I found this one[0] the other day where a radiation source ended up in the concrete wall of an apartment building. A whole family got leukemia, took 9 years to eventually have it removed.
> I found this one[0] the other day where a radiation source ended up in the concrete wall of an apartment building. A whole family got leukemia, took 9 years to eventually have it removed.
It's setup as one of those "walking simulators" where you experience fragments of life in the Soviet Union from the perspectives of multiple people, but with a plot twist and tragedy looming around the corner. If nothing else, going into it the first time without knowing the story behind it was a curious experience.
Chemotherapy too, since it usually causes DNA damage (cancers replicate quickly, so DNA damage affects them more). Very aggressive treatment has double-digit odds of giving you a new, additional cancer.
It talks about 4000 people. My father built our house in Chihuahua around 1985-86. Our family lived in that house for 30 years. We don't if we were affected, but it hit me when my sister died of brain cancer two years ago.
> On January 16, 1984, a radiation detector at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. state of New Mexico detected the presence of radioactivity in the vicinity. The detector went off because a truck carrying rebar produced by Achisa had taken an accidental detour and passed through the entrance and exit gate of the laboratory's LAMPF technical area.[6] Local authorities realized that the rebar triggered the alert and notified Mexico's National Commission on Nuclear Safety and Safeguards [es] (CNSNS) on January 18. CNSNS confirmed a wide dispersion of radioactive material had occurred and ordered Achisa to suspend the distribution of manufactured rebar until it was verified that it was not contaminated. Mexican authorities also proceeded to close the junkyard.[4]
Similar to both incidents is Kramatorsk, where a Ce-137 capsule was found in an apartment block, embedded inside a concrete wall, after it fell out of a piece of quarry equipment.
I'm from Juarez, Centro Medico de Especialidades was the hospital we all went to back in the day.
I only know about this story because my father told me how one of the biggest radioactive accidents happened in Juarez when discussing radioactive events after watching the show Chernobyl.
What’s wrong with that? I once read the plot of a horror movie on that page and it haunted me for months. And that was even though I fully expected the article to be unpleasant.
From the Wikpiedia description, it looks like the IGR owners and doctors were treated badly by the system in their country. They made steps to warn about the radioactive material left behind, but were prevented by a court order and guards from retrieving it. Then in the aftermath, they became defendants in civil litigation and criminal prosecution.
That was incredibly frustrating to read. That they tried and literally got legally blocked and still got pinned with it because someone with clout was scared and made prosecutors go after the ones who tried to prevent issues
The lead-up to the accident reminds me of the Beirut explosion where customs officials kept asking judges for permission to resell / dispose off the dangerously stored fertilizer for several years but judges refused to act. Bureaucracy is so absurd sometimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion#MV_Rhosu...
In light of the little bitty thing lost/found in Australia, this is a good example of why they spent such an effort to find it. Forget making dirty bombs, just have a "committed to the cause" person just carry something like this around as they tour the city. At least a dirty bomb would be obvious something happened, and people could know how/why they were getting sick in the aftermath.
This kind of thing would be the worst example of Silent But Deadly. Once the committed to the cause person was too affected from doing the work themselves, just have the next member pick up and carry on the mission. Ammo that never needs reloading. You just have to reload the delivery mechanisms.
I asked in a previous thread about the relative strength of the device in Goiânia and the recent device in Australia. cosama replied:
> The wikipedia article you linked mentioned that the Goiânia source was 50.9 TBq (1,380 Ci) when lost, the source in question here [in Australia] is probably 1-10 mCi, so about a million times weaker. See this other thread about the incidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34549126 .
Half a curie is an extremely dangerous source! An acquaintance of mine who ran a research reactor for something like ten years was surprised they made a 0.5 Ci Cs-137 at that gauge. He had expected a mining source to be in the tens of mCi range when the news first broke (though he also admitted he's less knowledgeable about mining industry uses than other ones).
Here and in the several prior HN threads on this topic, people often seem to insist on trying to make a movie plot out of it, as if it somehow fails to satisfy by being "merely" a serious industrial accident which was promptly and successfully resolved with at least as yet no evident casualties.
I don't understand what narrative so many seem driven to look for here and then complain about not finding, and I certainly don't see what benefit accrues to them or anyone else from the attempt.
