Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand(nationthailand.com)
nationthailand.com
Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand
https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40025846
53 comments
The key point being, Yes, it has been smelted.
Initial reports seemed to suggest it was found before it was smelted but that is not the case.
Initial reports seemed to suggest it was found before it was smelted but that is not the case.
Industrial smelters are big expensive bits of kit.
Radiation monitors are pretty cheap - at least ones sufficient to identify a Cesium 137 source in a pile of scrap steel.
Radiation in your steel is a hugely costly mistake - at a minimum, you're gonna have to give up all your costly smelting equipment and stock.
Radiation isn't super rare either - major events may be rare, but every few weeks a big smelter will detect small things that ought not be smelted.
So I don't see why any smelter wouldn't have a radiation detector on the input hooked up to warning sirens, for purely financial self interest.
Radiation monitors are pretty cheap - at least ones sufficient to identify a Cesium 137 source in a pile of scrap steel.
Radiation in your steel is a hugely costly mistake - at a minimum, you're gonna have to give up all your costly smelting equipment and stock.
Radiation isn't super rare either - major events may be rare, but every few weeks a big smelter will detect small things that ought not be smelted.
So I don't see why any smelter wouldn't have a radiation detector on the input hooked up to warning sirens, for purely financial self interest.
It is my understanding that there are radiation detectors at the entrances to recycling furnaces (as well as elsewhere in the US transportation-chain) for just this purpose.
[deleted]
Well this is telling you to have any metals that have been passed though Thailand ran under a geiger counter. At least in the US any major recyclers perform this operation to prevent radioactive materials showing up in the product stream.
Personally, I find radiation sources used in (medical) imaging way more terrifying than nuclear power plants.
That doesn't mean I want them to go away, but small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation that could just show up anywhere give me the willies in a way the elephant foot of Chernobyl or the ocean leak of Fukushima don't.
That doesn't mean I want them to go away, but small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation that could just show up anywhere give me the willies in a way the elephant foot of Chernobyl or the ocean leak of Fukushima don't.
Indeed, nightmare fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...
Goiânia accident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
With both of those, the people drilling into and roughly disassembling this equipment mystifies me. I can't imagine the thought process that went into it. I mean, I'm not a 'professional' scrapper either. But I'd like to think that if I were, I'd stay away from pieces of medical equipment of unknown purpose, not try really hard to crack it open like a walrus with a shellfish.
And that's assuming that there were no big fat yellow radiation warnings anywhere on this equipment. Which even in 1977 equipment I find hard to believe.
And that's assuming that there were no big fat yellow radiation warnings anywhere on this equipment. Which even in 1977 equipment I find hard to believe.
To put these people into context - at the time of this incident, there were newborns being called Ge and Siemens because that's the name of the equipment that aided their births. This is to say, they weren't familiar with most medical equipment, and almost certainly did not have a clue as to how it worked. All they saw was some good loot with some yellow stickers on top.
Reading about that particular disaster should be mandatory for people designing software.
The Goiânia accident would validate that concern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
The mention of the film has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. It may be urban legend.
https://commonplacefacts.com/2015/05/08/how-herbie-goes-bana...
https://commonplacefacts.com/2015/05/08/how-herbie-goes-bana...
Small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation are easy to detect and to collect. The 1.5 million litres of contaminated water that leaked in November from Monticello's nuclear plant are not. Actually this is so common that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the US have had
leaks of tritiated water in the past. It does not taste differently, it does not smell differently and it does not make you sick immediately but it sure is a health risk that frightens me more than a lost medical source.
Nuclear reactors produce small amounts of Tritium during normal operations. It’s released into the environment as standard procedure because the amount is so negligible that it doesn’t matter, but it must be closely monitored and reported. Any time it escapes in an unplanned manner, it’s a “leak”. That doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, though.
You could drink water from a well contaminated by a titriated water spill for a year and only get about 1/10th the radiation dose of flying cross country in an airplane. It also decays rapidly with a half life around 12 years and it doesn’t accumulate in the body.
