Goiânia Accident
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
I actually considered whether I should post this or not, but there's a game that deals with this subject matter, called Bright Lights of Svetlov: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1630920/Bright_Lights_of_...
It's setup as one of those "walking simulators" where you experience fragments of life in the Soviet Union from the perspectives of multiple people, but with a plot twist and tragedy looming around the corner. If nothing else, going into it the first time without knowing the story behind it was a curious experience.
For those less interested in actually playing the thing, there's an article called "This new Russian adventure game nails 1980s USSR" that goes into more detail: https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/334455-bright-lights-svetlov-...
It talks about 4000 people. My father built our house in Chihuahua around 1985-86. Our family lived in that house for 30 years. We don't if we were affected, but it hit me when my sister died of brain cancer two years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
I only know about this story because my father told me how one of the biggest radioactive accidents happened in Juarez when discussing radioactive events after watching the show Chernobyl.
> On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went off because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory's LAMPF technical area.[6] Local authorities realized that the rebar triggered the alert and notified Mexico's National Commission on Nuclear Safety and Safeguards [es] (CNSNS) on January 18. CNSNS confirmed a wide dispersion of radioactive material had occurred and ordered Achisa to suspend the distribution of manufactured rebar until it was verified that it was not contaminated. Mexican authorities also proceeded to close the junkyard.[4]
I'm still haunted from the first time I read about this.
Kafkaesque, you might say.
This kind of thing would be the worst example of Silent But Deadly. Once the committed to the cause person was too affected from doing the work themselves, just have the next member pick up and carry on the mission. Ammo that never needs reloading. You just have to reload the delivery mechanisms.
> The wikipedia article you linked mentioned that the Goiânia source was 50.9 TBq (1,380 Ci) when lost, the source in question here [in Australia] is probably 1-10 mCi, so about a million times weaker. See this other thread about the incidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34549126 .
Can I round it to 1000?
Thanks for the data. So it's 1000 weaker, not 1000000 weaker.
Downplaying the seriousness of the Australian incident is a really weird flex. The lost source was still easily lethal.
I don't understand what narrative so many seem driven to look for here and then complain about not finding, and I certainly don't see what benefit accrues to them or anyone else from the attempt.
Are you the type that gets irritated when people call out "great name for a band" during normal conversations. Some people just catch onto things in conversation and the mind takes its own spin on it. It can make for great conversations. Unless you're just against having fun.
Edit: never mind the plot of China Syndrome was an industrial accident, yet a very compelling plot. Or "Sully", or the one where Denzel inverts the plane to avoid tragedy, or any of the other numerous plots involving industrial accidents like CHUD!!!
I also write, but I don't talk about it very often, because it turns out most people aren't super excited to see an involved and wholly unrelated conversation interrupted with a more or less totally off topic plot idea someone happened to have. Unless you're actually at a workshop, that's what notebooks are for. If you don't have one, get one.
Except the exact opposite happened. I started a thread on this post. It went where it went until you interrupted it with mr serious response.
I wasn't really replying to your comment at the head of the subthread I was replying to. But, fair: if I'd considered the context a bit more thoroughly, I'd have picked some other metaphor than a movie plot for the unrelated kind of confabulation I was complaining about.
From https://www.aap.com.au/news/search-for-radioactive-capsule-i...
> Dr Robertson said the unit emits about two millisieverts of radiation per hour, which is the equivalent of having 10 x-rays in an hour.
Form https://xkcd.com/radiation/
> 2 millisieverts: Head CT scan
> 50 millisieverts: Maximum yearly dose permitted for US radiation workers
> 100 millisieverts: Lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increase of cancer risk.
> 400 millisieverts: Dose causing symptoms of radiation poisoning if received in a short time.
So if you keep the source for a day in your pocket, you reach the limit of radiation of a radiation worker. It's not wise, but that number is still quite conservative. I guess it's not lethal, but I definitively would not try to do that.
A few days or a week? It looks like a very very very bad idea.
If I were in charge, I'd also try to recover it as soon as possible. The idea is to minimize the health risk and the radiation received by people. And if some moron decides to open it, the health risk and cleanup would be much worse.