Maybe I was bored, and my mind wandered into something fanciful. No harm no foul, except it seems to have perturbed you. So I like to shoot short films and fun things with friends, and we're always chatting about random things from life that could be spun into a short story. It's habit. Never seemed to have bother anyone till now.
Are you the type that gets irritated when people call out "great name for a band" during normal conversations. Some people just catch onto things in conversation and the mind takes its own spin on it. It can make for great conversations. Unless you're just against having fun.
Edit: never mind the plot of China Syndrome was an industrial accident, yet a very compelling plot. Or "Sully", or the one where Denzel inverts the plane to avoid tragedy, or any of the other numerous plots involving industrial accidents like CHUD!!!
I wasn't really talking about what you said, but I guess this deserves a response, even if "do you hate fun?" is frankly pretty weak.
I also write, but I don't talk about it very often, because it turns out most people aren't super excited to see an involved and wholly unrelated conversation interrupted with a more or less totally off topic plot idea someone happened to have. Unless you're actually at a workshop, that's what notebooks are for. If you don't have one, get one.
In response to some comments from someone else who seemed really anxious to be able to argue, on no sound or sensible basis whatsoever, that the whole thing's absurdly overblown and no one should be taking it seriously as the danger to life and health that it was, which is something I've seen a frankly bewildering number of people on HN this week put effort into doing.
I wasn't really replying to your comment at the head of the subthread I was replying to. But, fair: if I'd considered the context a bit more thoroughly, I'd have picked some other metaphor than a movie plot for the unrelated kind of confabulation I was complaining about.
> 50 millisieverts: Maximum yearly dose permitted for US radiation workers
> 100 millisieverts: Lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increase of cancer risk.
> 400 millisieverts: Dose causing symptoms of radiation poisoning if received in a short time.
So if you keep the source for a day in your pocket, you reach the limit of radiation of a radiation worker. It's not wise, but that number is still quite conservative. I guess it's not lethal, but I definitively would not try to do that.
A few days or a week? It looks like a very very very bad idea.
If I were in charge, I'd also try to recover it as soon as possible. The idea is to minimize the health risk and the radiation received by people. And if some moron decides to open it, the health risk and cleanup would be much worse.
From the same article:
> “It emits both beta and gamma rays, so if you have contact or close to you, you could either end up with skin damage, including skin burns … and if you have it long near you it could cause acute radiation sickness,” Dr Robertson said.
It sounds definitively dangerous, but not all dangerous things are lethal (in a short time).
>So if you keep the source for a day in your pocket, you reach the limit of radiation of a radiation worker
You're missing the part where 2 millisieverts / hour is the dose at a distance of 1 meter. If you put in your pocket, you would rapidly sustain radiation burns.
You're also missing that a dose sustained over a short period is much more deadly than a dose dragged out over a year. In the latter case, the body will be repairing the damage as it happens, mitigating the effect.
Where did you get the distancie of 1 meter? It's very hard to get any data from the press.
I think you are right. Let's make some back of the envelope calculations.
The frontal surface of a person is 1m^2 approximately. The surface of a sphere of 1m is 4/3*pi*(1m)^2 ~= 4m^2. The silly proportion is 2msV/1m^2*4m^2 = 8mSv, but 1m is not far enough to assume the sphere is almost flat. Let's duplicate it to 16mSv (8 idiots can form a round at 1m, shoulder to shoulder and absorb almost all the radiation). May I round it to 20 mSv?
If someone put it in the pocket, s/he will get half of the radiation, that is 10mSv/hour. [Before you find more errors in my comment, I agree that it's more complicated. The front pockets of the pants are probably the worst area. Holding it in a closed hand would double the radiation. Anyway, if you have a more accurate calculation, it is welcome.]
A Chest CT scan is 7mSv and it takes like half an hour, but it's more evenly distributed.
My guess is that you can get some nasty radioactive burns as warned in the press article, but in a short time it's not lethal as clamed by the GP.
The risk with radiation sources dramatically increases within 1 m – we can calculate the dose rate using the ‘inverse square law’:
At 1 cm, the dose rate will be 10,000 time higher …. 16,650 mSv/h (or 16.65 Sv/h)
At 1mm (ie, if you were to pick the source up with your fingers), the dose rate would be 1,665 Sv/h – this will cause some serious damage to your fingers and surrounding tissues.