Radiation exposure is a huge spectrum and we can detect tiny amounts with modern equipment. There are a lot of detectable amounts of radioactive material out there that just don’t matter at all to your health: Bananas, smoke detectors, tritiated water from nuclear reactors, etc.
You could drink water from a well contaminated by a titriated water spill for a year and only get about 1/10th the radiation dose of flying cross country in an airplane. It also decays rapidly with a half life around 12 years and it doesn’t accumulate in the body.
Radiation exposure is a huge spectrum and we can detect tiny amounts with modern equipment. There are a lot of detectable amounts of radioactive material out there that just don’t matter at all to your health: Bananas, smoke detectors, tritiated water from nuclear reactors, etc.
tritium is quite expensive, makes gold look cheap, runs about "one new car" per gram. Its quite valuable. It would be like accidentally losing some gold coins in my backyard, that's not anti-enviro garbage dumping that's an accident. So if its a substantial leak they don't need govt regulation to clean it up, the financial market will force them if they lost a hundred million bucks or similar crazy amount.
I was unable in a short google search to find any information on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be incredibly small.
Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans, runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ... substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That and time, the half life only being around a decade.
Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500 TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels. 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that large.
So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have much to worry about.
I was unable in a short google search to find any information on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be incredibly small.
Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans, runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ... substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That and time, the half life only being around a decade.
Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500 TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels. 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that large.
So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have much to worry about.
Nuclear plant tritiated water is not concentrated to saleable quantities. The expense is from concentrating it. Sadly that doesn't help when it's mixed into the groundwater when a concentrated leak and a diffuse leak would both mix in about the same way.
1.5 million liters contaminated by how much? The former number is meaningless without the latter.
You'd think the radiation symbol would be universally understood by even the least educated metal thieves.
Apparently you'd be wrong.
Apparently you'd be wrong.
Which is one reason why the IAEA introduced a new symbol for use on interior components of radioactive sources:
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-symbol-launched-war...
Even if you don't know what the radiation trefoil means (a lot of people interpret it as a flower or a fan), the added message of "death, run away" is pretty clear. And, unlike the existing radiation symbol, this one is reserved for use in places that most people should never see (like inside radiation therapy devices), so there's little risk of people becoming accustomed to seeing it.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/new-symbol-launched-war...
Even if you don't know what the radiation trefoil means (a lot of people interpret it as a flower or a fan), the added message of "death, run away" is pretty clear. And, unlike the existing radiation symbol, this one is reserved for use in places that most people should never see (like inside radiation therapy devices), so there's little risk of people becoming accustomed to seeing it.
I think this is a good move, this symbol has the same problem that the biohazard symbol has. Not sure if the trefoil was designed under the same rationale as the biohazard symbol, but at least in that case, I think the idea to make a new symbol that is recognizable but with no existing meaning is a bad idea. People end up putting it on t-shirts because the symbol looks interesting but never learn what it means. It ends up both losing its impact and not conveying anything inherently.
But it's hard to gauge how dangerous something is.
Radioactive sign? Is it on an old smoke detector? Sure, it technically is radioactive, the sign is there, but the danger is on "meh" levels. And the size of that is relatively similar to the capsule lost recently in australia, which indeed was a lot more dangerous.
Biohazard sign? Could be a smallpox sample... also could be an old bag of used tongue depressors. Firs one would cause (another) global catastophe, and the second one can be safely cleaned in most dishwashers on the "normal"/high heat setting.
Radioactive sign? Is it on an old smoke detector? Sure, it technically is radioactive, the sign is there, but the danger is on "meh" levels. And the size of that is relatively similar to the capsule lost recently in australia, which indeed was a lot more dangerous.
Biohazard sign? Could be a smallpox sample... also could be an old bag of used tongue depressors. Firs one would cause (another) global catastophe, and the second one can be safely cleaned in most dishwashers on the "normal"/high heat setting.
> Could be a smallpox sample... also could be an old bag of used tongue depressors.
Yeah, no joke. I have boxes full of baggies with biohazard signs on them because I needed to do daily covid tests for work and each come with such a bag. I have so many of them that i was thinking about storing small parts and such in them.
