Radioactive Tape Dispenser (1970s) | Hacker News Reader

Radioactive Tape Dispenser (1970s)

orau.org

108 pointsthunderbong51 comments

- "This particular example came from a 55 gallon drum of tape dispensers that the U.S. Army was about to dispose of as radioactive waste."

This is a common beach sand [0]. It illustrates something absurd, I can't quite put my finger on what, about the relation between human society and technology. No one knows anything about the physical or chemical properties of sand on the beach. No one asks; no one cares. There are no EPA surveys of beach radioactivity. No beach signs warning beachgoers "do not eat the sand", or, "this beach is known to the state of California to cause cancer". But you take one handful of the beach into a plastic box, and accidentally walk it past the wrong regulatory compliance officer, and suddenly the US Army is burying your one-handful-of-beach-sand in a 55-gallon drum packed in bentonite.

It's one lens for nature, and one lens for the anthropogenic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite

I wonder if the phenomenon you're describing is the subtle and often hidden complexity of science, and our inability as humans to recognise and handle that complexity appropriately.

In this case, we have the US Army's procedure for disposing of low-level radioactive waste. That process probably says something like "if a thing has been identified as more radioactive than THRESHOLD, then dispose of as radioactive waste." Could the process be expanded to cover cases where the radioactivity is naturally occurring? Probably, but who would then take on the liability if there were any? I'm not sure. What about a case like this, where a naturally occurring radioactive source has been transformed into some piece of equipment that nobody would reasonably expect to be radioactive. Does that need special handling, or not? If so, who is responsible -- the US Army? The manufacturer? The US EPA, even?

It all gets quite complicated, and as complexity increases the risk of a procedure not being applied consistently, or at all, rises quickly. To keep the collective human machine functional, we need to ignore the complexity, and have every radioactive thing be disposed of in the same way.

There are many instances of humans handling scientific complexity badly and coming to poor decisions as a result. A well-known one is declining nuclear fission power stations in favour of coal power stations and subsequently releasing more radioactivity into the environment than the nuclear power stations would ever have done. I'm sure there are hundreds more.

I visited a friend in Elliot Lake once and we stopped at a plaque on the side of the highway to read. A geologist friend came along, and he recognized the formation of the rocks under our feet as uranium-bearing. I had brought my Geiger counter along, and sure enough, these were hot too.

As you mention: no warning signs, no caution tape. Being close enough to that in any “anthropoid” setting would require, at the very least, a dosimetry badge.

I can live within that cognitive dissonance, but it’s just an interesting observation.

In vast sections of Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Quebec (and probably many other areas) anyone with a basement has to monitor for radon gas - it's just a normal part of the environment overall because of the geological makeup.

If you can keep a window or two open - it's not so bad - we use an smart bluetooth-connected monitor that I check daily - CO2 seems to be more of a problem than the radon.

Yes. Live in one of those areas and "radon mitigation systems" are common. There is a sealed lid that goes over your sump pump cover, and a fan constantly pulls air from it, which goes up a tube on the side of your house and empties near the roofline.

Relatively common is the cities around Madrid (Spain) mountains, and then to the west and northwest due to the granite there. Specially because lots of the houses in the area were built with that local granite.

Similar in parts of the UK (where there's granite) - there's a map of radon-prone areas on the UK Government website.

* https://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps

Well, what's the alternative? Walk all over the US of A, measuring radiation at every square foot? That's prohibitively expensive even today for a rather dubious benefit: most of the terrain is not (yet) noticeably radioactive, after all.

There’s no alternative, other than recognizing that these dichotomies exist.

A brown bear in the wild doesn’t have any warning signs or set off any alarms, but it sure would if it was in a human-occupied building. Context is key! :)

On the other side of this you have something like the Runit Dome, which is a nuclear test crater in the Pacific which they filed in with radioactive debris and covered in concrete. It is starting to leak from rising sea levels. But when people complain about this, they are told "oh, don't worry, there's actually far more radioactive material outside the dome" because it turns out they only managed to clean up about 1% of the contamination, and the rest of the immediate area is still covered in fallout.

Monazite isn't common. Well, it's somewhat common but not on beaches. Beach sand is mostly quartz.

Beach sand may or may not be radioactive, but California only requires Prop 65 warnings on things for sale.

The beach isn't for sale.