>>>
I'm a little suspicious of their inverse-square calculation, though, as by their logic the dose rate would be infinite at a distance of 0m (skin contact). That's clearly not the case.
Thanks for the link. It looks like the get the official data at 1m and decided to extrapolate, but those calculations don't make any sense. The inverse square law is only a good approximation when the source and the target are small (or other special configurations, for example when one of them is a sphere).
Right. If a "weak" thing like this ends up in a place where somebody is near it constantly - like a workplace desk, or in somebody's home? It may take months but they will accumulate a lethal dose.
Thats not how you would do it, the way you would do it is to place it in a shielded briefcase. There would be a mechanism on the briefcase that would allow you to open up an exposure focal point effectively exactly like a radiotherapy device. Taking this into a subway, coffee shop etc. opening up the aperture and aiming it at a person quietly for a hour would give them a potentially lethal dose of radiation.
A serial killer, assuming they could construct and acquire the necessary radioactive materials could probably perform this many many times before being caught.
Ignorance is enough already, you don't need any malice. A child that didn't have had the chance to learn about radioactivity is enough to kill plenty of people.
That's why you control radioactive elements. Not exactly because of some antagonistic group. Any such group could probably kill way more people, way more easily by messing with something else.
>Just have a "committed to the cause" person just carry something like this around as they tour the city.
Please don't fear-monger; the impact of radiation on the human body is cumulative and the inverse square law makes it hard for any point source to have a ton of impact (particularly with how much attenuating concrete and metal exists in cities).
A person walking around a city with a Cs-137 capsule would emit a very dangerous field around themselves, but the impact would be very localized and require long exposure times for there to be a meaningful impact. Your scenario would primarily be a confusing suicide mission, where maybe a random assortment of people would have elevated cancer levels in future years.
Hell, even the guy next to Slotin at the Demon core criticality survived 20+ years (before dying of a heart attack)[0]
The most deadly disasters are the ones where a radioactivity source is in one place for a long time and people interact closely with it, frequently (usually because they don't know it is there).
Take the Goiânia accident [1] as an example. Only the scrapyard employees who spent a few days with the capsule ended up dying. Other people with shorter interaction times were fine.
Or take the Kramatorsk Accident [2], only the families in the apartment died of leukemia, despite it being a full building.
If you took this seriously after Silent But Deadly to come away with I'm trying to practice fear mongering, "well, boy, I don't know."
We have so many movie/book plots, that this is exactly how they start. Someone reads something, and then just plays with the idea. I'm not a writer, so it's not like I'm ever going to use the idea. But who knows, maybe somebody else reads and turns it into a good idea.
We can still have fun in this world even with deputy downers like you ruining for everyone "because it's not accurate".
Aside from both incidents happening in countries not particularly well known for long-term follow-up on the consequences of failures by the state...law of inverse squares is what saved a lot of people in these incidents. The source wasn't actually that close to them. In a dense city, a hypothetical terrorist probably wouldn't have to work too hard to get around this.
Some radiotherapy sources are stamped "DROP AND RUN." If you're able to read that, by the time you've read it, you're already in deep dogshit. The levels of radiation involved cause near instant cell death and odd sensations due to, well, the frying of the nervous system. You might live - but
The impact wouldn't be that high in terms of people injured/killed. The real impact would be on the public psyche, as well disruption of the health system when people showed up in ERs and doctors offices thinking they were exposed, clogging those systems for care of other patients. In that sense, as a terror attack, it would be highly successful.
It's really bizarre seeing a bunch of HNers downplaying how serious these sorts of incidents are. We're very lucky that the lost sources have never ended up in the hands of anyone but non-malicious actors. Now 'bad' people are far more aware of them...
>side from both incidents happening in countries not particularly well known for long-term follow-up on the consequences of failures by the state
Journalists followed the other people. We know their names. We have evidence of them dying for other reasons later on (unless you want to get into Damar Hamlin clone territory)
>law of inverse squares is what saved a lot of people in these incidents. The source wasn't actually that close to them. In a dense city, a hypothetical terrorist probably wouldn't have to work too hard to get around this.
The law of inverse squares is extremely hard to get around. The amount of radiation 10 feet away from the capsule is only 1% of the radiation 1 foot away from the capsule. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. I don't know how 'in a dense city' overcomes that law of physics.
>Some radiotherapy sources are stamped "DROP AND RUN."