From the same article:
> “It emits both beta and gamma rays, so if you have contact or close to you, you could either end up with skin damage, including skin burns … and if you have it long near you it could cause acute radiation sickness,” Dr Robertson said.
It sounds definitively dangerous, but not all dangerous things are lethal (in a short time).
You're missing the part where 2 millisieverts / hour is the dose at a distance of 1 meter. If you put in your pocket, you would rapidly sustain radiation burns.
You're also missing that a dose sustained over a short period is much more deadly than a dose dragged out over a year. In the latter case, the body will be repairing the damage as it happens, mitigating the effect.
I think you are right. Let's make some back of the envelope calculations.
The frontal surface of a person is 1m^2 approximately. The surface of a sphere of 1m is 4/3*pi*(1m)^2 ~= 4m^2. The silly proportion is 2msV/1m^2*4m^2 = 8mSv, but 1m is not far enough to assume the sphere is almost flat. Let's duplicate it to 16mSv (8 idiots can form a round at 1m, shoulder to shoulder and absorb almost all the radiation). May I round it to 20 mSv?
If someone put it in the pocket, s/he will get half of the radiation, that is 10mSv/hour. [Before you find more errors in my comment, I agree that it's more complicated. The front pockets of the pants are probably the worst area. Holding it in a closed hand would double the radiation. Anyway, if you have a more accurate calculation, it is welcome.]
A Chest CT scan is 7mSv and it takes like half an hour, but it's more evenly distributed.
My guess is that you can get some nasty radioactive burns as warned in the press article, but in a short time it's not lethal as clamed by the GP.
excerpt>>>
The risk with radiation sources dramatically increases within 1 m – we can calculate the dose rate using the ‘inverse square law’:
At 1 cm, the dose rate will be 10,000 time higher …. 16,650 mSv/h (or 16.65 Sv/h)
At 1mm (ie, if you were to pick the source up with your fingers), the dose rate would be 1,665 Sv/h – this will cause some serious damage to your fingers and surrounding tissues.
I'm a little suspicious of their inverse-square calculation, though, as by their logic the dose rate would be infinite at a distance of 0m (skin contact). That's clearly not the case.
Ignorance is enough already, you don't need any malice. A child that didn't have had the chance to learn about radioactivity is enough to kill plenty of people.
That's why you control radioactive elements. Not exactly because of some antagonistic group. Any such group could probably kill way more people, way more easily by messing with something else.
They'd be dead in a day or two, with no ill-effects for anyone else.
Please don't fear-monger; the impact of radiation on the human body is cumulative and the inverse square law makes it hard for any point source to have a ton of impact (particularly with how much attenuating concrete and metal exists in cities).
A person walking around a city with a Cs-137 capsule would emit a very dangerous field around themselves, but the impact would be very localized and require long exposure times for there to be a meaningful impact. Your scenario would primarily be a confusing suicide mission, where maybe a random assortment of people would have elevated cancer levels in future years.
Hell, even the guy next to Slotin at the Demon core criticality survived 20+ years (before dying of a heart attack)[0]
The most deadly disasters are the ones where a radioactivity source is in one place for a long time and people interact closely with it, frequently (usually because they don't know it is there).
Take the Goiânia accident [1] as an example. Only the scrapyard employees who spent a few days with the capsule ended up dying. Other people with shorter interaction times were fine.
Or take the Kramatorsk Accident [2], only the families in the apartment died of leukemia, despite it being a full building.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_C._Graves [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
We have so many movie/book plots, that this is exactly how they start. Someone reads something, and then just plays with the idea. I'm not a writer, so it's not like I'm ever going to use the idea. But who knows, maybe somebody else reads and turns it into a good idea.
We can still have fun in this world even with deputy downers like you ruining for everyone "because it's not accurate".
Some radiotherapy sources are stamped "DROP AND RUN." If you're able to read that, by the time you've read it, you're already in deep dogshit. The levels of radiation involved cause near instant cell death and odd sensations due to, well, the frying of the nervous system. You might live - but
The impact wouldn't be that high in terms of people injured/killed. The real impact would be on the public psyche, as well disruption of the health system when people showed up in ERs and doctors offices thinking they were exposed, clogging those systems for care of other patients. In that sense, as a terror attack, it would be highly successful.
