11 ms·

Most Radioactive Spot in New York: A Street Corner in Queens

100 points by state_machine 11y ago

mgraczyk 11y ago
The article is wrong about safe doses by a factor of 50-100. "a worker at Los Primos is exposed to about 300 millirem per year (100 per year is deemed the highest "safe" dose)" should be "5000-10000 per year is deemed the highest safe dose".
- userbinator 11y ago
  In other words, the actual amount of radiation there is only a bit above background and not really so dangerous? Also, I almost read that as "Los Alamos".
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    About three times as much as you'd get from eating a banana a day (from naturally-occurring radioactive potassium)?
- mapt 11y ago
  Nobody deems any amount of radiation to be a safe dose. Instead, they work under a linear no-threshold model where 50 millirems each might cause 10 cancers in N million people exposed, while 200 millirems each will cause 40 cancers in the same population - absorbed dose is supposed to be directly proportional to harm in large groups of people. There are suspicions that this is maybe too conservative, and that we have repair mechanisms for small quantities of radiation that don't exist for larger quantities, but this directly contradicts the establishment line on the matter, and would be impossible to ethically test. Placing limits on workplace or general exposure would not represent "safety", but merely a threshold at which regulatory mechanisms kick in. Per http://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.gif http://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.g... , background dose aboveground is about 310mrem/yr, and we average about twice that when taking into account human activities (medical imaging and radon mostly, I would expect).
  - mc32 11y ago
    There are populated places on earth with high, naturally occurring background radiation, one such place is in Iran, what have been the long term health effects on people in places like that? I imagine studies have been done.
    - lostlogin 11y ago
      Have a read up on radiation hormesis. It looks like small doses might be beneficial. The linear no threshold model is all fine and good at high doses, but low down the data is poor. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15673519 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15673519
      - mapt 11y ago
        As effect size goes down, statistically significant data gets harder and harder to collect and control effectively. We have tiny amounts of research funding, and even if we took in seven billion people as a dataset, there is some non-negligible dose below which this ceases to be statistically significant.
ars 11y ago
Why have any business there at all? Use the area for storage or parking, or something intermittent like that.
- electro_thiago 11y ago
  I used to live about 3 blocks from here. Within a 2 block radius, there's a children's school, a popular outdoor bar, a hipster pizza restaurant, and some "artist lofts". It's likely that the residents and workers in the area don't have/didn't have knowledge of the former monazite sand site. With the NYC real estate market as it is, there are a bunch of areas with toxic sites like the Gowanus Canal that are people are moving to. http://gothamist.com/2015/07/30/brooklyn_hipster_havens_toxic.php http://gothamist.com/2015/07/30/brooklyn_hipster_havens_toxi...
johnm1019 11y ago
Obligatory XKCD chart for understanding the radiation amounts in the article https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ 100 mrem == 1mSv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Rem_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Rem_equivalence Thinking about the article... for those who understand the risks of increased background radiation, I bet for these businesses rent is cheap!
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  How many inches of lead on the ground is considered safe?
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    How much lead is seeping into the groundwater from this location?
    - johnm1019 11y ago
      That's why they wrap it in a steel sandwich -- to protect the lead, not principally for radiation protection.
      - DonHopkins 11y ago
        I can understand why the lead on the streets of New York needs to be wrapped in 2 inches of steel for protection: otherwise it would be stolen.
Luc 11y ago
There's a bit more detail in this Pulitzer Prize winning (short) article, also addressing the 100 mrem figure: http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/national-reporting/wsjwastelands/02wsjwastelands2014.pdf http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/national-reporting/wsjwas...
devb 11y ago
A lot in Staten Island was once used to store uranium ore for the Manhattan Project. A recent survey found very high levels of radiological contamination. https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/staten-islands-tainted-edge-geologic-city-report-3/ https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/staten-islands-tain...
iSnow 11y ago
Why the hell does this not get cleaned up?
- aluhut 11y ago
  The first question that came into my mind. This makes it even worse: > the Environmental Protection Agency has asked that no employee rest on their back within the premises So...they know and admit it's bad but instead of locking it up, they come up with such ridiculous "solutions"?!
- ams6110 11y ago
  Probably politics and money. You'd have to go through an eminent domain process to condemn and buy up all that property, dig up and remove all the earth, underground utilities, etc. down to a depth of at least a few feet if not yards (in the process, probably spreading comtaminated dust all over the surrounding area) and then fill it in with clean earth. Many many millions of dollars to do this.
