Nuclear material left in "Swap Shop" at UK Hacker camp emfcamp | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear material left in "Swap Shop" at UK Hacker camp emfcamp

meow.social

118 pointscardinal_black54 comments

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Best toot about this:

https://meow.social/@AtomicMaya@tech.lgbt/112536890144120140

''' OH: "we had a radioactive source dropped at the swap drop

a furry wearing a collar with a shirt showing a furry with the radiation symbol came to dispose of it"

most #emfcamp sentence ever '''

The furry being referred to is the OP in the link for this post, says they work in civilian nuclear.

Meh.

The comments about it being "dangerous if disassembled", the general tone of "this is really important/urgent!" and the follow-up saying that it's more dangerous than a smoke detector because these devices contain "considerably more" Am241, lead me to believe that if they do actually "work in civilian nuclear" (and it's not as an accountant, sysadmin, or janitor) they are trying to milk this for attention, even if they know better.

The source could be the size of a golf ball and it'd be completely harmless if you were more than a few inches away because alpha particles are stopped by an inch or so of air. Thus, alpha sources are only dangerous if ingested/inhaled. Am241 emits a very small amount of weak gamma radiation that isn't really worth mentioning.

They mention risk of dust inside the chamber of the device from self-sputtering. That seems like a non-issue given the likely purity of Am241 used and the fact that Am241 sources (such as those in a smoke detector) are bound in a matrix of another material, so if there's sputtering, a good bit of ti will be the matrix, not the Am241. Even if it wasn't in a matrix, the quantity of any self-sputtered material would still be completely inconsequential. We're talking about single atoms of the source being boinked off at a time here, in a really-not-that-radioactive source.

Given that there are no warnings or markings about there being a radioactive source inside, my guess is that the case is just, well, a case - an outer shell, and the actual instrument is inside the outer shell- and if there are any warnings, they'd be on that instrument, which you would see if you were to open it up.

Everyone really needs to understand that this was a near complete non-issue and that the person who retrieved it exposed themselves (and the people around them) to more risk of injury/death just driving to and from where the source ended up.

This is just some furry doing what furries do best - seek attention.

Edit: the person in question is now referring in other 'toots' to themselves as a "protagonist" in "the story of orphan sources." This fuss was definitely for attention. I'm guessing the wikipedia article already exists...

You can see a newer device based on the same design here: https://forcetechnology.com/-/media/force-technology-media/p...

Page 33 shows all of the components and 34 shows the Measuring Ionization Chamber with the housing removed and a radiation warning underneath.

They both use Americium alpha foil which is the Americium in a gold matrix.

I mean, this is an unmarked source that's been dumped at an event which is likely to involve people who are likely to be taking apart whatever they pick up. It's possible someone could have injured themselves, even if it's not going to turn into another Ciudad Juárez incident. Their tone was entirely reasonable, and now it's blown up because people find the story engaging, even if just amusing because it wasn't actually that dangerous, they're reacting to that. I dunno why you find it objectionable enough to believe that it was an action entirely taken for the purposes of attention seeking.

Are you saying you have more training/experience with source handling procedures than that person? Are you specifically claiming that handing off that much material with potentially no labels (we don't know if there are any in practice, they may be removed or unreadable) to a random person interested in dissembling things is safe? Because otherwise I don't see anything attention seeking there: number of sources verified, taken to disposal, risk confirmed by the author without playing it up.

"completely harmless if you're more than a few inches away"

This was in the "disassemble for scraps" tent. I do not think that's a particularly reasonable thing to assume.

95% of the time, someone unscrews the housing, sees the radiation symbol, behaves appropriately. 5% of the time it goes in a garage junk box, gets dropped, kid finds the shiny yellow disc and tries to open it.

As it was, this was hilarious, and perfectly on-brand for EMF. I'm glad there's not a small nuclear source sitting in some unknowing person's hackspace, I'm glad someone was watching out, and them wearing cute animal ears makes the story even better!

Source: I was there. Person who handled this is a friend of mine.