It's really bizarre seeing a bunch of HNers downplaying how serious these sorts of incidents are. We're very lucky that the lost sources have never ended up in the hands of anyone but non-malicious actors. Now 'bad' people are far more aware of them...
Journalists followed the other people. We know their names. We have evidence of them dying for other reasons later on (unless you want to get into Damar Hamlin clone territory)
>law of inverse squares is what saved a lot of people in these incidents. The source wasn't actually that close to them. In a dense city, a hypothetical terrorist probably wouldn't have to work too hard to get around this.
The law of inverse squares is extremely hard to get around. The amount of radiation 10 feet away from the capsule is only 1% of the radiation 1 foot away from the capsule. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. I don't know how 'in a dense city' overcomes that law of physics.
>Some radiotherapy sources are stamped "DROP AND RUN."
Yes, and if you're even a few feet away or on the other side of attenuating matter, you're in much less trouble (See: Alvin Graves).
>The impact wouldn't be that high in terms of people injured/killed. The real impact would be on the public psyche, as well disruption of the health system when people showed up in ERs and doctors offices thinking they were exposed, clogging those systems for care of other patients. In that sense, as a terror attack, it would be highly successful.
Sure, but then what's the point of even doing it vs. just saying you had? And again, aren't I doing exactly what you should want by telling people that their risk in this scenario is basically zero?
>It's really bizarre seeing a bunch of HNers downplaying how serious these sorts of incidents are. We're very lucky that the lost sources have never ended up in the hands of anyone but non-malicious actors. Now 'bad' people are far more aware of them...
I'm really waiting for the explanation of how these bad actors get over the inverse square law...
A serial killer, assuming they could construct and acquire the necessary radioactive materials could probably perform this many many times before being caught.
it's not any less believable than Havana Syndrome or other such "unknown" almost scifi type of things we've seen recently.
The blue glow of death.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Last scene
There, Dr Edward Obbard an expert from UNSW Sidney university was interviewed on the occasion of the lost capsule in Australia. The article says:
"The search for the missing capsule captured the world’s imagination, but Obbard says radioactive material goes awol about 100 times a year around the world."
Also the fact that there are at least eight nuclear bombs that have been lost and never found is always chilling. And these are only the ones from western countries we know about...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/03/relative...
Other terrible accidents (not related to the nature of Goiana):
* Hisashi Ouchi: Fatal dose beyond imagination. Accident during manually mixing a bucket of radioactive material (yes, you read that right) in a room. They did this in order to bypass the regular procedure to finish the job earlier as they were already delayed. Doctors (if I recall correctly) kept him alive for 2 months while the poor guy was begging to let him go.
* Anatoli Bugorski: Literally put his head in a particle accelerator. Happened because a light indication was off when it should have been on. He described seeing the light of a billion suns (or something like that). Survived but with serious consequences.
Why were the owners liable? They notified the court and were prevented by the court from removing the machine, so my first thought is they should be blameless: The court assumed control and therefore responsibility.
The people who stole and opened the source obviously shouldn’t have, but given the period I think it’s more reasonable that they didn’t understand what was going on. The judge doesn’t have that excuse.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion#MV_Rhosu...>
> On September 15, Pereira visited a local clinic, where his symptoms were diagnosed as the result of something he had eaten; he was told to return home and rest.
Hopefully the partial amputation occurred after the visit, otherwise I would really love to know what the clinic thought he ate that could cause partial amputation!
>> both of his legs and and all ten fingers amputated
> better to have modern medicine than not
Fuck no! Never let modern medicine butcher me like that.
> “September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.”
I feel like that would get the ol spidey sense tingling for most.
however, "let me light this glowing-blue stuff on fire to see if it is gun powder" really sounds like they forgot the part where he said "hold my beer"
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle nuclear technologies.
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit by that big meteor!
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage, you can't handle sewage technologies.
The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument against building a large infrastructure of nuclear operations.
When nuclear energy goes wrong, thousands of people die.
