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Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,”

Three times the background radiation is hardly noteworthy. It would have been much more interesting to know what they found in the waste water. Sulphuric and nitric acid?

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Variation in background radiation around the world varies by far more than 3x. As you say, this is not a notable observation.

Hell, the amount of uranium naturally found in granite will make some countertops emit significant amounts of radiation. I'm not sure how much exactly, but I'd be willing to bet it's well over 3x the background.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/granite-countertops.html

Back when I was an exploration geologist looking for uranium, one of the things we would do was wander around prospecting with a scintillometer. A typical background on sandstone would be ~40 cps, whereas we could expect >400 cps on granite, an order of magnitude variation.

What exactly did the article define as the background? The ambient conditions of the laboratory?

Also, it is not just the uranium in the granite that is responsible for the radiation. Thorium and potassium are significant as well.

Exactly my thoughts. He should have linked to another article or some sort of table detailing the water quality.

It would also be interesting to know the air quality in that city as well.

The scenery and pictures don't do much to elicit a reaction from me. There are quite a few natural places as bleak and "hellish" as the landscape he describes, some that people actually appreciate for their austere "beauty". I'd like to know more about the impact on wildlife and people, maybe what it looked like before and after.

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