don't really trust the contents of the article.

And here we see the same kind of misrepresentation:

"but they also spread these pieces all over the street on the way to the dumpster and left basically a bomb of cobalt-60. Bear that in mind."

This 'nuclear energy is like a nuclear bomb' delusion is really harmful and pushes a narrative that many ordinary believe - if you use nuclear material for non-weapon purposes it risks behaving like a nuclear weapon. Journalists should take some responsibility for this kind of thing - it has very real impacts on public perception of nuclear and therefore govt decision making.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsdLDFtbdrA

> This 'nuclear energy is like a nuclear bomb' delusion is really harmful and pushes a narrative that many ordinary believe

This was nicely explained by former nuclear submarine commander [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/Xv9aaTJVIxA?t=683

I don't think it's pushing a narrative. I think it's just sloppy thinking/describing.

A nuclear detonation presents multiple risks/dangers, on multiple time scales. One of the longer term dangers is the dispersion of radioactive material over a large area, resulting in that area becoming uninhabitable. That is what the author is describing. They're not trying to scare you into thinking the material is going to explode

The HBO show literally talks about an explosion 'equivalent' to a MT bomb. There has been ongoing misinformation about Chernobyl and a potential nuclear explosion had the melted core reached the flooded basement, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKV1piLjoa0

I remember thinking this before I saw the thunderf00t video on this. Misinformation like this sticks.

The article is less clear (though they specifically say 'bomb' further perpetuating the myth), but it opens by referring to the HBO special as if it were fact. I think you're probably right (and the author is probably just equally confused as I was previously) but their intent doesn't change the fact that misinformation is being perpetuated.

I get frustrated that artistic license is taken with stuff like this and end up perpetuating harmful misunderstanding. HBO made a great entertaining show but they probably should have been more careful on this side of things.

> I think you're probably right (and the author is probably just equally confused as I was previously)

Hah! I was just going to add the following to my comment:

You're both making the same category of error. The author assumes everybody knows he's talking about radioactive dispersion. You're assuming everybody thinks he's talking about explosion potential.

I have nothing to add about any other potential misinformation - here or elsewhere. I just think this particular instance chalks up to sloppiness

Poor writing style, lack of understanding of units (equating emitted and absorbed, comparing total dose with dose per unit of time, etc)

The accident is pretty interesting and you can find some good articles, much better written.

It felt kind of like a machine translation.

Probably. I read it first in Spanish from the BBC https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-54429012 and also found the one that someone quoted here from the New York Times.

It's gotta suck to be so critical of free. lol

Yeah I was going to say the same. Have read about this before from much better written sources!

I'm originally from Cd. Juárez. And the house next to my parents' house had to be demolished and rebuilt because it had been constructed with Cobalt-60 contaminated rebar.

Decades later, just in our block, there have been many cases of cancer (1 renal carcinoma -- my mom, 1 testicular cancer, 1 melanoma, 3x breast cancer). Sometimes I wonder if that's the natural incidence or if it is in fact a cancer cluster caused by remnants of Cobalt-60.

I'm tempted to go back there with a radiation counter of some sort, inside the houses, but I have no idea if a regular geiger counter would suffice (a neighbor who had a radiation counter for construction already checked it out and found nothing when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if he was using the right equipment or if it was sentitive enough. This was in the 90s, and the counter looked like a car battery with a single needle meter).

> Decades later, just in our block, there have been many cases of cancer (1 renal carcinoma -- my mom, 1 testicular cancer, 1 melanoma, 3x breast cancer). Sometimes I wonder if that's the natural incidence or if it is in fact a cancer cluster caused by remnants of Cobalt-60.

That is such an interesting and scary thing about it. It is really hard, and takes a lot of careful data collection, to figure out how much cancer is "normal" everyday cancer from smoking, genetics, voodoo curses; and how much is actually "extra" cancer from possible radiation exposure. It would be especially difficult on something as small scale as a neighborhood block, since random variation of even one or two extra or fewer people unlucky enough to get “natural” cancer could completely skew an analysis attempt.

