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In the village of Lia, Georgia, on December 2, 2001, Three lumberjacks discovered two 90Sr cores from Soviet radioisotope thermoelectric generators. These were of the Beta-M type, built in the 80s, with an activity of 1295 TBq each. The lumberjacks were scavenging the forest for firewood, when they came across two metal cylinders melting snow within a one meter radius laying in the road. They picked up these objects to use as personal heaters, sleeping with their backs to them. All lumberjacks sought medical attention individually, and were treated for radiation injuries. One patient, DN-1, was seriously injured and required multiple skin grafts. After 893 days in the hospital, he was declared dead after a fever caused by complications and infections of a radiation ulcer on the subject's back. The disposal team consisted of 25 men who were restricted to a maximum of 2 minutes worth of exposure (max. 20mSv) each while transferring the canisters to lead-lined drums.

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

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> The disposal team consisted of 25 men who were restricted to a maximum of 2 minutes worth of exposure

I'm trying to figure out how that works. One team moves the crane and the geiger counters near the device, the next team brings in the lead boxes, the next team attaches the device to the crane, the next team puts it in the box and closes the box, the next team checks that the box is working, and then someone else puts the boxes on a truck?

The process was described here in detail: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...

From the linked report:

During the recovery operations, the following steps were taken:

(1) The vehicle and container were positioned so the rear of the vehicle was close to the radioactive sources.

(2) Two members of the recovery team installed stairs on the vehicle.

(3) The recovery team was divided into two groups. The first was positioned in an area located 20 m from the radioactive sources. The second remained beyond that area at a safe distance from the location of the radioactive sources.

(4) Two members of the recovery team placed the manipulating devices near the location of the radioactive sources.

(5) One member of the recovery team cleared the surrounding area of the radioactive sources.

(6) One member of the recovery team collected one of the radioactive sources and placed it into a special vessel.

(7) Two members of the recovery team transferred the radioactive source in the special vessel to the vehicle.

(8) Two members of the recovery team standing on the vehicle received the radioactive source and placed it into the container.

(9) In the event that a recovery team member became unable to complete their activity (e.g. due to the dose received), a substitute person was ready and available.

(10) The second half of the recovery team conducted the same actions for the second radioactive source.

(11) One person conducted individual dosimetry control for all members of the recovery team and recorded the doses.

(12) Two members of the recovery team conducted dose rate monitoring.

(13) All actions were led by a team member assigned to give commands to start or to stop, according to the plan. A signal to stop was given to every worker after 40 s from the beginning of each activity, indicating replacement by the next worker.

*edit: formatting

Additionally (just skimming) three members received some medical issues:

> Following the exposure on 2 December 2001, all three patients exhibited in the first 24h symptoms of nausea, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), headaches and dizziness, followed by cutaneous radiation syndrome (CRS). These early clinical manifestations and anamnesis of the patients strongly indicated ARS of a haematological type for the three patients. Furthermore, Patient1-DN developed transitory oropharyngeal syndrome.

The last medical condition is usually found in older people, making swallowing difficult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oropharyngeal_dysphagia

Also the PDF has some helpful pictures and diagrams. Looks like both original containers were nearly stacked and sideways on a rocky/hilly path, in a difficult to get to place.

Those were the three villagers who found the sources. They carried them to the rocks, and used them plus small fire to stay warm overnight.

Probably something like that. By comparison, for certain areas on the Chernobyl reactor roof where the time limit was 30 seconds, each person would be given a shovel, go out on the roof, throw a piece of graphite off the roof, then go back inside and hand the shovel off to the next person.

I believe there's a video on youtube with this, they used a whistle to signal when to stop and change teams. IIRC it was 2 minutes of exposure, followed by hour of cool off time or something like that.

But everytime I hear this story, I got to wonder who would pick up an object generating heat and not question why it's still hot hours later?

"Wondering why it's hot" doesn't necessarily imply "worrying whether whatever makes it hot could be dangerous".

If you didn't know that radioactivity can cause heat, and you found a magic hot rock, do you think you'd go "I don't understand this, must be dangerous" or "I have now clue how this thing works but it's really useful, I'm gonna keep that thing"?

In today world, my default setting is pessimism - so I'd assume it was dangerous. I'm way past thinking 'magic' is harmless.

However, thinking I understand something when I really don't will probably be the end of me :-P

I think non-{science,tech,engineering} people are a considerably more pessimistic about the world than the average.

Russian winter. These guys were looking for firewood, for a fire to keep warm. Cold makes people despirate. And, knowing a little of russian rural culture in the winter, i think it safe to say alcohol may have been a factor.