- matheweis 11y ago
  "a sandwich of 2 inches (5 cm) of steel, 2 inches of lead, and another 2 inches of steel has been laid down under almost the entire block" Not cleaned up, but somewhat mitigated and wow that doesn't sound like it was cheap...
  - iSnow 11y ago
    The sheer volume of money and work and the technical difficulties of putting a 15cm thick sandwich of metal underneath a block make me doubt the veracity of the article. Especially coupled with the factual error "separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate". Sodium is nowhere near a rare-earth metal and Monazite is a Cerium/Lanthanium phosphate that contains lots of other elements, Uranium and Thorium among them.
pvaldes 11y ago
Is not related but is a curiosity, 'Los primos' (the cousins) is often translated colloquially as 'The fools' in spanish. When you fall in a very obvious scam you are a 'primo' or did 'el primo'. But the best part is what is not said in the article. It seems that there is a licensed grocery selling sandwiches next to this garage... if your dream is to develop superpowers after sipping a coffe this would the place.
- DugFin 11y ago
  "Irradiated" and "radioactive" are not the same thing. An irradiated sandwich poses absolutely no threat to its consumer.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    But eating radioactive sandwiches and sipping radioactive coffee does cause you to develop superpowers?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Only if you count sudden cancer as a superpower. That said, GP's point is that unless there are radioactive substances flying in the air / otherwise contaminating the store next door, things bought there should be safe. They'll be irradiated (affected by radiation), but not radioactive themselves. Contrary to popular opinion, getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive.
      - pvaldes 11y ago
        > unless there are radioactive substances flying in the air things bought there should be safe I'll think rather in a ROG [1] event [1] Rodent Olympic Games.
      - the8472 11y ago
        > getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive. Well, actually... Neutron activation and photodisintegration via high energy gamma rays can produce radioactive isotopes via irradiation. But this generally requires a high flux or high energy to produce noticeable secondary radioactivity. So depending on the type and energy spectrum of the radiation the sandwich is exposed to it might pick up tiny tiny amounts of radioactivity. But yeah, that's probably going to be drowned out by any kind of radioactive dust.
mrob 11y ago
>The plant processed Monazite sand, which, when treated with Sulfuric Acid, separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate, Sodium sulfate is not a rare-earth. This looks to me like a case of copying from Wikipedia without understanding. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite#Acid_cracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite#Acid_cracking "leaving a solution of lanthanide sulfates from which the lanthanides could be easily precipitated as a double sodium sulfate" This is an additional step that happens after the steps shown in the diagram, to separate the different lanthanides. Sodium sulfate is added to the mixed lanthanide sulfates, some of which form lanthanide-sodium double sulfates (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_salt) which precipitate out while other lanthanides remain in solution. See https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HPyNk-cU-nQC&pg=PA402&lpg=PA402&dq=lanthanides+double+salts+sodium+sulphate https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HPyNk-cU-nQC&pg=PA402&lp...
grahamel 11y ago
There's an interactive piece from a couple of years ago for more background/history of the Wolff-Alport site http://projects.newyorker.com/story/radioactive-nyc/ http://projects.newyorker.com/story/radioactive-nyc/
davegardner 11y ago
The actual EPA documentation[1] about this site shows that the comparative exposure is not nearly as significant as the article indicates. A handy comparative radiation dose table that they provide shows that you'd receive an additional 240 mR/year simply by moving from NYC to Denver, Colorado.[2] By comparison, the estimated annual dose received by a worker at the former Wolff-Alport site is 120 mR/year. [1] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/docs.html#Docs http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/docs.html#Docs [2] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/pdf/NYC_DOH_May_2007_wolff_alport_exposure_sheet.pdf http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/pdf/NYC_DOH_May_200...
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
One of Chicago's most upscale downtown neighborhoods is built on a thorium dump from the gaslight era. This is more than a little academic as Streeterville is currently being re-developed by Northwestern Hospital and the city has to be careful not to put more thorium in the air. There are something like four or five new buildings being built right now. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-17/news/ct-thorium-radioactive-cleanup--20140417_1_chicago-river-west-chicago-radioactive-waste http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-17/news/ct-thoriu... The fix? When radiation is detected, the soil is put in bags and shipped to a facility that can dispose of it. The land in the article is going to be park. http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2012/08/22/work-on-chicagos-newest-lakefront-attraction-could-start-soon/ http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2012/08/22/work-on-chicag...