It's interesting how radioactive sources are often detected while looking for something else. About 10 years ago, I was pulled into a situation where PET imaging patients were setting off radiation detectors coming back into the US at border crossings. Now, it's not unusual for patients who have been given radioisotopes to set off detectors at airports, etc, what was unusual is that PET isotopes usually have very short half-lives. In this case, the patients had been given Rb-82, which has a half-life just over 1 minute. Yet they were setting off detectors weeks after getting PET scans.

What was happening was that there was contamination of the isotope. They were getting more than the allowable amount of Sr-82 along with the Rb-82. Sr-82 has a half life of about 25 days.

The way that Rb-82 is made, is the pharmacy is provided with a generator or 'cow', which is a bunch of Sr-82 which decays to make Rb-82. The 'cow' is 'milked', which means passing saline through it, and if all goes well the Rb-82 comes out with the saline and the Sr-82 stays in the cow. Some Sr-82 always gets out but usually it is a small amount.

Now, Sr-82 is not easy to measure, and the limits are very small. Sr-82 only has a few very low energy gammas. I happen to be an expert in the type of device normally used to measure it (a re-entrant dose calibrator). The QA check used in the clinics was, shall we say, optimistic about the ability to detect it.

Here's an article about the situation: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-d...

Oh I've heard and read about this. There's a great Mexican podcast that talks about this "accident".

The outrageous thing is how incompetent, corrupt and lazy our Mexican government is. That this radioactive material was used for construction. And there ARE still radioactive houses all around the country. And of course nobody is responsible. It was just due to the USA intervention that the stupid Mexican government did something (albeit half asses).

My country is a joke.

As someone from the US, I would have smiled with a smirk after reading your comment, but seeing how my country deals with current crises, now I fear my country is now no better, and I realize how important it is that everyone does their part and everyone is fairly rewarded.

Yes... and no. See, where I see the main difference is the attitude of the people itself. Forget the government and politics. When something happens in everyday life, there are a series of institutions which become active (simple people doing their work) and they react to situations to solve the issues at hand.

The difference is that, it is in those everyday life decisions/situations that my fellow countrymen just make bad and stupid decisions. It is the lack of "do things right" mentality. From my experience visiting the US often, that's what "saves" it, everyday people still have a certain judgement bar of what's right and what's wrong. Here in Mexico... it is just not there, people just rush through things to get freed from the chore. As a podcast I linked said: When the authorities come to interview you about what you saw, a lot of people will just say they did not see anything, mainly so that they don't have to deal with any follow up. You don't see that in the USA for example when an accident happens, or a robery: People usually standup and stay to help.

The US government has proven in 2020 that it is just as careless and incompetent with people's lives.

What's the name of the podcast? I'm learning Spanish, and would listen to it if it's either in Spanish or English

https://youtu.be/VPBpfWVYxrM

It's in Spanish . But if you can understand it, it is really good.

Thanks very much!

There are very, very few countries that wouldn't cough up a zero-accountability half-assed response to a similar major incident. Corruption, protecting decision-makers from accountability, and taking half-measures are, sadly, inherent to the human condition.

Just look at how badly most of the world has handled COVID-19.

It’s terrifying how not-together our general human act is, in most places on Earth. Even large, well-funded governments resort to coverups and lies in the face of disasters, even ones that are somewhat to be expected (in general, if not specific timing).

It’s what depressed me most about COVID. Every large country has engaged in various forms of cooking its books related to deaths or hospitalizations, or saving face, with almost no exceptions. China, US, Russia, Japan, Brazil - all of them massaging the counting (and/or restricting publication) so that accurate information is impossible to obtain.

What’s wrong with simply publishing the facts, straight, and telling people how it is? Are governments and those within them so terrified of the weaponization of narrative that the best game-theoretic optimal choice is to lie by default?

Is this really the best we can do?

politicians are usually held responsible for stuff that goes on during their term, whether or not they could have done anything about it or even if it's a consequence of something the previous administration did. these kinds of nuances don't really come across to the voters, so it's much easier to just downplay everything bad that happens on your watch.

So the sad thing is, there are international resources available to help exactly in these kinds of scenarios.