Yes, and if you're even a few feet away or on the other side of attenuating matter, you're in much less trouble (See: Alvin Graves).
>The impact wouldn't be that high in terms of people injured/killed. The real impact would be on the public psyche, as well disruption of the health system when people showed up in ERs and doctors offices thinking they were exposed, clogging those systems for care of other patients. In that sense, as a terror attack, it would be highly successful.
Sure, but then what's the point of even doing it vs. just saying you had? And again, aren't I doing exactly what you should want by telling people that their risk in this scenario is basically zero?
>It's really bizarre seeing a bunch of HNers downplaying how serious these sorts of incidents are. We're very lucky that the lost sources have never ended up in the hands of anyone but non-malicious actors. Now 'bad' people are far more aware of them...
I'm really waiting for the explanation of how these bad actors get over the inverse square law...
its terrible, but given that after smearing this stuff all over the place only 4 people died, it seems to take a bit more effort than just walking around the city. Those shooters like Las Vegas etc we get here cause way more destruction without having to use such extravagant methods.
i don't know if it's just because we've become numb to these events, but they just don't get the reaction from something esoteric like someone irradiating the local stores causing people to get sick invisibly. then again, maybe i'm giving the new "scary" too much credit. overall, we didn't take covid seriously. i could see people having radiation parties of groups of people convinced it's not real.
This kind of attack might be detectable with any digital camera. I'd hope the level it takes to produce visible noise is less than the level to be harmful.
> That night, Devair Alves Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard, noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days, he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing substance.
> On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.
The Goiânia accident was certainly extraordinary but I was surprised to learn from a recent Guardian article how common the loss of radioactive sources actually is.
There, Dr Edward Obbard an expert from UNSW Sidney university was interviewed on the occasion of the lost capsule in Australia. The article says:
"The search for the missing capsule captured the world’s imagination, but Obbard says radioactive material goes awol about 100 times a year around the world."
Also the fact that there are at least eight nuclear bombs that have been lost and never found is always chilling. And these are only the ones from western countries we know about...
Other terrible accidents (not related to the nature of Goiana):
* Hisashi Ouchi: Fatal dose beyond imagination. Accident during manually mixing a bucket of radioactive material (yes, you read that right) in a room. They did this in order to bypass the regular procedure to finish the job earlier as they were already delayed. Doctors (if I recall correctly) kept him alive for 2 months while the poor guy was begging to let him go.
* Anatoli Bugorski: Literally put his head in a particle accelerator. Happened because a light indication was off when it should have been on. He described seeing the light of a billion suns (or something like that). Survived but with serious consequences.
> One of IGR's owners and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building.
Why were the owners liable? They notified the court and were prevented by the court from removing the machine, so my first thought is they should be blameless: The court assumed control and therefore responsibility.
One of the more stupid accidents. Here a judge decided that security of a radioactive source that belong to company A was secondary to a lease agreement with company B, and so contributed to multiple people dying.
The people who stole and opened the source obviously shouldn’t have, but given the period I think it’s more reasonable that they didn’t understand what was going on. The judge doesn’t have that excuse.
> He soon developed a burn on his hand in the same size and shape as the aperture – he eventually underwent partial amputation of several fingers.
> On September 15, Pereira visited a local clinic, where his symptoms were diagnosed as the result of something he had eaten; he was told to return home and rest.
Hopefully the partial amputation occurred after the visit, otherwise I would really love to know what the clinic thought he ate that could cause partial amputation!
Well, they clearly didn’t think much of the doctors advice… the next day:
> “September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.”
however, "let me light this glowing-blue stuff on fire to see if it is gun powder" really sounds like they forgot the part where he said "hold my beer"
I mean, I can respect an experimentalist approach. It certainly seems foolish when considered on the assumption that everyone in the world knew as much about radiation forty years ago as you and I know today, but so to assume would constitute flagrant historiographical presentism.
I'm posting a yahoo page about it because of a text preference for HN, but the Chubbyemu YouTube video is mildly terrifying. It's my understanding that this sort of thing is vanishingly rare, but serves as a reminder that it's better to have modern medicine than not.
https://news.yahoo.com/teenager-legs-fingers-amputated-eatin...