100 points by state_machine 11y ago

The article is wrong about safe doses by a factor of 50-100. "a worker at Los Primos is exposed to about 300 millirem per year (100 per year is deemed the highest "safe" dose)" should be "5000-10000 per year is deemed the highest safe dose".

userbinator 11y ago
In other words, the actual amount of radiation there is only a bit above background and not really so dangerous? Also, I almost read that as "Los Alamos".
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  About three times as much as you'd get from eating a banana a day (from naturally-occurring radioactive potassium)?
mapt 11y ago
Nobody deems any amount of radiation to be a safe dose. Instead, they work under a linear no-threshold model where 50 millirems each might cause 10 cancers in N million people exposed, while 200 millirems each will cause 40 cancers in the same population - absorbed dose is supposed to be directly proportional to harm in large groups of people. There are suspicions that this is maybe too conservative, and that we have repair mechanisms for small quantities of radiation that don't exist for larger quantities, but this directly contradicts the establishment line on the matter, and would be impossible to ethically test. Placing limits on workplace or general exposure would not represent "safety", but merely a threshold at which regulatory mechanisms kick in. Per http://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.gif http://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.g... , background dose aboveground is about 310mrem/yr, and we average about twice that when taking into account human activities (medical imaging and radon mostly, I would expect).
- mc32 11y ago
  There are populated places on earth with high, naturally occurring background radiation, one such place is in Iran, what have been the long term health effects on people in places like that? I imagine studies have been done.
  - lostlogin 11y ago
    Have a read up on radiation hormesis. It looks like small doses might be beneficial. The linear no threshold model is all fine and good at high doses, but low down the data is poor. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15673519 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15673519
    - mapt 11y ago
      As effect size goes down, statistically significant data gets harder and harder to collect and control effectively. We have tiny amounts of research funding, and even if we took in seven billion people as a dataset, there is some non-negligible dose below which this ceases to be statistically significant.

ars 11y ago

Why have any business there at all? Use the area for storage or parking, or something intermittent like that.

electro_thiago 11y ago
I used to live about 3 blocks from here. Within a 2 block radius, there's a children's school, a popular outdoor bar, a hipster pizza restaurant, and some "artist lofts". It's likely that the residents and workers in the area don't have/didn't have knowledge of the former monazite sand site. With the NYC real estate market as it is, there are a bunch of areas with toxic sites like the Gowanus Canal that are people are moving to. http://gothamist.com/2015/07/30/brooklyn_hipster_havens_toxic.php http://gothamist.com/2015/07/30/brooklyn_hipster_havens_toxi...

johnm1019 11y ago

Obligatory XKCD chart for understanding the radiation amounts in the article https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ 100 mrem == 1mSv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Rem_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Rem_equivalence Thinking about the article... for those who understand the risks of increased background radiation, I bet for these businesses rent is cheap!

DonHopkins 11y ago
How many inches of lead on the ground is considered safe?
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  How much lead is seeping into the groundwater from this location?
  - johnm1019 11y ago
    That's why they wrap it in a steel sandwich -- to protect the lead, not principally for radiation protection.
    - DonHopkins 11y ago
      I can understand why the lead on the streets of New York needs to be wrapped in 2 inches of steel for protection: otherwise it would be stolen.

Luc 11y ago

There's a bit more detail in this Pulitzer Prize winning (short) article, also addressing the 100 mrem figure: http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/national-reporting/wsjwastelands/02wsjwastelands2014.pdf http://www.pulitzer.org/files/2014/national-reporting/wsjwas...

devb 11y ago

A lot in Staten Island was once used to store uranium ore for the Manhattan Project. A recent survey found very high levels of radiological contamination. https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/staten-islands-tainted-edge-geologic-city-report-3/ https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/staten-islands-tain...

iSnow 11y ago

Why the hell does this not get cleaned up?

aluhut 11y ago
The first question that came into my mind. This makes it even worse: > the Environmental Protection Agency has asked that no employee rest on their back within the premises So...they know and admit it's bad but instead of locking it up, they come up with such ridiculous "solutions"?!
ams6110 11y ago
Probably politics and money. You'd have to go through an eminent domain process to condemn and buy up all that property, dig up and remove all the earth, underground utilities, etc. down to a depth of at least a few feet if not yards (in the process, probably spreading comtaminated dust all over the surrounding area) and then fill it in with clean earth. Many many millions of dollars to do this.
matheweis 11y ago
"a sandwich of 2 inches (5 cm) of steel, 2 inches of lead, and another 2 inches of steel has been laid down under almost the entire block" Not cleaned up, but somewhat mitigated and wow that doesn't sound like it was cheap...
- iSnow 11y ago
  The sheer volume of money and work and the technical difficulties of putting a 15cm thick sandwich of metal underneath a block make me doubt the veracity of the article. Especially coupled with the factual error "separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate". Sodium is nowhere near a rare-earth metal and Monazite is a Cerium/Lanthanium phosphate that contains lots of other elements, Uranium and Thorium among them.