Sand that is sold in the state of California does come with the warning that it is a carcinogen because regular old silicon dioxide is a carcinogen: https://mcdn.martinmarietta.com/assets/safety-data-sheets/na...

With all things the dose makes the poison, so even if you are a beach bum you're ok but if you are an industrial worker exposed to concentrated amount of silica dust on a daily basis, you should really be informed that it is a carcinogen (among other things) and be equipped with PPE.

Wherever the car break runoffs from the highways reach the beach, the chancer rates must be through the roof too

I don't think Silicosis is cancer as much as it's just "shredding your lungs"

It's a horrifying disease and people in affected industries should always wear PPE and likely don't.

Silicosis causes cancer the same way a lot of things do: If you repeatedly damage cells over and over and over, that increases the likelihood that some of the DNA will be mis-copied, fail to be repaired, and survives the biological lottery to become a cancer cell.

> Beach sand may or may not be radioactive, but California only requires Prop 65 warnings on things for sale.

They're not just on things for sale. They're also required at workspaces, businesses, rental housing. I've seen them on unpaid parking structures.

If the beach was operated by a private entity instead of by public agencies or just public access with no supervision, a warning might be needed.

I'm not a geologist; did I misunderstand the Wikipedia entry I linked? It says

- "Because of their high density, monazite minerals concentrate in alluvial sands when released by the weathering of pegmatites. These so-called placer deposits are often beach or fossil beach sands..."

And I found two specific examples of notably radioactive monazite beaches—an 800 km stretch of Brazil's coast [0], and 55 km stretch of India's coast [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarapari#Radioactivity

[1] https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/No-major-birth-defects-fou...

Depends on the beach. Brasil has more than others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdHHUGwFoJE

Those locations, with their high concentrations ("high" being "greater than 0.01%-ish") of heavy metals, of which mazanite is but one of many, are the rare exception.

The IAEA report on Guarapari specifically says "it's weirdly high, brah":

>The exposure level due to monazite sand radiation in Areia Preta beach, Guarapari, is high. The activity concentration of 232Th in Areia Preta is higher than others beaches in world studied. The values of the absorbed dose rate in air and outdoor annual effective dose rate in Areia Preta beach are higher than the world averages due the content of 232Th. Areia Preta is also has higher background found in beaches in world.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

There are other radioactive types of sands. Black sands ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_sand ) can be quite active, and they can be found in many places.

>> here are no EPA surveys of beach radioactivity. No beach signs warning beachgoers "do not eat the sand",

Perhaps there should be. The idea that the natural world is somehow safe has roots in mythology, that some creator has designed the world for us and so any "untouched" wilderness is unpolluted and free of invisible pollutions. Maybe there are beaches with dangerous levels of radiation. I am open to the concept that there exists natural places nevertheless radioactive enough to justify warnings. We certainly issue warnings for other unseen natural hazards.

A while ago now, the Oklo nuclear reactor ran - according to wikipedia [0] - for a few hundred thousand years albeit only with power levels averaging less than 100 kilowatts. It was discovered because there was a discrepancy in the amount of uranium expected from a mine and the amount they actually got.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

>No one knows anything about the physical or chemical properties of sand on the beach. No one asks; no one cares.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22026436

I know what you mean! I found a random field like 20 miles from my house where the radioactivity was like 100x normal due to Thorium in the dirt. How many spots like that have a house built over them and no one knows? Here is my webpage with a video of the field visit. https://hunterwlong.com/mapping-radiation-with-a-raspberry-p...

Now I am curious why 3M was using monazite specifically as a tape dispenser ballast.

So it is sand encased in resin. My initial thought was it is heavier(denser) than plain silica sand, And while it probably is, It feels weird that 3m specifically searched it out to use for that reason alone, I bet they had quite a bit of the stuff on hand for other products, and so might as well use the waste as a tape dispenser ballast.

A tangent on heavy rock ballast, I once saw a documentary on an offshore oil platform, and it was towed to the site, sunk and then filled with rocks to anchor it. the rocks used were specifically iron ore as that is significantly denser than most rocks.