When fossil fuels go right, millions of people die.
There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech.
Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same.
Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours.
Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.
You uh, sure about that one?
Nuclear accident deaths, all time: around 300.
Nuclear bomb deaths, all time: around 150,000.
Fossil fuels deaths: 8.7M people dead, per year. It's not even close.
I know this is sarcastic but the UK is in the middle of an absolutely massive scandal with raw sewage being continuously discharged in rivers and the sea for many years now:
https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/sewage-in-rivers
https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
Why is raw sewage pumped into the sea?
>> Pollution warnings for dozens of beaches in England and Wales were issued after water companies discharged untreated sewage and wastewater into the sea.
>> Raw sewage was pumped into rivers and seas about 375,000 times in 2021, the Environment Agency says.
>> In 2022, Ofwat, the water regulator for England and Wales, launched cases against six water companies over discharging sewage at times when this should not have happened.
And of course there's the little-known matter of anthropogenic climate changed caused by CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. I know it's hard to believe, but it is starting to become a bit of a problem.
In Ireland, it's actually even worse. Only 50% of Irish sewage is treated to EU standards!
Many towns dump raw sewage onto rivers continuously, and lots of areas like Cork do so whenever it rains a bit. Disgusting.
In Brazil, it's actually even worse. Only around 35% of Brazil sewage is treated to Brazil standards!
Many towns dump raw sewage onto rivers/ocean continuously, and as a result around 15% of the population don't even have access to basic water sources due to this. Disgusting.
I think there are lots of cases where we definitely rushed to market way too soon in several situations. The realistic thing about it is that you can only test things as far as someone can think of crazy situations to test against. Even if we tested against every crazy combination and permutation of situations, something in real life will always come along and provide an even crazier situation. Sure, you add that to the list for the next time.
However, we are smart enough to know that certain things will have similar results just based on experience. We know that burning of anything will release things into the air, so we can test the results of burning $newThing. If $newThing is made from very similar processes and materials of $knownThing, we can look to see what issues may have been learned and test with those in mind. At some point, based on experience up until now, you make conclusions that it might just be safe enough which is good enough for corps looking to recoup R&D
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other point is that other places are objectively much worse.
In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is completely different than everything else, it's highly regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at all).
Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy, incompetent.
Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures.
Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw the regulators because they want to save money on construction, or some person installs substandard materials because somewhere down the long globalized value chain, someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by accident, and it compromises the entire system.
Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't account for.
Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable systems.
Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as well.
This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing.
More specifically - the rules are already in place for Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult. [1]
It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk.
Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see what happens.
There are weapons far more dangerous today than nuclear.
The delusion is entirely yours.
Ukraine and Russia unfortunately show to us all that what defines what's a 'sovereign country' and what isn't is either having youself, or being a very close ally of countries that have stockpiles and [innate?] ability to use nuclear weapons.
Even the specific source in the Goiânia accident could easily have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up taking.
Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.
People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
True.
> hugely disproportionate number of deaths
Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers.
The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.
That is generalisable to all global catastrophic risk: by virtue of the fact that they can occur once, and once only, means that we're effectively living in the survivorship-bias universe in which they did not occur.
That thought's only recently occurred to me, though Richard Posner wrote of it.
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109712403433781694>
By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13.
<https://archive.org/details/catastropheriskr00posn/page/13/m...>
But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done, and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of some course of action against the absence of that risk; you have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this tech just for fun.
I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it clear which is better.
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/448169/deadliest-creatur...)
But the examples are not the point.
The point is that things that are relatively harmless but common and handled carelessly (dogs, cars and hydro) easily cause more deaths than something that is very, very dangerous but rare and handled carefully (tigers, guns and nuclear).
Oil accidents are limited and proportional.
Nuclear accidents have massive externalizations.
Fukishima and Chernobyl are unlivable. Waste from Nuclear can do such damage in other places.
Other forms of energy do not have this kind of risk, Nuclear is completely different.
the chernobyl exclusion zone is not a barren wasteland full of dead. the flora and fauna are living. while i wouldn't move there myself or eat any thing from there, life is not dead there. life, uh, finds a way, as it has been said.