Look at the International Atomic Energy Agency's report of the incident in Georgia(the country) where lumberjacks found an abandoned radioactive source in a forest - Georgia alone would have never had the resources to deal with it, but because they followed the international protocol the entire operation was done under supervision, cleaned up properly and affected people given top-class help in foreign hospitals:

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...

My point is - all that the Mexican government had to do was to swallow some pride and work with an agency like IAEA to clean it up properly.

While what you otherwise say is true, I think it is an error to attribute it to the "human condition". There is no proof that humans will inevitably act this way under all circumstances. But, by claiming it to be inevitable, you ensure that you will make no effort for it to be any other way.

Similar incident in Brazil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Short YouTube doco:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8

NY Times coverage from 1984: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-...

The "good" thing about radiation is, it's easy to track:

> By Dec. 6, Mr. Sotelo had thrown the capsule off his truck into the salvage yard. The date is known because all paperwork from the junkyard dated Dec. 6 or later is radioactive.

…

> The capsule was made of nonferrous metal. Every time it was scooped up by the magnet, it eventually fell to the ground, spilling out cobalt pellets like salt from a shaker. The pellets were ferrous. The magnet picked them up and mixed them into the scrap leaving the junkyard. Some pellets were pulverized and thoroughly spread across the huge junkyard, and others are believed to have become imbedded in truck tires and spread along highways.

> In this manner, 300 curies of radioactive cobalt made its way to two foundries. One in Juarez manufactured metal table legs and sent them to the largest distributor of restaurant tables in the United States. Another in Chihuahua produced about 5,000 tons of rebar, or steel rods used to reinforce concrete in building projects.

> About 600 tons of the contaminated steel was shipped to the United States in December and January.

> Spill Discovered by Accident

> When a delivery truck took a wrong turn near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico on Jan. 17, a radiation alarm was tripped. Thus, by accident, did the American and Mexican authorities learn of the contamination. It was quickly traced to the junkyard, which was closed Jan. 20. Mr. Sotelo's truck was impounded Jan. 26.

And they flew a helicopter over roads to find more pellets that had been hidden in bitumen!

Thanks for sharing, it's much better written than the article in the post.

Yes, I should have posted that one. I read it as well, but read it first in Spanish from the BBC https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-54429012.

What they didn’t know is that by breaking the box, they unleashed 6,010 pellets of cobalt-60, a synthetic radioactive isotope of cobalt with the force of 1,003 curies. To put it into perspective, being exposed for a significant amount of time to a single curie could fry some of your organs.

Anyone want to say more about this? This description seems a little frustrating.

The 1984 NYTimes article nl shared in this thread has more details.

Excerpt:

When the capsule was breached it held about 400 curies of radioactive cobalt in the 6,010 pellets. Each pellet, according to Joel Lubenau, a health physicist at the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, produced a radiation dose of 25 rads per hour two inches from the pellet. One to 50 rads per hour is considered a significant radiation dose. In comparison, the highest exposure a bystander could have received from the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island was 100 millirads, or about one-tenth of a rad.

A rad is a unit of absorbed radiation. An average chest X-ray produces 20 to 30 millirads instantaneously. A lethal dose for half the population is 450 rads received instantaneously over the whole body.

Radiation exposure measurement is complicated. [0] has a decent description.

This story[1] about another cobalt-60 incident in Mexico (!) says: "With cobalt-60, a single-curie source will give you a dose of a little more than 1 rem in an hour if kept at arm's length". [0] says that "Eventual death for 50% if exposure is above 450 rem; others recover in about six months" and that 600 rem will kill almost 100% of people.

So yes, if you drive for 8-12 hours with a bunch of cobalt-60 in your truck it is going to be pretty harmful.

[0] http://www.3rd1000.com/chem101/chem105e.htm

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a9840/mexica...

One more thing to know about Co-60: its half-life of 5.27 years, combined with the radiation it emits, makes it particularly dangerous. The half life being so long means it's a 30 year problem (after 5 half lives you're at about 3% of original activity), while its being so short (many metals are thousands of years) means that a small mass can have a high activity. Its gammas that it radiates are fairly energetic compared to most (a problem not encapsulated by the Ci unit) and it bioaccumulates so that small amounts inhaled or ingested can provide huge doses over the subsequent decades.