They weren't milking it for attention. At EMF - at least early on - they were deliberately downplaying it to avoid causing a panic until the risk was known. Unfortunately when Atomicmaya's toot[1] dropped, they felt like they had to respond to squash any potential speculation or rumours. (the fear was someone would hear "orphan source" or "nuclear material" and think "Goiana incident, repeat of" -- Goiana was a much stronger caesium-137 gamma source).

Photos of the unit were being circulated privately in case there were more (the donator's identity was unknown at this point). EMF later announced in closing -- and you can see this on the recording [4] -- that they'd like to know if there were only two.

I've done basic risk assessment in a volunteer role and when there were unknowns, we took the path of assuming the worst, and planning for the best until we had more information. I can't really judge Tryst or anyone else for doing the same. In this case the worst-case scenario was a kid or teen at the camp buying it and taking it apart in their tent, and making the source material airborne.

Several people in the Furry Village google were trying to find information on the MIC based on the photos, and at the time we all found nothing.

The thing also very industrial which probably amped up the risk profile a bit further in peoples' minds, because it wasn't an obvious, recognisable, smoke detector.

This evening I googled the part number and sure enough, it's a very spicy (compared to modern ionisation detectors, about 10x the amount of Am241) early-generation smoke detector, and the Am241 is encased in gold. [2] [3]

TLDR: It's low risk, but that wasn't known at the time.

1: https://tech.lgbt/@AtomicMaya/112536889993443251 2: https://forcetechnology.com/-/media/force-technology-media/p... 3: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ml003770968.pdf 4: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/emf2024/relive/551

That is a really confusing sentence to parse.

I'm still not sure how a collar is wearing a shirt, which is the only way I could parse it.

> a furry wearing a collar

A person of the furry persuasion who was wearing a collar, presumeably a dog collar, perhaps a cat collar, maybe the collar of an Anglican minister . . .

> with a shirt

was also wearing a shirt, likely a tee-shirt

> showing a furry with the radiation symbol

that shirt had a picture on it, as many tee shirts do, that picture was Inception as it depicted a furry with a radiation symbol

> came to dispose of it

which kind of made sense as that furry was part of the radiation police.

Thanks!

Radiation is such an interesting topic that really bridges the atomic scale with our macro scale in that we can detect each single atom decaying.

If the comments are right, this thing had a few microcuries of an alpha emitter in it that can't hurt you unless you literally ingest or inhale it. The alphas couldn't get through your skin if you held it unshielded in your hand.

Meanwhile, back at ORNL this guy recollects a time when he had 60,000 Curies of Sr-90 in a hot cell where he was seeing strikes of lightning in the cell from the voltage of the emitted beta particles [1].

It's just crazy to me that we can deal with 10 orders of magnitude different concentrations of radiation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWLRafBwhGQ

Very editorialized HN title. "Radioisotope source" would be accurate and non-clickbaity (in place of "nuclear material").

I think it’s a fair title considering we talk about the “Nuclear Boy Scout” with the same title, and he used the same source collected from many smoke detectors to perform his experiments and the end result was his shed was designated a superfund site.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

The boy scout was trying to build a breeder reactor, which is quite a different beast as it produces more fissile material over time.

(edited: built -> trying to build)

The boy scout was attempting to do that, but did not come anywhere near achieving it. It's wrong to say he built one.

I stand corrected! The article I read about the boy lead me to believe that the neutron source had been pointed at other materials to produce more radioactive materials...I see from the Wikipedia article that wasn't the case.

Yes I think a lot of the articles are a bit hyped up and misleading. Thanks for checking on it!

Even if he had produced something with the (alpha,neutron) sources he was making, it still wouldn't be a breeder reactor, but rather the same kind of neutron source the e.g. Enrico Fermi was using in the 1930s to investigate the nature of radioactive materials at the pre-dawn of the nuclear age.

Breeder reactors require a neutron chain reaction that generates more nuclear fuel than they consume, which is far beyond just irradiating stuff with a neutron source. After the Manhattan Project it took our top reactor designers until about 1951 to really build one and demonstrate it, at the EBR-1 in Idaho [1]. I think it's safe to claim that no kid will ever build one in a garage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I

That's not the same thing though. Those experiments weren't a simple alpha-emitter source; they were a neutron source that finely combined an alpha source with a low-Z element (aluminum? [0]), which was deliberately combined with fissionable nuclear material, thorium, to test nuclear fission reactions (on a very small scale). It's technically accurate to describe that one as a nuclear experiment.