pvaldes 11y ago

Is not related but is a curiosity, 'Los primos' (the cousins) is often translated colloquially as 'The fools' in spanish. When you fall in a very obvious scam you are a 'primo' or did 'el primo'. But the best part is what is not said in the article. It seems that there is a licensed grocery selling sandwiches next to this garage... if your dream is to develop superpowers after sipping a coffe this would the place.

DugFin 11y ago
"Irradiated" and "radioactive" are not the same thing. An irradiated sandwich poses absolutely no threat to its consumer.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  But eating radioactive sandwiches and sipping radioactive coffee does cause you to develop superpowers?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Only if you count sudden cancer as a superpower. That said, GP's point is that unless there are radioactive substances flying in the air / otherwise contaminating the store next door, things bought there should be safe. They'll be irradiated (affected by radiation), but not radioactive themselves. Contrary to popular opinion, getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive.
    - pvaldes 11y ago
      > unless there are radioactive substances flying in the air things bought there should be safe I'll think rather in a ROG [1] event [1] Rodent Olympic Games.
    - the8472 11y ago
      > getting irradiated doesn't cause you to become radioactive. Well, actually... Neutron activation and photodisintegration via high energy gamma rays can produce radioactive isotopes via irradiation. But this generally requires a high flux or high energy to produce noticeable secondary radioactivity. So depending on the type and energy spectrum of the radiation the sandwich is exposed to it might pick up tiny tiny amounts of radioactivity. But yeah, that's probably going to be drowned out by any kind of radioactive dust.

mrob 11y ago

>The plant processed Monazite sand, which, when treated with Sulfuric Acid, separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate, Sodium sulfate is not a rare-earth. This looks to me like a case of copying from Wikipedia without understanding. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite#Acid_cracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite#Acid_cracking "leaving a solution of lanthanide sulfates from which the lanthanides could be easily precipitated as a double sodium sulfate" This is an additional step that happens after the steps shown in the diagram, to separate the different lanthanides. Sodium sulfate is added to the mixed lanthanide sulfates, some of which form lanthanide-sodium double sulfates (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_salt) which precipitate out while other lanthanides remain in solution. See https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HPyNk-cU-nQC&pg=PA402&lpg=PA402&dq=lanthanides+double+salts+sodium+sulphate https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HPyNk-cU-nQC&pg=PA402&lp...

grahamel 11y ago

There's an interactive piece from a couple of years ago for more background/history of the Wolff-Alport site http://projects.newyorker.com/story/radioactive-nyc/ http://projects.newyorker.com/story/radioactive-nyc/

davegardner 11y ago

The actual EPA documentation[1] about this site shows that the comparative exposure is not nearly as significant as the article indicates. A handy comparative radiation dose table that they provide shows that you'd receive an additional 240 mR/year simply by moving from NYC to Denver, Colorado.[2] By comparison, the estimated annual dose received by a worker at the former Wolff-Alport site is 120 mR/year. [1] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/docs.html#Docs http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/docs.html#Docs [2] http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/pdf/NYC_DOH_May_2007_wolff_alport_exposure_sheet.pdf http://www3.epa.gov/region02/waste/wolff/pdf/NYC_DOH_May_200...

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

One of Chicago's most upscale downtown neighborhoods is built on a thorium dump from the gaslight era. This is more than a little academic as Streeterville is currently being re-developed by Northwestern Hospital and the city has to be careful not to put more thorium in the air. There are something like four or five new buildings being built right now. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-17/news/ct-thorium-radioactive-cleanup--20140417_1_chicago-river-west-chicago-radioactive-waste http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04-17/news/ct-thoriu... The fix? When radiation is detected, the soil is put in bags and shipped to a facility that can dispose of it. The land in the article is going to be park. http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2012/08/22/work-on-chicagos-newest-lakefront-attraction-could-start-soon/ http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2012/08/22/work-on-chicag...