> In the village of Lia, Georgia

It's not Russia.

Does Georgia not have Russian Winters, or Russian Rural Culture?

No, AFAIK no snow, and very much different rural and overall culture.

People with no education?

I happened to watch a short documentary about this yesterday on Plainly Difficult. A lot of great videos on this channel. https://youtu.be/23kemyXcbXo

I've also watched it, and a few other videos on the channel. Frankly, his videos just seem to be minimally editorialized recitals of wikipedia pages.

For someone that has made so many videos on nuclear accidents, he seems to have a pretty poor understanding of nuclear radiation and contamination.

His "plainly difficult" disaster scale is all over the place, for example, the texas city disaster, which killed >581 people is rated as a 7, while some smoldering garbage at the "West Lake Landfill", rates just below it as a 6.

Heh, story straight out of the Strugatsy Brother's "Roadside Picnic" right there: Advanced tech (I was going to put quotes around it, but it really is) created by a defunct civilization found by people who see side-effects, but don't understand the functionality at all.

This is like those island tribesmen imitating air controller hand signals, because they thought it was magic that summoned supply planes.

Here you can find a detailed report about this event, if you get intrigued as I did : https://www.iaea.org/publications/10602/the-radiological-acc...

> Following the accident, it was determined that eight RTGs [radioisotope thermoelectric generator] of the Beta M type had been brought into Georgia in the early 1980s to serve the radio relay system between the Engury hydroelectric station and Hudoni hydroelectric station, which was under construction at the time. These generators were placed in pairs at four substations located in areas where there were no other means of electrical power supply. In these generators, the heat generating elements were 90Sr radioisotope sources with an activity of 1480 TBq and a heat power of 250 W.

> After the construction of the Hudoni hydroelectric station was stopped, the radio relay system lost its function, and the generators were left without supervision and control. By the end of the 1990s, the generators were disassembled, with the radioactive sources exposed and removed from their original location. Of the eight 90Sr radioactive sources, only six have so far been found.

Was it found out how did two Beta-M type radioisotope thermoelectric generators got to a side of forest road?

Stolen most likely and abandoned when thieves got sick.

>NTV reported that eight such radiothermal generators were brought to Georgia in the early 1980s to power relay antennas during construction of the Inguri and Khudoni hydroelectric plants, and subsequently abandoned. Six of these have now been recovered by Georgian authorities.[5] Despite a search, however, Interfax reported on 24 January 2002 that Georgian police and the Georgian Environment Ministry have been unable to find the remaining two power generators.[5] According to Georgian

So glad Canada plans to litter our country with these soon. They want SMR's in every logging camp, remote community, mine, and so on. Sure they are more dangerous per GW and more costly per GW but they are MUCH cheaper initially so small unqualified companies can get involved. Let the good times roll.

i live within 10KM of pickering Nuclear. I have no concerns as nuclear is among the safest form of power available.

A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

dont let the facts get in the way..

Nuclear power plants aren't the same thing as portable nuclear batteries, which is what these are.

No, but risk is all relative.

The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.

These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.

History of nuclear has taught us that nuclear is very safe until an accident happens. You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen. here in Quebec, we decided to close a nuclear reactor after Fukushima at a cost of $2 billion

> You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen

I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.

security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.

Chornobyl alone put more radioactive isotopes into air than all coal plants combined. Don't know about ground and water.

This statement could definitely use a source.

For coal power stations:

«According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations.»

About 1% of it is leaked into air, so about 500 tonnes of uranium and 1500 tonnes of thorium are leaked into air every year.

However, uranium and thorium are much less dangerous than radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium.

For Chornobyl, I found estimate at Wikipedia: «An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was 3±1.5%; this was later revised to 3.5±0.5%. This corresponds to the atmospheric emission of 6 tonnes (5.9 long tons; 6.6 short tons) of fragmented fuel.[127]»

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...

But is this an apt comparison. The soviet union was pretty independent from the rest of the west. I's sooner qualify that western/European nuclear is safe, so the average isn't dragged down by despotic/unstable nations.

Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.

> A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant.

Until the nuclear plant suffers a catastrophic accident...

The thing is, a coal plant is a guaranteed continuous catastrophic incident.

Don't discount nuclear waste as well. I'm not trying to promote coal here, but nuclear energy has problems too and shouldn't be touted as something it's not: a safe and clean solution.

Don't overblow nuclear waste. Normal responsible operation produces very little waste per electric MWh produced. And we know how to handle it. No energy production solution is perfect but compared to coal/gas pollution it can eliminate it is a nonbrainer.

... And we know how to handle it.

I do not agree with this overall. It holds true only for some timescales and for some assumptions of risk factors.