Yeah, no joke. I have boxes full of baggies with biohazard signs on them because I needed to do daily covid tests for work and each come with such a bag. I have so many of them that i was thinking about storing small parts and such in them.
I have the board game pandemic, and I used these bags to store the infection counters.
>i was thinking about storing small parts and such in them.
I can only see that ending badly.
Not 24 tonnes of radioactively contaminated dust badly, but still.
I can only see that ending badly.
Not 24 tonnes of radioactively contaminated dust badly, but still.
Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!
to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"
Too similar to https://www.gjplastics.co.uk/fire-exit-sign/ ?
Very wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
> A 1992 episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers depicts a somewhat loosely-based version of this event in the episode "A Deadly Glow," albeit with a happier ending for all involved, and blaming the contamination of the town on an eco-villain. However, it did feature caesium-137 as the radioactive contaminant, as well as portrayed two young children unwittingly playing with it in a similar manner to Leide das Neves Ferreira, who, unlike the children in the cartoon, received a fatal dose.
Fascinating
Fascinating
Repeating an old comment by myself:
Some idiots are using the extremely scary-looking radiation symbol (or something too similar) to sell soda, for example:
* https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Radioactive-Mulberry-Marciano-In...
* http://rad-60.com.ar/ [1]
IIUC this is just water with sugar and a fluorescent dye, not radioactive material (except the natural amount of radioactive deuterium and potassium, that is not enough to make it glow).
[1] Thanks to kragen for the second link in a reply in my old comment. I remembered the advertisement in tv, but I couldn't find the exact name or webpage.
Some idiots are using the extremely scary-looking radiation symbol (or something too similar) to sell soda, for example:
* https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Radioactive-Mulberry-Marciano-In...
* http://rad-60.com.ar/ [1]
IIUC this is just water with sugar and a fluorescent dye, not radioactive material (except the natural amount of radioactive deuterium and potassium, that is not enough to make it glow).
[1] Thanks to kragen for the second link in a reply in my old comment. I remembered the advertisement in tv, but I couldn't find the exact name or webpage.
Is that idiocy even legal? We had the mirror case at a previous workplace once, when an arts class drew artsy warning signs, but then they hung them up in the Science Building to serve as genuine warning signs. Several "Emergency Exit" signs went about the doors, there was a neat "Inflammable" sign on the steel cabinet for solvents & so on.
Meth is powerful and apparently common in Thailand. That said, the scrap dealer ought to be informed and quickly run the other direction when a tweaker walks in with a radiation source.
They probably thought "eh, there's no way they'd throw it away with the dangerous parts included".
The container in the image has Ohmart on it. Looked them up...
https://www.vega.com/en-us/company/vega-americas/our-story
https://www.vega.com/en-us/company/vega-americas/our-story
Looks like it is, more specifically, an Ohmart "SR" series "source holder":
http://www.appliedmc.com/content/images/32867-US.pdf
http://www.appliedmc.com/content/images/32867-US.pdf
We seem to live in a pre-phase of "Cuban missile crisis" again
Everybody rushing to find and locate where the radioactive stuff ended and how many. Somebody counting their cans of plutonium. Other looking at the junkyards. Other threaten to bomb the Hague tribunal...
Looks like if somebody would be suddenly very afraid of the possibility of the attack of a rogue, non tagged with a country flag, small nuclear bomb. The technique of "hit and then put innocent face and argue for years that was not me" has been polished perfectly in the last years.
Crazy times.
Everybody rushing to find and locate where the radioactive stuff ended and how many. Somebody counting their cans of plutonium. Other looking at the junkyards. Other threaten to bomb the Hague tribunal...
Looks like if somebody would be suddenly very afraid of the possibility of the attack of a rogue, non tagged with a country flag, small nuclear bomb. The technique of "hit and then put innocent face and argue for years that was not me" has been polished perfectly in the last years.
Crazy times.
What does a coal-fired power plant need that stuff for?
Presumably, they were measuring the level of coal (or other material) in a tank. Look up "ohmart radioactive level transmitter".
It looks as if this type of device is still sold today.
It looks as if this type of device is still sold today.
