Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium 137 | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium 137

reuters.com

125 pointsgeox32 comments

My guess is it'll eventually be traced back to improperly disposed of Cs-137 source. This wouldn't be the first time [1] [2].

There was also a famous case in the 80s where a scrapyard in Mexico sent some steel contaminated with Cobalt-60 to a foundry where it was melted down into rebar. It was detected when a truck transporting rebar to a construction site took a wrong turn and ended up at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it triggered contamination alarms. By that point, the rebar had been used in a whole bunch of construction that had to get torn down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

Wow, what a lucky fluke to have caught it. Makes me wonder how much construction material has contaminated materials in it that go undetected.

So much that in post Soviet countries it’s common to bring a Geiger counter to buy real estate. Usually the contamination is from natural sources like stone quarry that hasn’t been properly inspected.

There was the Kramatorsk radiological accident in the Soviet Union (Ukraine) where a cesium 137 source used at a gravel quarry was lost. Ended up in the wall of an apartment. Four people died of leukemia over 9 years.

You should know that Mexican steel was circumspect for years after this, with shipments regularly being checked at the border for contamination.

No need to go that far back, Wikipedia lists seven incidents just in 2020s. It happens pretty often, although sources are usually not that powerful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

There's another incident, not appearing on that list, which seems like a plausible candidate:

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

Another similar case occurred in Ukraine in the 80s:

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

> Officials from Indonesia’s nuclear energy regulatory agency have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology, or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed.

> It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.

Imagine the lead contamination also

I saw a How it’s Made-esque show on aluminum recycling just a couple years ago, which is when I learned that aluminum-lead alloys are a thing, and have to be separated. They used a pneumatic blast picker, an x ray machine, and real time image processing to separate the lead from the other alloys. I’ve seen other such systems before, and in those the camera was usually around 30ms up the conveyor from the picker and it pushes the targeted materials into a separate hopper. The scan is parallelized to keep it real time.

Recycling is pretty amazing.

You have to imagine some lead is getting into the aluminium yeah?

You have to imagine it's possible. Thankfully, aluminum cans have a plastic liner that separates the liquid from the metal container.

It’s a bit fuzzy but I think these guys were making window frames rather than food grade materials.

I do know that for certain impurities in metal recycling, they have a tendency to accumulate at the top or bottom of the billet, so cutting off those sides to make the billet square removes a lot of sins. But some documentaries don’t show this step, and some the billet doesn’t appear to have been modified before subsequent use.

It’s possible that there are steps we aren’t shown/skipped as either trade secrets or too complex to explain.

In addition to x-rays, hyperspectral cameras can also be used to discern material composition at least superficially: https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Hyperspectral_Imaging_Ass...

https://www.specim.com/hyperspectral-imaging-applications/hy...

awesome tech

Yeah the time before that when I encountered such a picker, someone was trying to recycle mixed plastics by chopping them up and the somehow with cameras they could see which plastic type it was. I’m sure they were using more than visible light to accomplish that.

Sadly haven’t heard much since so I don’t know if they are still around, if it didn’t work at all or if they just couldn’t make it cheap enough. I don’t recall the name of the group. One is mentioned in your link and they achieves 98% purity, which may not be sufficient for industrial use.

"Released from the facility’s smokestack" sounds bad.

Is it even possible to clean this up, if true?

Depending on where it went, maybe. Scrape and remove topsoil and everything on top of it downwind where the particles settle. Dredge any waterways. Etc.

Edit: You can read about one such cleanup after the incident linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...

This article is talking about relocating residents, doesn't sound great: https://kbr.id/articles/indeks/membongkar-ancaman-paparan-ra...

Complicating matters, cesium's melting point is 28.5C/83.3F - given the Indonesian climate it's going to be liquid a lot of the time.

cesium is one of the most reactive metals known - it can’t stay in pure form in the atmosphere at all. it long ago formed compounds

For intensely radioactive materials used in medical equipment and elsewhere, can we require the equivalent of a bottle deposit, where buyers pay a large sum up front when their device is installed and then, when the device reaches the end of its life, the manufacturer or government pays them to get it back and properly disposes of it? I'm guessing that nearly all instances of this sort of thing happening are because of attempts to dodge the - likely large - cost of proper disposal. Make it profitable to do the right thing and organizations will.

No, I don't think that is possible. It would make each of these things prohibitively expensive and be equivalent to a ban.

I found this article a bit better than Reuters one;

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioacti...

Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?

We will likely never know. Once you melt the evidence and stir it with tons of other molten metal there’s not much to track.

IIRC all sources are tracked at manufacture and it migh also be possible to try to match the isotope ration to the original source material ? Not to mention the whole "spraying deadly radiation all over the place" that can be detected with modern sensitive detectors, possibly tracing back all places where the original source was miss-handled.

If the metal is still radioactive they can probably narrow it down to a couple of train cars of scrap that were likely sources, but short of adding sensors to prevent a repeat, and auditing their partners…

Cs-137 is commonly extracted from fuel used as a source for radiation therapy, although less so these days, due in part to incidents with misplaced sources.

The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiânia accident where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of radiation poisoning, including a six year old.

My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended up in the scrap metal stream.

It's also used as a gamma source for metallurgical testing. Which is what the sources that caused the recent Thai and Russian incidents were used for.

Based on latest update, it came from nearby iron smelter that caried through ashes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WeiGvAOD4

There is something so horrifying about basic nuclear physics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com