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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

The russians left a scary amount of radioactive material in random places after the union fell :/ I'm reminded of the Lia Radiological Incident (three men irradiated by the remains of soviet RTGs) and the 1997 Tbilisi, Georgia incident where 11 servicemen were irradiated by a radioactive source in a jacket, left over from soviet training

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Similar accident in 1980 when a lost Caesium-137 capsule in a quarry became mixed into a concrete wall of a bedroom in an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing several people and making others ill, for 8 years before it was found:

https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kra...

If you ever want to have a worrying afternoon, have a read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

I now want a bluetooth geiger counter hooked up to my smartwatch with sound effects

Here you go: https://www.radiacode.com/

Thats a much smaller list than I would have expected considering it covers the entire planet.

Wonder what it is about these sources that compels people to pick them up put them in their pocket and surprisingly often keep them in their kitchen. Do they visibly glow or look cool?

Yeah, this one is super scary...

Not entirely related. Some scam health products are made with radioactive material[0,1] (thorium dioxide) and can be found in wands, baby clothing, pendents, cards, wristbands, face cream, toothbrushes, and more.

Even more concerning given that these products will shed that radioactive material into the environment and be ingested by humans. The "quantum wands" as shown in the YouTube video are filled with a sizeable quantity of thorium dioxide powder and is possible to forcibly open.

They are illegal but continue to be sold.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BA5bw1EV5I

Somewhere in China is a businessman incredibly pleased with himself that he found a way to sell the toxic waste left over from rare earth processing to new age hippies.

Don't forget the space nukes [reactors]! Some of them exploded, and stringed the planet with Saturn-like rings of nuclear dust[0]; others are slowly oscillating towards Earth like the blade from the Poe story, to impact sometime a few centuries from now.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status" (.pdf))

To be clear, nuclear reactors, not nuclear bombs. It's droplets of the liquid metal they used as coolant in their nuclear powered ocean radar recon satellites.

It's both nuclear fuel and droplets, although the clouds of metal droplets are much easier to track by radar. Several of the space reactors did explode (were observed to break up and fragment).

Or the 2006 London incident, where a Putin critic was irradiated by a radioactive source in his stomach.

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