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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find radiation sources used in (medical) imaging way more terrifying than nuclear power plants.

That doesn't mean I want them to go away, but small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation that could just show up anywhere give me the willies in a way the elephant foot of Chernobyl or the ocean leak of Fukushima don't.

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Indeed, nightmare fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...

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

With both of those, the people drilling into and roughly disassembling this equipment mystifies me. I can't imagine the thought process that went into it. I mean, I'm not a 'professional' scrapper either. But I'd like to think that if I were, I'd stay away from pieces of medical equipment of unknown purpose, not try really hard to crack it open like a walrus with a shellfish.

And that's assuming that there were no big fat yellow radiation warnings anywhere on this equipment. Which even in 1977 equipment I find hard to believe.

To put these people into context - at the time of this incident, there were newborns being called Ge and Siemens because that's the name of the equipment that aided their births. This is to say, they weren't familiar with most medical equipment, and almost certainly did not have a clue as to how it worked. All they saw was some good loot with some yellow stickers on top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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

The Goiânia accident would validate that concern

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...

Small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation are easy to detect and to collect. The 1.5 million litres of contaminated water that leaked in November from Monticello's nuclear plant are not. Actually this is so common that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the US have had leaks of tritiated water in the past. It does not taste differently, it does not smell differently and it does not make you sick immediately but it sure is a health risk that frightens me more than a lost medical source.

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

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-xcel-radioactive-minnesota.htm...

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 plant tritiated water is not concentrated to saleable quantities. The expense is from concentrating it. Sadly that doesn't help when it's mixed into the groundwater when a concentrated leak and a diffuse leak would both mix in about the same way.

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.

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