Not specifically about waste, but still relevant. Fukushima and other plants in Japan were designed to withstand a 100 year tsunami. Bad luck that 3/11/11 was greater than that.

Every analysis is based on some assumptions and all predictions hold true only for limited timescales. Yes natural disasters happen and we can't prevent all of them. Yes we will have "nuclear disasters". The world is under constant threat of semiglobal nuclear war.

But Chernobyl and Fukushima (and others, let's not kid ourselves) are disasters with minuscule cost in lives and environment harm. Every year 60 million people die and out of that 12 million die due to unhealthy environment. Risks of (non-weapon) nuclear energy to life, while they exist, are a complete non-issue. Apart from political changes, we need cheap reliable energy to fix the atmosphere and to fix that unhealthy environment.

Here in Canada we use the CANDU system which is far safer than the systems like what you found in Three Mile Island - and no-one is as foolish as to do the Russian tests again.

Just a friendly reminder that nuclear power causes fewer deaths per terawatt hour than any other energy source known to man.

We will know that after cooling of nuclear waste to background level only, which will not happen soon.

Nuclear waste is safely stored in pools and other facilities, it does not hurt anybody.

if you bury it in the same place you dug the uranium ore from, doesn't that resolve it?

A friendly rejoinder.

Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.

Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.

Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.

Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.

30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.

Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share.

I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.

If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.

So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.

Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.

A single Concorde crash drove that aircraft's safety profile down from the very best to amongst the worst per passenger mile of any aircraft.

...as long as you completely ignore any catastrophic risk for the next 10.000 years.

Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.

Not to mention coal actually disperses a ton of radioactive waste, as it contains both uranium and thorium [1].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...

How about switching to renewables + batteries? Solar is now as cheap as coal power in China.

When you add some batteries you will be fine with no pollution. And no waste your childerns childern (and beyond) have to take care of.

It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be.

Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled.

There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.

> Do you want a bit of perspective

Thanks but I don't need a strawman.

Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter.

On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.

Detecting radiation isn't the hard (or expensive) part https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225...

Its not nuclear vs oil and gas. Renewables are an alternative with lower cost and lower waste.

A good safety history is a measure of what happened, not what could happen.

Nuclear energy has exceptionally good safety history.

> Nothing is risk free.

I specifically called out SYSTEMIC risk.

What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels?

> On the other hand

The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas.

> And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.

...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.

Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat.

Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.

As a Canuck I'm enthused about an increased adoption of nuclear energy. It's far safer than coal or oil, and is able to generate energy on-demand. It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro.

> and is able to generate energy on-demand

Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down. Had anything improved in this area?

More modern designs can ramp faster, but still not fast. The main issue is that the largest cost of a nuclear power plant is the capital investment to build it and staff to run it, which is fixed. In comparison fuel costs seem to hover at about 25%.

Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation.

Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you.

This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.

It sounds like it makes more sense with sufficient battery technologies then (which don't yet exist).

Thanks for the information.

That's a fair criticism. I don't know the numbers, but I'd be curious to see them. Especially around modern designs.

> It's a great pairing to solar, wind, and hydro

No it's not - to compensate for times when there is not enough energy from renewable sources, you need power plants that can be shut down and brought back online quickly, and nuclear plants are certainly not that.

Nuclear power plants can vary power output quickly if planned during the design. As France has an installed capacity of more than 60 GW of nuclear power production, their power plants can quickly adapt their production. That's needed to keep the network balanced.

France has 80% nuclear. It works there not because French reactors can respond meaningfully to short-term meteorology, but because: 1) France is connected to a continent-sized grid and 2) All of France's neighbours are nowhere near 80% nuclear, so will buy this baseload power.

If Germany, NL, Denmark, Spain, UK et al. had 80% nuclear France's nuclear power would become uneconomic.

It's the grid and unique political considerations, not those plants' responsiveness that makes it work for France.

The French do vary the power of the reactors to follow the load [1] [2]. They don't purely rely on their neighbors, far from it. As a consequence, the usage factor of the plants is lower than nuclear plants in countries where they they purely use them for base load.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant [2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-...

Incorrect, we don't need all power plants to ramp up/down in seconds. Energy demand of a provider during the day follows roughly the same curve for the specific time of year. Thus ramping up/down of baseload can be and is planned in advance. The random variations from that prediction can be handled by smaller number of responsive plants.

I think SMRs are very different from RTG. SMR is an essentially a small and fairly complex reactor design, like a molten salt reactor. It heats water or other liquid, turns it into steam, steam spins a turbine, just like a regular power plant.

An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.

SMRs are not radioisotope thermal generators.

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