[0] https://cen.acs.org/articles/82/i32/PITFALLS-SELF-GUIDED-SCI...

It looks like it was confirmed that they've all been accounted for: https://social.emfcamp.org/@info/statuses/01HZD9RNT3VFHCF5QJ...

So person drops off some device that measures radiation at a swap meet.

?Somehow person figures out device is radioactive?

Person throws radioactive device in back of truck. Then will dispose of properly at civilian nuclear facility.

I guess the worry here is that the other person is unqualified to handle and dispose of the device and cause bodily injury to self?

> I guess the worry here is that the other person is unqualified to handle and dispose of the device and cause bodily injury to self?

Yes. Or even more precisely the worry is that someone who maybe took it doesn't even recognise that they have to safely handle it.

Imagine that you have a very sharp sword. If you do the wrong thing with it can maim you. Further imagine that nobody has a "sword sense". They just can't see the edge. So people just take it and you only realise that they come in contact with a sword when they report to a hospital with multiple deep cuts. What is worse is that they might go to a hospital report that they have deep cuts and nobody thinks that they had a sword. Because swords are very rare and people get similar symptoms for other non-sword reasons. And the hospital itself only starts to suspect that they have a sword incident when multiple people starts to report with injuries which can be caused by a sword. And then they have to send out specialist with a sword-finding equipment who are trained to handle the sword safely without themselves being able to see the edge.

Radioactive sources are like that sword nobody can see the edge of. There are all kind of procedures, and if you follow them they can be handled safely. But if you don't even know that what you have has an "edge" you are not just unqualified to do those procedures, but you also don't know that you should do anything special.

Here is a list of "orphan source incidents" [1]. Which is basically radioactive safety people speak for "the radioactive thing went on a walkabout to places it shouldn't have". Some of the tales are beyond terrible.

That being said I have no clue how "hot" this thing is. If you believe other commenters probably not very?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

It's not especially hot but definitely a problem if broken to pieces and scattered, like might happen if a tinkerer gets their hands on it and doesn't know what it is. Like most of the people at the swap shop I imagine.

Things like this aren't unheard of.

For example, I once deployed Americium-241 samples for critical automated testing and monitoring functionality throughout my home, and I wasn't even too fearful that my kids would get exposed. I may have a higher risk tolerance than other people in the same situation, though.

Referring to smoke detectors, right? Right?

Exactly :)

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one of these particular things objects, but I observe two things:

1. There’s no radiation symbol or mention of any radiation source in the picture.

2. From looking on Wikipedia, this type of device looks like it’s meant to measure radiation, and there’s no mention of any reason that it would contain a radioactive source. Household smoke detectors contain ionization chambers and a radiation source, but they seem to be separate devices.

Is there any reason to believe that this thing contains a radioactive source?

I mean the guy who went and collected them works in the nuclear industry, so I'd imagine he knows what he is on about.

This looks like it measures smoke density by measuring radiation. The americium is bound up in a gold matrix called "Americium alpha foil" and the sensor essentially measures how many alpha particles make it through the smoke or how much the gamma emissions ionize it? I can't tell.

According to some random Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents, a specific EC 23095-1 with Serial no. 830101 was used as the calibration standard for testing other MICs: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003770968.pdf

No, it's a smoke detector. Specifically, ionization-type smoke detector, which are based on Americium-241 (half-life of 400+ years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Ionization

The amount is usually negligible, but this is more of a reference device than a normal smoke detector and it definitely looks sketchy enough to warrant such a response. If you look through its manual, you'll see plenty of warnings: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ml003770968.pdf

It's about 3.5-4 smoke detectors worth. This source contains about 3.5 ucuries; a typical smoke detector contains 1 ucurie or less.

I think the biggest danger is that most people know not to dig around in the inside of a smoke detector if they don't want to end up like the Radioactive Boy Scout, but some random thing dropped at a swap -- you might start prying open, and if you eat/inhale the Americum-241 by accident, it's radiotoxic.

Huh, you’re clearly right. I would have expected it to say smoke measuring ionization chamber, to distinguish it from a radiation measuring ionization chamber.

