Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand

Well this is telling you to have any metals that have been passed though Thailand ran under a geiger counter. At least in the US any major recyclers perform this operation to prevent radioactive materials showing up in the product stream.

Industrial smelters are big expensive bits of kit.

Radiation monitors are pretty cheap - at least ones sufficient to identify a Cesium 137 source in a pile of scrap steel.

Radiation in your steel is a hugely costly mistake - at a minimum, you're gonna have to give up all your costly smelting equipment and stock.

Radiation isn't super rare either - major events may be rare, but every few weeks a big smelter will detect small things that ought not be smelted.

So I don't see why any smelter wouldn't have a radiation detector on the input hooked up to warning sirens, for purely financial self interest.

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

The mention of the film has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. It may be urban legend.

https://commonplacefacts.com/2015/05/08/how-herbie-goes-bana...

1.5 million liters contaminated by how much? The former number is meaningless without the latter.

tritium is quite expensive, makes gold look cheap, runs about "one new car" per gram. Its quite valuable. It would be like accidentally losing some gold coins in my backyard, that's not anti-enviro garbage dumping that's an accident. So if its a substantial leak they don't need govt regulation to clean it up, the financial market will force them if they lost a hundred million bucks or similar crazy amount.

I was unable in a short google search to find any information on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be incredibly small.

Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans, runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ... substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That and time, the half life only being around a decade.

Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500 TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels. 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that large.

So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have much to worry about.

Nuclear reactors produce small amounts of Tritium during normal operations. It’s released into the environment as standard procedure because the amount is so negligible that it doesn’t matter, but it must be closely monitored and reported. Any time it escapes in an unplanned manner, it’s a “leak”. That doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, though.

You could drink water from a well contaminated by a titriated water spill for a year and only get about 1/10th the radiation dose of flying cross country in an airplane. It also decays rapidly with a half life around 12 years and it doesn’t accumulate in the body.

Radiation exposure is a huge spectrum and we can detect tiny amounts with modern equipment. There are a lot of detectable amounts of radioactive material out there that just don’t matter at all to your health: Bananas, smoke detectors, tritiated water from nuclear reactors, etc.

Reading about that particular disaster should be mandatory for people designing software.

> A 1992 episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers depicts a somewhat loosely-based version of this event in the episode "A Deadly Glow," albeit with a happier ending for all involved, and blaming the contamination of the town on an eco-villain. However, it did feature caesium-137 as the radioactive contaminant, as well as portrayed two young children unwittingly playing with it in a similar manner to Leide das Neves Ferreira, who, unlike the children in the cartoon, received a fatal dose.

Fascinating

to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"

I think this is a good move, this symbol has the same problem that the biohazard symbol has. Not sure if the trefoil was designed under the same rationale as the biohazard symbol, but at least in that case, I think the idea to make a new symbol that is recognizable but with no existing meaning is a bad idea. People end up putting it on t-shirts because the symbol looks interesting but never learn what it means. It ends up both losing its impact and not conveying anything inherently.

Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!

Is that idiocy even legal? We had the mirror case at a previous workplace once, when an arts class drew artsy warning signs, but then they hung them up in the Science Building to serve as genuine warning signs. Several "Emergency Exit" signs went about the doors, there was a neat "Inflammable" sign on the steel cabinet for solvents & so on.

Metallic Cesium reacts too fast with Oxygen. They are using a salt with Cesium.

For obvious reasons it's easier to find videos with metallic Sodium instead of metallic Cesium. Both are chemically similar and react with Oxygen very fast and must be stored protected from Oxygen, and water, and many other things. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs

It's very difficult to store metallic Sodium, but it's quite easy to store Sodium salts.

The relevant paragraph in Wikipedia is

> Also the higher specific activity caesium sources tend to be made from very soluble caesium chloride (CsCl), as a result if a radiography source was damaged it would increase the spread of the contamination. It is possible to make water insoluble caesium sources (with various ferrocyanide compounds such as Ni 2Fe(CN) 6, and ammonium ferric hexacyano ferrate (AFCF), Giese salt, ferric ammonium ferrocyanide) but their specific activity will be much lower.