> They learned that JC only received the first dose of the meningococcal vaccine just before he entered middle school. And once he reached the age of 16, JC did not receive the recommended booster for the vaccine.
wow, so it totally is possible to lose your fingers after eating something. This also show the importance of vaccination and makes me wonder: how do I know if I missed some vaccines as a kid? how do I know whether I need a booster of something since school?
This is the issue with nuclear in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated.
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle nuclear technologies.
Nuclear medicine in middle-income countries has almost certainly saved orders of magnitude more people than it's killed.
Even the specific source in the Goiânia accident could easily have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up taking.
Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.
We seem to manage nuclear very well, and one piece of evidence is how horrifying it is that four people died in this story, and the degree of concern it generated. Nuclear stuff is like airline safety; there's a good cultural and governmental stance around taking its risks seriously.
But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done, and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of some course of action against the absence of that risk; you have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this tech just for fun.
I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it clear which is better.
We've had numerous power plant incidents throughout history, all attributable to human arrogance and incompetence - some of which have left thousands of square miles uninhabitable and given millions elevated cancer risks, caused widespread contamination of entire regions of the sea, etc.
There's pages worth of military-related incidents, including things like reactor fires that ejected huge plumes of highly radioactive fallout.
There have been numerous incidents in nuclear processing. One resulted in the murder of a journalist to cover it up. Hanford took decades to clean up (I think they've finally finished?)
We spent decades blowing up nuclear weapons for giggles, causing so much fallout to spread worldwide that almost all steel these days has radioactive fallout in it, and many things can be dated by the decay of fallout in them because it's so widespread.
The US alone has lost several functional nuclear weapons.
The policy around nuclear waste in much of the US and elsewhere was, and often still is, "stick it in a hole. In containers that can rust. In water."
The point is that things that are relatively harmless but common and handled carelessly (dogs, cars and hydro) easily cause more deaths than something that is very, very dangerous but rare and handled carefully (tigers, guns and nuclear).
are you saying that the thousands of square miles of ocean from the platforms like Deep Horizon are not suffering massive externalizations?
the chernobyl exclusion zone is not a barren wasteland full of dead. the flora and fauna are living. while i wouldn't move there myself or eat any thing from there, life is not dead there. life, uh, finds a way, as it has been said.
This is the issue with fossil fuel technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated.
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
>> There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
I know this is sarcastic but the UK is in the middle of an absolutely massive scandal with raw sewage being continuously discharged in rivers and the sea for many years now:
>> Pollution warnings for dozens of beaches in England and Wales were issued after water companies discharged untreated sewage and wastewater into the sea.
>> Raw sewage was pumped into rivers and seas about 375,000 times in 2021, the Environment Agency says.
>> In 2022, Ofwat, the water regulator for England and Wales, launched cases against six water companies over discharging sewage at times when this should not have happened.
And of course there's the little-known matter of anthropogenic climate changed caused by CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. I know it's hard to believe, but it is starting to become a bit of a problem.
This is a pretty bad problem, and they have had years to fix it.
In Brazil, it's actually even worse. Only around 35% of Brazil sewage is treated to Brazil standards!
Many towns dump raw sewage onto rivers/ocean continuously, and as a result around 15% of the population don't even have access to basic water sources due to this. Disgusting.
Fossil fuel technology is easy. You dispose of the waste products into the atmosphere which is like infinitely vast! Most of the really damaging stuff will be washed out by rain, and stored in all of these previously-useless lakes and rivers. Let's be honest, what has a lake or river done for YOU lately?
If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit by that big meteor!
I think there are lots of cases where we definitely rushed to market way too soon in several situations. The realistic thing about it is that you can only test things as far as someone can think of crazy situations to test against. Even if we tested against every crazy combination and permutation of situations, something in real life will always come along and provide an even crazier situation. Sure, you add that to the list for the next time.
However, we are smart enough to know that certain things will have similar results just based on experience. We know that burning of anything will release things into the air, so we can test the results of burning $newThing. If $newThing is made from very similar processes and materials of $knownThing, we can look to see what issues may have been learned and test with those in mind. At some point, based on experience up until now, you make conclusions that it might just be safe enough which is good enough for corps looking to recoup R&D
There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech.
Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same.
Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours.
Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.
> There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire and five people die? That could happen with any tech.
Nuclear accident deaths, all time: around 300.
Nuclear bomb deaths, all time: around 150,000.