Like spider man they hope a random office blob from sector 7G will get a papercut from the radioactive office supply, only for the radiation to transform him into... .. RED TAPE MAN! He swings from office building to office building shooting duct tape from his wrists, fighting tax cheats and completing tax returns along the way

They're doing a radiological survey of the waterfront in Alameda county because twentieth century humans accidentally depleted it of non-radioactive material, enriched it, in other words. They already identified a small area that's dangerously active.

I thought this was going to be about generating x-rays by peeling scotch tape (https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-ma...)

I thought it was going to be some kind of anti-static device to make the dispensed tape less statically clingy.

I've seen antistatic devices based on ionizing radiation, but not recently. That might be partially a function of different work environments.

All of a sudden I'm imagining some kind of wintergreen-flavored device which you bite on and which takes dental xrays at home...

Yeah, when I read the title I immediately thought "big fng deal, EVERY tape dispenser is a (mildly) radioactive tape dispenser".

applied science segment about this: https://youtu.be/KdfHVcU8U7U?t=1190

How radioactive is this exactly? I picked up one of these in a thrift store a few years ago and have just had it sitting in storage... Waiting to get my retro office vibe once I find the space but I'm willing to let it go if it might kill me? Especially a slow agonizing radioactive based death? Are they seriously so radioactive that the military was afraid of them?

It's not really. It's detectable so it theory it might trip something in a nuclear power plant, but unless you plan on grinding it up and inhaling it, it should stay in the casing.

Nuclear power plants, outside of the reaction chamber, are about the least radioactive places you can go. Given the materials they handle, they operate under such strict procedures to get as early warning as possible if anything is, in fact, leaking from containment.

Which sounds like the story in the article; a radiological survey to ensure safety found a false positive (as in it wasn't the contamination they were looking for). It makes perfect sense to eliminate the false positive from that setting, even if it is a normal everyday item.

When my father started working at the St. Lucie nuclear power plant in ~1988 they had just gotten rid of a shipment of tape dispensers that arrived too hot to be kept on site.

Be careful how you stack them.

(this is a joke, I realize that criticality would be completely impossible for a zillion reasons)

I think fusion from gravity would be the first radiation hazard lol. You would need quite a few.

Interesting to know. These were so commonplace but it's been a while since I've seen one. I was struck by the design while reading the article. I almost want one, but I so rarely use scotch tape...

Dreyfuss designed that? With those swooping curves? That looks more like Loewy or Eames.

I was sure that it was pictured on my 60th Anniversary poster of the Measure of Man poster.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YGdIshaGclHor

the original book. https://www.theprintarkive.co.uk/products/2746-henry-dreyfus...

It is not there. I even searched to find who did design the C-15. I found no credited designer.

I don't know where the belief came from but my ID department had a pipeline into Henry Dreyfuss and Associates right until I graduated. I had a lot of close contact and maybe that is where I learned this fact. It's also possible that 3M has an internal design department therefore no credit is given. I have to point out that is just like 3M to dispose of mining waste a little at time in the form of tape dispensers. That is some real vertical integration.

Finally I'm surprised that the you believe the HDA is incapable of designing forms such as the C-15. They designed the "Princess"" phone and the round Honeywell thermostat.

3M was featured in "Search of Excellence" I think focusing on the the post-it note invention. They wanted a super strong glue and instead got a mild glue and turned it into the post-it note.

I will see what they say about the internal design department.

About 20 years ago I kitted out our office with furniture and supplies from a business liquidation auction. Several tape dispensers of that general shape came along with the lot. I guess I had better bring my geiger counter to the office. Probably the wrong vintage, but who knows?

monazite isn't radioactive enough to be dangerous unless you're breathing the radon. chemically it's very stable, even without the epoxy encapsulation

Just curious. I bought the geiger counter to verify the authenticity of some fiestaware and discovered that my radium dial alarm clock is hot enough to trigger the alarm.

yeah, radium-dial alarm clocks actually can be dangerous. but i think you can put monazite sand in your food with no ill effects except for tooth wear

I set off the explosives detectors at LAX on one trip back from Apex Surplus:

https://apexsurplus.com/

My wife ran off laughing while the officers pulled random bomb-looking pieces from my luggage.

I think those detect certain kinds of nitrogen. I wonder what set it off.

You know someone got kudos for finding a cheap supply of ballast. Never ask why it’s so cheap. The answer is either slaves, children, or contamination. Sometimes all three.

I thought this was going to be able how peeling tape in a vacuum creates X-Rays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com