What would be the best sensor one could get so that it could pick up random radiation sources like this? Are there any good ones in keychain form?

The thought process is that if there is random steel laying around releasing unhealthy amounts of radiation, would it be nice to know before going to the doctor?

You’re looking for an Electronic Pocket Dosimeter or EPD

Do modern ones use scintillators?

You can buy (or build from a kit if you can solder) a functional geiger counter that will detect gamma radiation (what cobalt-60 emits) for under 100 USD. They're a bit too big to put on a keychain, but you can easily keep one in a backpack.

Or maybe they should outfit police cars and FedEx trucks with them? They could issue warnings if they drive by a radiation source.

You might find https://safecast.org/ interesting.

I own a GQ GMC-500+: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071JWB7TJ/ There are several results for "bluetooth geiger counter", I assume some of those will pair to a phone.

>Are there any good ones in keychain form?

No. The sensing element needs to have a fair bit of volume, to have a decent chance to detect rare impact events. (Remember, the characteristic feature of gamma radiation is that it penetrates, easily passing through normal matter. A geiger tube has to be big.)

Additionally, geiger tubes consume a fair amount of power. It needs to be recharged daily, like a cell phone. Not something easily carried around just in case.

Additionally, additionally, the 500+ has two tubes, which lets it measure higher doses of radiation. A cheaper single tube geiger counter designed to detect low levels of radiation will saturate when exposed to more dangerous levels of radiation. (This was a fun detail of the Chernobyl disaster: all the dosimeters the staff had access to maxed out at 0.001 R/s, which is far below any threatening level. This lead them to underestimate how bad the explosion was for many hours.)

Apparently wristwatch-sized detectors also exist, and there was a case in Czech Republic that an walking-by engineer accidentally found a missing radiation source in the wild using his watch, it was buried in a playground [0], unbelievable!

[0] https://english.radio.cz/passerby-stumbles-upon-radioactive-...

Fascinating story. The detector used in this case appears to be a Polimaster PM1208.

Photo source:

https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/zvysenou-radiaci-v-praze-...

Manufacturer page:

https://www.pce-instruments.com/english/measuring-instrument...

Well There's Your Problem did an episode about this I believe.

https://pca.st/episode/2bf5024d-d237-451c-af69-61d4e2aa386b

Ah, I remember this one. There was a truck full of metal tables being driven to various restaurants around Chicago, the metal included scrap from Juarez. My favorite coffee shop was going to be one of the stops.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/02/03/a...

Article is interesting but seems quite exaggerated;

> (Compared to chernobyl) the Cobalt-60 accident of Ciudad Juarez is by far bigger, precisely because it’s impossible to really know and determine the number of victims

Wut?

I've never heard of this one before, but it's remarkable how many similarities it shares with the Goiânia incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

similar case happened in india https://www.ndtv.com/cities/killer-cobalt-60-delhi-universit...

> and left basically a bomb of cobalt-60

It wasn't a bomb. This is an amateurish article.

non-cancerous mirror https://archive.is/5ffIg

Orphan sources of radioactivity are pretty common in industrialized world. Most are not really harmful until you start breaking them or cutting them in half. There's Soviet plutonium smoke detectors, luminous radium paint on various gauges (mostly dark today, but its dust is still dangerous if it gets inside the body), even some unmanned boiler rooms used radiation-based water level switches.

There is a notable topic on Russian enthusiast forum, “Stuff you shouldn't touch”:

https://caves.ru/threads/То-что-не-надо-трогать-руками.8503/

There are many examples, mostly from the guy working in the official hazardous materials control in Vladivostok region dealing with radiation alarms on freight trains and scrap metal yards.

Old pictures are dead, but you can recover them by visiting http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/th...

http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/th...

etc. (It was pain in the ass to find these, because the forum has switched its engine (and URL format) at least four times, and the Web Archive only sees slashes as meaningful path delimiters, so all the topics on a typical forum are recognized as one big mess of individual web pages that are on the same level of hierarchy. Anyone trying to filter something based on a parameter in the link should better get the full dump of saved URLs for the website from CDX server API and deal with it locally.)