Fossil fuels deaths: 8.7M people dead, per year. It's not even close.
The kind of damage a few malicious or negligent individuals can cause in an afternoon from nuclear operations can't be matched by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have caused damage through the effort of billions of people over centuries.
The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument against building a large infrastructure of nuclear operations.
This is the issue with sewage technology in general. In short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila, regions devastated.
There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage, you can't handle sewage technologies.
This sounds like "Great White Father" stuff to me. Are wealthy countries really so suited to telling poorer ones what they may and may not do to join the wealthy?
Yes. It's imperfect but that's the way it is, it's already in place with 'Nuclear Non Proliferation' [1] and many other things. It's a 'free world' until interests are threatened, then you see where the balance of power is, moreover, there are legitimate issues of responsibility here. Canada, Japan, Ukraine, Brazil, Cameroon - all different places in so many ways, it is what it is. That's diversity.
EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other point is that other places are objectively much worse.
Well so nobody can handle nuclear technologies, since nobody handles garbage correctly. Just look at how many stuff that can be recycled get tossed into general waste, or how much electronic waste we send to poor countries since we can't deal with it.
In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is completely different than everything else, it's highly regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at all).
Where are the regulations around combat teams hiding in Nuclear Power plants? Artillery shells landing 500ft from reactors? Small quasi-accidents happening because one regime wants to 'blame it' on another? Nuclear staff being locked into the facility?
Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy, incompetent.
Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures.
Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw the regulators because they want to save money on construction, or some person installs substandard materials because somewhere down the long globalized value chain, someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by accident, and it compromises the entire system.
Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't account for.
Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable systems.
Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as well.
This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing.
More specifically - the rules are already in place for Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult. [1]
It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk.
Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see what happens.
> This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of innate thing.
Ukraine and Russia unfortunately show to us all that what defines what's a 'sovereign country' and what isn't is either having youself, or being a very close ally of countries that have stockpiles and [innate?] ability to use nuclear weapons.
I think statistics do not support this fear. This is in Brazil that probably has been running thousands of this equipments over decades, with this one significant incident. Also runs two nuclear power plants and enriches uranium locally without any relevant incident. I think this irrational fear of atomic poses more danger because it's something we need , oil kill much more people and renewables alone won't cut it. Even Brazil that runs a lot of hidro eventually needs to run fossil fuel thermoelectric because of low volume of rains.
Nuclear has a fundamentally different risk profile. Nuclear failures mean possibly a hugely disproportionate number of deaths, entire regions unusable, and very risky externalizations such as someone using waste to make most of Manhattan unlivable, which is absolutely a possibility that exist, and does not for almost all other technologies.
People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers.
The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.
This is the issue with people in general. Any industry is going to cause a certain number of deaths. And nuclear is far from being the worst. Particularly nuclear medicine, which has saved untold number of people.
I see where you’re coming from, but the way the western countries managed their garbage problem was to send it to those especially unprepared countries (think: sending container ships with trash from the US to China).
I think you’re mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and power dynamics.
A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems better. It’s the 21st century, we’re much more intertwined than we’ve ever been.
Of course it is. Just read up on "China Waste Import Ban".
> China is the largest importer of waste plastics, accounting for 56% of the global market.[1] Meanwhile, the United States, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom are the main source countries.[1]
The issue with the nuclear power is the nuclear warhead. Mankind would be perfectly fine with nuclear power but will always be at risk as long as it is weaponized. Some folks being fatally radiated does not impose risk to our kind.
I'd argue that nuclear warheads have saved millions of lives by preventing another world war. MAD prevents nuclear weapons states from waging war against each other directly.
You realise of course that in the alternative universe in which this was not the case, you'd be unable to make this statement.
That is generalisable to all global catastrophic risk: by virtue of the fact that they can occur once, and once only, means that we're effectively living in the survivorship-bias universe in which they did not occur.
That thought's only recently occurred to me, though Richard Posner wrote of it.
By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13.
But then people don't know a thing about isotopes, fertile and fissile nuclei, or what actually goes into a bomb. The reactors that produced the plutonium used in warheads largely came from specialised reactors designed for this purpose only. You cannot get the same stuff out of civilian reactors.
I remember this when I was a kid. Most amazing was that the federal goverment didn't had a protocol to deal with things like that, even at the time we where building our second nuclear power plant.