Fukushima has barely any exclusion zone left, the last inhabited area was reopened around the beginning of last year.
There's pages worth of military-related incidents, including things like reactor fires that ejected huge plumes of highly radioactive fallout.
There have been numerous incidents in nuclear processing. One resulted in the murder of a journalist to cover it up. Hanford took decades to clean up (I think they've finally finished?)
We spent decades blowing up nuclear weapons for giggles, causing so much fallout to spread worldwide that almost all steel these days has radioactive fallout in it, and many things can be dated by the decay of fallout in them because it's so widespread.
The US alone has lost several functional nuclear weapons.
The policy around nuclear waste in much of the US and elsewhere was, and often still is, "stick it in a hole. In containers that can rust. In water."
Strange definition of "managed very well."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
I think you’re mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and power dynamics.
A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems better. It’s the 21st century, we’re much more intertwined than we’ve ever been.
That's not a real thing. It's a persistent myth, but it's not actually real.
> China is the largest importer of waste plastics, accounting for 56% of the global market.[1] Meanwhile, the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom are the main source countries.[1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6010324/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
I do wish I was wrong though. Again, we cannot afford to think only locally any more. We're much more interconnected.
nuclear what? chemistry?
You could make the same argument about fire.
But the military was aable to perform a fast response for the incident. And shows that even if nuclear energy is the future, we could never understimate it.
The only company that had the know how in constructions like that was involved in the Petrolão, the scandal involving bribes and and money laundry in contructions for the country national oil company, and the company was basically nuked. Now chinese contruction companies are taking the place in the market.
The Goiânia Accident (1987) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127586 - Nov 2021 (121 comments)
Goiânia Accident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664402 - June 2020 (2 comments)
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A&feature=share
I mean you might like it anyway but the lyrics are central.
Goes into detail day by day about the events, including celebrating some of the heroes of the story who probably saved countless lives.
I'm no Simpsons expert so I don't know if the incident was part of a longer episode because you can't see the consequences of such an accident in the short opening sequence, but I think it's enough to get people to ask questions about this glowing green thing, if you don't already know about radioactivity.
Maybe because the Simpsons became worldwide famous and one of the most popular shows ever, many people all around the world especially children are more aware of radioactive hazards, even when school systens fail to teach them about their danger.
>The capsule was originally part of a radiation level gauge and was lost in the Karansky quarry in the late 1970s. The search for the capsule was unsuccessful and ended after a week. The gravel from the quarry was used in construction.The caesium capsule ended up in the concrete panel of apartment 85 of building 7 on Mariyi Pryimachenko Street
>By the time the capsule was discovered, four residents of the building had died from it and 17 more had received varying doses of radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
1. military and civilian use of technology both go wrong roughly similarly often (approx. 55% and 45%, respectively)
2. in just about 100 years of "nuclear technology", there have been more than a mean of 1 1/2 incidents per year.
I'd be surprised if the Wikipedia list is complete, there are probably substantial numbers of unreported/suppressed incidents, although I expect them to be small (large incidents would have been detected by others measuring radiation).
Shame on the authorities for allowing this to happen in the first place. Their job is to protect society from things they don't/can't understand. And let's not forget money probably accounted for why the source wasn't removed in the first place.
"As an almost purely human-made isotope, caesium-137 has been used to date wine and detect counterfeits and as a relative-dating material for assessing the age of sedimentation occurring after 1945."
I wish we would put more emphasis on supporting the body as a means to improve health instead of assaulting the body in the name of assaulting the illness.
whose idea was this? incinerating things contaminated with radioactive material seems like the a really unsafe thing to do!
If you're actually feeling anxious about this, there's a laundry list of things far more likely to harm you that you can act on right now, such as making sure you have sufficient smoke and CO alarms, a CO2 measurement tool to see if your popular rooms are getting enough fresh air, and a radon detector (though depending on region this may not apply).
Why such a large figure for toilet paper? Is it somehow more easily contaminated by radiation?
- radioactive source somehow got inside a tree
- tree and source are ground to pulp in a large batch to make paper
- large batch of pulp makes approx 50,000 rolls of TP