Another link to a different forum:

http://forum.rhbz.org/forums.php?forum=6

You probably won't read the discussions, but there is a lot of photos and links in the topics. For example,

https://realt.onliner.by/2019/03/14/mchs-18

Dead grandma was a chemist, so her relatives had to dump a full basket of various uranium salts when cleaning the garbage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwXc2X2qlM

Indian news report on a 2010 Cobalt-60 incident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCH3vKIGNlg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAEoSE7eITo

Unloading the '70s radiotherapy machine (with '70s technology, and mostly by the '70s people).

So, if you see some cylindrical or ovoid thing that is heavy and strong that seemingly has no use apart from being heavy and strong, don't try to find out what's inside.

Oh, and some the latter photos can be seen directly on http://rhbz.pw/

Holy clickbait title, Batman!

Spoiler: there was no reactor involved.

I'm increasingly of the view that any comments complaining about 'clickbait' titles are worse than the actual practice (such as it is).

There is no mention of a reactor in the original title. So probably you are referring to 'Mexican Chernobyl'. Yes, Chernobyl was a nuclear accident involving a reactor but not all nuclear accidents involve a reactor and Chernobyl is being used in this context as a well-known disastrous nuclear accident (not necessarily involving a reactor). And the original title clarifies that they are talking about this greater set.

Furthermore, HN, as is its admirable practice, has rewritten the title anyway. If you have an issue with the title you can easily get the mods attention by mentioning 'title' in your comment and making some constructive criticism (which yours wasn't).

(I wouldn't usually spend so much time responding to a bad comment but taking this one as just an example of this particular genre of bad comments.)

'Mexican Chernobyl' clearly primes the reader to expect a nuclear reactor disaster, like, you know, the Russian Chernobyl. I'm Mexican, know about this cobalt source case, and yet I wondered if the article was about a disaster in our sole nuclear reactor, Laguna Verde, that I didn't know about. 100% pure clickbait.

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

> 100% pure clickbait

And thus you undermine your case. It obviously isn't "100% pure clickbait". (What would that even mean?) Confirming again that people who use this word are usually engaging in a hyperbolic criticism, when they could simply point out any concerns they have with the title in a level manner.

p.s. Chernobyl was and is in the Ukraine, not Russia.

> "100% pure clickbait". (What would that even mean?)

It would mean that one hundred percent of the title was pure clickbait.

Like, for example, the title "Mexican Chernobyl".

> p.s. Chernobyl was and is in the Ukraine, not Russia.

My bad. When it happened, Ukraine was still part of the USSR, which was interchangeably with Russia back then.

Also, would it have been better if I had said "pure clickbait" instead of "100% pure clickbait"? Both are equivalent, although yes, 100% pure is redundant. I was excited. Why did a lone hyperbole invalidate my whole argument? Isn't that an overreaction?

> Why did a lone hyperbole invalidate my whole argument?

It didn't invalidate your argument. You made a good point about the phrase "Mexican Chernobyl" leading some people to think they were talking about a reactor accident. I agree that that phrasing is somewhat problematic. What I am objecting to is the use of the word 'clickbait' and again, quite obviously, that the title wasn't 'pure clickbait'. The title was still informative and gave a fairly good indication of what the article was about. There is an issue with the title, yes, but that can be pointed out without indulging in hyperbole, which is what undermines (not invalidates) your point. But your comment was still much, much better than the original one I objected to; I wouldn't have said anything in reply to your comment except for it being in that thread under the one I first replied to.

This is the stolen/abandoned medical radiotherapy machine.

The TLDR is a hospital shutdown but a lawsuit meant that they could empty it. This left equipment inside, including a radiotherapy machine.

People broke in to steal stuff that look expensive, and decided the radiation source (they didn't know what it was or contained) looked like it would be a worth a lot, and was portable enough to be stolen. So they did.

They tried to disassemble it, in doing so managed to get to the raw radioactive pellets. From there people played with it, and it spread around, before they eventually took it to a junk yard.

A number of people got sick, at least one died (OTOH).

It's happened more than once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident is one famous case

Thanks, that was the one I was familiar with soI was surprised by the reference to Mexico here.

