Tragically relevant story to accompany this article: the Goiânia accident.
On the one extreme, you have the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl, which even today will kill you if you, like, go up and lick it. But it's not going to sneak up behind you, so just don't go over there.
On the other extreme you have the release of radioactive water from Fukushima, which instantly dilutes to nothing in the vastness of the ocean. Meh.
In the middle, you have radiation sources like this, which are small enough to be unnoticed and highly mobile, but clumpy enough to still kill you dead if you get too close. Unless you have a radiation detector, you could step on one on your way home today and never know it.
Scary!
Nah... You will know it quite soon.
Stuff with a really short half life is horribly radioactive, but not for long. Stuff with a half life of millions of years sticks around forever, but it’s not throwing off that much radiation. But stuff in the middle (a half life of perhaps decades to a thousand years) can be very dangerous and remain that way for a long time.
Plus it can probably be done in roughly a headphone jack sized spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.
A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.
Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004.
Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-r...
Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...)
Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.
https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter...
They've been begging the EPA for help for decades.
Is it “stealing” if it’s abandoned?
This whole thing was a complete failure of bureaucracy from that start and the only entities that deserve any blame are those responsible for leaving nuclear waste in an abandoned facility after being told about it.
The hospital moved to a new site but as there was disagreement with their previous landlord they were prevented to move equipments by the police despite trying to secure the source which was later stolen and having repeatedly warned of its danger.