But the military was aable to perform a fast response for the incident. And shows that even if nuclear energy is the future, we could never understimate it.
The only company that had the know how in constructions like that was involved in the Petrolão, the scandal involving bribes and and money laundry in contructions for the country national oil company, and the company was basically nuked. Now chinese contruction companies are taking the place in the market.
If civilization collapses there will be lots of terrible stories like this over the next 500 years or so as enterprising folks raid old sites and find amazing "treasure".
There was an instance maybe in the ‘90s where a few hunters found an abandoned Soviet radioisotope thermal generator in the woods and used it to keep warm overnight. I think one or two of them may have ultimately survived, but at least one died and they all suffered terribly.
I know there are probably tons of horrible accidents related to radioactive material, but I wonder if this one inspired Matt Groening when he created The Simpsons between 1987 and 1989, with the famous opening sequence where Homer gets an uranium rod fall into the back of his protection suit and unknowningly brings it home.
I'm no Simpsons expert so I don't know if the incident was part of a longer episode because you can't see the consequences of such an accident in the short opening sequence, but I think it's enough to get people to ask questions about this glowing green thing, if you don't already know about radioactivity.
Maybe because the Simpsons became worldwide famous and one of the most popular shows ever, many people all around the world especially children are more aware of radioactive hazards, even when school systens fail to teach them about their danger.
>The capsule was originally part of a radiation level gauge and was lost in the Karansky quarry in the late 1970s. The search for the capsule was unsuccessful and ended after a week. The gravel from the quarry was used in construction.The caesium capsule ended up in the concrete panel of apartment 85 of building 7 on Mariyi Pryimachenko Street
>By the time the capsule was discovered, four residents of the building had died from it and 17 more had received varying doses of radiation.
The roughly 150 combined military and civilian incidents that the two respective Wikipedia lists contain demonstrate that
1. military and civilian use of technology both go wrong roughly similarly often (approx. 55% and 45%, respectively)
2. in just about 100 years of "nuclear technology", there have been more than a mean of 1 1/2 incidents per year.
I'd be surprised if the Wikipedia list is complete, there are probably substantial numbers of unreported/suppressed incidents, although I expect them to be small (large incidents would have been detected by others measuring radiation).
We humans can screw up anything. Whether it's not protecting others or just not being cautious enough. Why would you ever bring an item that glows and you have absolutely no idea what it is around your family?
Shame on the authorities for allowing this to happen in the first place. Their job is to protect society from things they don't/can't understand. And let's not forget money probably accounted for why the source wasn't removed in the first place.
Pardon my ignorance but How could any radioactive material whose half life is 30 year could survive billions of years on earth and still be radioactive?
Cesium-137 is made in nuclear reactors, but some radioactive isotopes with shorter half lives (well, short compared to the age of the Earth) exist in nature because they are a product of the natural radioactive decay of other, long-lived materials like Uranium.
"As an almost purely human-made isotope, caesium-137 has been used to date wine and detect counterfeits and as a relative-dating material for assessing the age of sedimentation occurring after 1945."
It took us a few hundred years, but we did finally realize the alchemists' dream of transmuting elements into other elements. It's just a little expensive.
The Goiânia accident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after a forgotten radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city.
I wish we would put more emphasis on supporting the body as a means to improve health instead of assaulting the body in the name of assaulting the illness.
Plainly difficult channel covered it at some point https://youtu.be/nhL0xQzPSy8 I remember liking the explanation/event breakdown, curious why this short documentary link is not in the Wikipedia article
If you're curious, there's some reasonably priced ones on Amazon that might satisfy your curiosity (but are not safety rated or scientifically accurate).
If you're actually feeling anxious about this, there's a laundry list of things far more likely to harm you that you can act on right now, such as making sure you have sufficient smoke and CO alarms, a CO2 measurement tool to see if your popular rooms are getting enough fresh air, and a radon detector (though depending on region this may not apply).
What's also bad about this incident is that it was hidden from the public during a weekend because they were having a Moto GP that weekend and didn't want the publicity.
It was not forgotten. It was neglected by the government, which then then tried to blame the owners that had been begging for months for someone to address the issue. The government actively prohibited them from removing it.
It's a long chain of avoidable mistakes, each contributing to the next one, culminating on the deaths of far too many people who didn't make any mistake.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...