This is the one I was looking for. For anyone not familiar, read the Events section. It’s crazy.

I've read this article previously, and to me, this is the most horrifying paragraph...

> That night, Devair Alves Ferreira (the owner of the scrapyard) noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. [...] There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate a sandwich 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 sandwich she was consuming.

in fairness to him a lot of people in the first half of the 1900s did this kind of thing, so in the absence of knowledge of radiation and the harm it causes this is clearly a "reasonable" belief (to humans at least)

The horrifying part I was referring to was not the fact that he dismantled the radiation source, but that his daughter ate a radioactive sandwich... It's surreal horror from a Hollywood thriller.

Also this:

> Devair Ferreira himself survived despite receiving 7 Gy of radiation. He died in 1994 of cirrhosis aggravated by depression and binge drinking.

A ‘Gy’ is a ‘Gray’, and is a measure of absorbed radiation (almost always estimated obviously). Deviar absorbed more than anyone yet survived the incident that ultimately took the lives of his wife and daughter and two of his employees.

For reference a Gray is ‘defined as the absorption of one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter.[1]’. The fact that he survived this blows me away.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)

I remember reading that his family was under constant exposure to radiation, but himself was moving around, so he was under intermittent exposure to radiation across multiple occasions, and it was a likely explanation of his survival despite having received the greatest total dose.

I remember hearing about this before...that poor kid.

>When an international team arrived to treat her, she was discovered confined to an isolated room in the hospital because the staff were afraid to go near her.

The real WTF is how preventable it all was and then who got the blame.

>The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia (IGR), a private radiotherapy institute in Goiânia,[1] was just 1 km (0.6 mi) northwest of Praça Cívica, the administrative center of the city. It moved to its new premises in 1985, leaving behind a caesium-137-based teletherapy unit that had been purchased in 1977.[5] The fate of the abandoned site was disputed in court between IGR and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, then owner of the premises.[6] On September 11, 1986, the Court of Goiás stated it had knowledge of the abandoned radioactive material in the building.[6] Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the objects that were left behind.[6] Figueiredo then warned the president of Ipasgo, Lício Teixeira Borges, that he should take responsibility "for what would happen with the caesium bomb".[6] The court posted a security guard to protect the hazardous abandoned equipment.[7] Meanwhile, the owners of IGR wrote several letters to the National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), warning them about the danger of keeping a teletherapy unit at an abandoned site, but they could not remove the equipment by themselves once a court order prevented them from doing so.[6][7]

So the doctor group know that the radioactive source is dangerous and tries to do something about it but a court orders them not to remove it.

>In light of the deaths caused, the three doctors who had owned and operated IGR were charged with criminal negligence. Because the accidents occurred before the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988 and because the substance was acquired by the clinic and not by the individual owners, the court could not declare the owners of IGR liable. One of the medical doctors owning IGR and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building.

Then the doctors are sued because they didn't do enough to prevent theft?

That was the one I was confusing this with -- @vilhelm_s also pointed my mistake out -- whoops

I think you are thinking of the accident in Goiânia (Brazil) in 1987, but this article is actually about the accident in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) in 1983.

There have been quite a few accidents involving radiation sources from disused radiotherapy machines, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc... . In particular, there was an incident in Taiwan in 1982 which seems extremely similar to the one described in this article, it also involved a Cobolt-60 source contaminating recycled steel.

oh nuts, you are correct.

How many times has this happened???

O_o

Wikipedia has a list of 'Civilian radiation accidents' [1] which is worryingly long.

Johnstonarchive has an interesting list of 'radialogical events' [2] which is easy to search through for 'theft' and 'lost source'.

Wikipedia also has a more specific list of orphaned source events [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...

[2] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/index.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source

Heads up, as others have this is actually a different yet similar event. I'd edit to say such but apparently there's a time limit on editing comments :D

Something isn't adding up. I grew up about twenty miles from here in the 1980s and 1990s and never heard of this. How is this possible?

The ASARCO copper smelter put so much arsenic, lead, and cadmium in the air around there that this radiation accident hardly even matters in a public health context.

That's the grim truth.

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