Interestingly, the manual explains how to handle and clean the radioactive source with only minor precautions (sec. 5.1.1).

An enticing story, but in the end, it's no better than finding an old smoke detector at a yard sale.

Just reading the comments I found out about this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60...

Brazil also had an incident like this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of note is that the (horrible) Goiania incident had a source with around 74 tera-Bq, the source in the original post here is something like 360 kilo-Bq.

So try to visualize the difference between a 360 kilobyte file and a 74 terabyte file. Or the cost difference between a cheap pack of chewing gum and an F-35 fighter aircraft.

A factor of 200 million.

There's also the small matter that the Goiania incident involved a gamma source, and the source here is an alpha source, of which all the radiation is blocked by an inch or so of air.

There's some hand-waving about the source self-sputtering. It seems highly unlikely that the source a)is not coated b)is pure enough for that to be a risk

Even if it did, the amount of dust generated would be so small it would be inconsequential compared to numerous natural radiation sources, including alpha emitters like radon.

It was not the worst for fatalities, but the one that disturbs me most I think, was the one in the 1980s in Ukraine where an intense radiation source that was lost, worked its way into gravel, that was used for concrete for an apartment building. It was in a panel in a bedroom. A young family died of leukemia. Another family moved in. The son of the man who moved in, soon died of leukemia. He knew about the previous residents, and started looking into it, and eventually they brought in a radiation specialist and a geiger counter.

The dose rate was about 0.2 R per hour. Enough to almost certainly be fatal if you slept next to it regularly for even just a few months. Yet low enough that it likely wouldn't cause any acute sickness to anyone simply passing through the room periodically. Particularly insidious. And so it was in the wall for 9 years.

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

The disturbing thing about the Juarez contamination is that one old radiotherapy machine was able to meaningfully contaminate 6,000 tons of rebar.

Yeah, and that's why scrap yards in Germany are required by our OSHA equivalent [1] to scan all incoming and outgoing scrap for radiation and that all workers be regularly trained on how to properly deal with contamination.

In 2009, these checks led to the discovery of at least 150 tons of contaminated metal across the country, the source here were Indian steel plants who melted down cobalt-60 sources together with regular scrap [2].

[1] https://www.bghm.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Arbeitsschuetzer/G...

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/giftmuell-import-...

A very similar one happened in Turkey as late as 1998! https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1102_web.p...

A hospital sold the Co-60 source they depleted to a company. The company got the license but didn't reexport them to US. They stored the containers in a generic warehouse without even security personnel and lost the track of them. The warehouse got sold and the containers are sold as scrap to members of public who are barely educated if at all. They probably didn't even know what radiation warnings all over the containers mean. They opened up the containers using an oxyacetylene torch in their garden and got contaminated and radiation sickness.

its very very hard to imagine someone that does not know about the radiation symbol

There is a massive difference between a gamma source that emits so much radiation the sources can be (infamously) engraved with "DROP AND RUN" that will give a lethal dose in tens of minutes to someone close enough to read the text...and a tiny little layer of an alpha-emitting material embedded in a piece of gold foil.

https://chaos.social/@jonty/112546819875403045 - Americum 241 apparently

The same material is used in smoke detectors.

But these things have a lot more of it

Are you sure ? Actually the quantities reported are only a bit more than a smoke alarm's worth. https://tech.lgbt/@tryst@meow.social/112537465686977310

I was going by https://meow.social/@tryst/112547072349850935

Yes, these are like 10 smoke alarms each. 360k becquerel each, and a smoke alarm is about 30k.

That's a typo. 7 microCurie would be 260 kBq, not 360 kBq.

This whole thing's a farce; there's nothing remotely interesting, or alarming, about a sealed alpha source this small. There's countless millions of residential smoke detectors of exactly this size, isotope, and basic design. (The multiple other commenters are also speaking correctly, that modern smoke detectors are about 1/10th this size. The older 20th-century models are a bit larger).

Ya and it's insane. My college for a project bought dozens of fire detectors from the 70s to take the Am out (they had more than todays) for a project.

Of course, he had to take the necessary license before he started that project.

> (they had more than todays)

Or at least they used to ;)

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