At first I thought you might be referring to a radiation detector because coal ash is radioactive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
However, it was a Cesium-137 radiation source.
It may have been used as a calibration source for one of their sensors, or for the detection of non-coal materials in loads of coal, or for the measurement of coal material flow rate through a feeder. https://cbprocess.ca/products/field-instruments/nuclear/
It is a somewhat difficult process to measure the amount of rock mass passing a specific point. You can assume that a truck load has a particular volume, you can assume a specific gravity, you can measure with difficult to keep calibrated weight sensors, etc. But once the material starts to flow you will have difficulty knowing the flow rate and the amount of material remaining.
Using a radiation source and a sensors you can detect the flow of the mass of material, or the volume in a container, based on scattering, reflection, and absorption of the radiation.
Based on the images in this article, the source may have been used to determine the volume of the tank it was attached to.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230316103321/https://asianews....
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
However, it was a Cesium-137 radiation source.
It may have been used as a calibration source for one of their sensors, or for the detection of non-coal materials in loads of coal, or for the measurement of coal material flow rate through a feeder. https://cbprocess.ca/products/field-instruments/nuclear/
It is a somewhat difficult process to measure the amount of rock mass passing a specific point. You can assume that a truck load has a particular volume, you can assume a specific gravity, you can measure with difficult to keep calibrated weight sensors, etc. But once the material starts to flow you will have difficulty knowing the flow rate and the amount of material remaining.
Using a radiation source and a sensors you can detect the flow of the mass of material, or the volume in a container, based on scattering, reflection, and absorption of the radiation.
Based on the images in this article, the source may have been used to determine the volume of the tank it was attached to.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230316103321/https://asianews....
[deleted]
So they took a vessel with a reactive alkaline liquid in it and smelted it? The vaporized cloud could spread far and wide.
A solid piece of steel/iron with an inner container of cesium. Hopefully they didn't try to disassemble it.
Cesium (from wikipedia) "It is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature."
Cesium (from wikipedia) "It is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature."
Metallic Cesium reacts too fast with Oxygen. They are using a salt with Cesium.
For obvious reasons it's easier to find videos with metallic Sodium instead of metallic Cesium. Both are chemically similar and react with Oxygen very fast and must be stored protected from Oxygen, and water, and many other things. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs
It's very difficult to store metallic Sodium, but it's quite easy to store Sodium salts.
The relevant paragraph in Wikipedia is
> Also the higher specific activity caesium sources tend to be made from very soluble caesium chloride (CsCl), as a result if a radiography source was damaged it would increase the spread of the contamination. It is possible to make water insoluble caesium sources (with various ferrocyanide compounds such as Ni 2Fe(CN) 6, and ammonium ferric hexacyano ferrate (AFCF), Giese salt, ferric ammonium ferrocyanide) but their specific activity will be much lower.
For obvious reasons it's easier to find videos with metallic Sodium instead of metallic Cesium. Both are chemically similar and react with Oxygen very fast and must be stored protected from Oxygen, and water, and many other things. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs
It's very difficult to store metallic Sodium, but it's quite easy to store Sodium salts.
The relevant paragraph in Wikipedia is
> Also the higher specific activity caesium sources tend to be made from very soluble caesium chloride (CsCl), as a result if a radiography source was damaged it would increase the spread of the contamination. It is possible to make water insoluble caesium sources (with various ferrocyanide compounds such as Ni 2Fe(CN) 6, and ammonium ferric hexacyano ferrate (AFCF), Giese salt, ferric ammonium ferrocyanide) but their specific activity will be much lower.
It was a vessel with a Cesium salt, not a liquid. Cesium is very heavy, so my guess is that it doesn't evaporate too much.
Even if it was disolved in water, imagine boiling water with table salt. The water goes away, but the salt is left at the bottom.
Even if it was disolved in water, imagine boiling water with table salt. The water goes away, but the salt is left at the bottom.
"Provincial public health and labour welfare officials last week set up a command centre to search for the cylinder and handle any fallout from the incident."
I felt like the writer really wanted to use that word there.
I felt like the writer really wanted to use that word there.
https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cyl...