13 ms·

A few years ago a professor from the Miami University in Ohio came to our institution to give a talk about her students accidentally found high levels of radiat

A few years ago a professor from the Miami University in Ohio came to our institution to give a talk about her students accidentally found high levels of radiation in a valley nearby. After some investigation they tracked down the source of radiation to a factory that prepared nuclear raw materials during the cold war. Some of the radiating dusts got carried by the wind and affected a region of tens of miles down in the valley. Apparently the locals in the valley town are not informed and the cancer rate is relatively high in the town. For some reason their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried. I am not sure what the situation is now, but it would not be too difficult to contact some faculties of environmental sciences in that university if anyone is interested.

fred_is_fred 7y ago
[citation needed]
- marmaduke 7y ago
  > their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried
  - flimflamm 7y ago
    Well you can allays publish them anyway - even in HN for public review.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
      Yes, we would be all very interested to read them. I'm aware of these kinds of things happening in the 50s, but a few years ago - that's unthinkable and should lead to criminal investigation. All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.
      - akuji1993 7y ago
        > All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months. I think you meant, talk about it on page 5 of the paper or on some sidebar on the website, be enraged for exactly two days and then immediately drop the topic and don't do any followup?
        john_minsk 7y ago
        It is not the case. The fact that people tend to forget news nowadays is because there are so many of them. And there are so many of them, because more people are able to break stories like that. The situation above is a major fuck up of the local authorities. A lot of journalists out there would make a career if they break a story like that and ride the hype wave for the next year or two. So if you want to make something public it is much more difficult to stop you nowadays rather then to publish anything.
        Intermernet 7y ago
        How many people had heard of Erin Brockovich before there was a movie made about it? Not zero, but nowhere near as many as after the movie. A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story. People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized. See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better? I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec. If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.
        pjc50 7y ago
        The Flint water crisis took years to resolve. Authorities and businesses poison people all the time, but usually those people are poor and irrelevant enough that news coverage makes no impact at all.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    this smacks of the conspiracy fallacy... "the guilty are hiding the evidence"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rhcom2 7y ago
I wonder if this was it, Alba Craft Laboratory, Inc. They processed radioactive uranium in Oxford, Ohio. https://magazine.miamistudent.net/alba-craft/ https://magazine.miamistudent.net/alba-craft/ Sounds like it got cleaned up in the 1990s.
- casefields 7y ago
  That is it. They published a book which the article mentions. It was reported in USA Today in 2000. OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy. This is the guy to figure it out: https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball That's not the resume of someone not able to get the word out.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy. "Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
    - justin66 7y ago
      Excise the part you made up and simply say Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't and you have an accurate assessment of what happened.
      - vectorEQ 7y ago
        people read through their own lenses. some people read conspiracy, others see that it is generally due to circumstances and human error. perhaps, it might be somewhere in between, or perhaps both overlap in ways. i'd say people generally overestimate how 'on purpose' these things occur, but then again, with lack of clear information, both sides of the coin hold equal value...
      - 7y ago
atoav 7y ago
On Hacker News there are relatively many people arguing for nuclear fission, I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these. In an ideal society it still would be a challenge to deal with the unprocessable wastes of nuclear fission (some extremely poisonous and with half lifes well beyond thousand years). But we are far from ideal and the incentives to not just offload it onto future generations are simply not there.
- blueboo 7y ago
  Pollution and contamination are merely future opportunities for innovation. Let’s make more, bigger opportunities!—or so the founders-in-waiting may advocate
- Ntrails 7y ago
  The argument isn't that it is riskless cheap energy - but that it is far better than fossil fuels and necessary to complement other renewables in energy supply. There is no question that there are risks and they are non trivial - but they are mostly manageable through proper regulation!
  - colordrops 7y ago
    It can be argued that regulation is almost completely broken in the United States.
    - ryan_j_naughton 7y ago
      >almost completely broken That seems like a gross exaggeration, almost to the degree of willful ignorance. The amount of premature death as well as increase in morbidity caused by the entire nuclear energy industry in the US is significantly lower than any other source of power. Simply the steel and concrete alone required for solar power pushes it's morality rate higher. While our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, might have had no clue what the department of energy did when he wanted to abolish it as a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, it and other regulatory bodies are quite effective an ensuring we have safe nuclear facilities.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vectorEQ 7y ago
it is really difficult to get people to 'admit' mistakes like this due to the long term human costs often involved. Even, people will do a lot to avoid any additional financial costs incurred when such an admission is made. Hence, academics and interested non-academic parties are often boycotted from releasing such information, or if not possible ,ridiculed / discredited to avoid such financial costs to the responsible parties. it's a shame, and i'm not yelling conspiracy, but this is how business and politics works, and that's a shame / sad. If anyone was interested to follow up and research the current status of this valley you note, most likely they would meet similar resistance to publish their findings.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- moosey 7y ago
  Looking from the outside, dealing with problems of this scale have a number of aspects to them: remediation of the issue, understanding, prevention, and accountability. In this list, accountability stands out. A person or organization that makes a mistake that has already been taught the other pieces of understanding and prevention of an accident has limited need for accountability. This is not how our society works or thinks, though. There is a strong current of punitive accountability. From a financial perspective, someone might argue that this makes sense: someone who causes harm to many others shouldn't be allowed to remain rich. However, implementing such a system means that organizations within will defend themselves vociferously. This is why many businesses are starting to use low or no accountability systems to make sure that root cause analysis and mistakes are brought to the forefront after issues. I'm not suggesting that such a system would be easy to implement on a much larger level, especially with our level of inequality in the US, but perhaps the solution is just not to be so damn punitive, and perhaps the other aspects of issue remediation wouldn't be so damn bad. Perhaps there wouldn't be lawyers informing business owners that they can't apologize, because that is opening the doors to being completely destroyed by accountability.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 7y ago
There are alot of anecdotal incidents like that which don't attract attention for reasons unknown or because they fall short of a standard. One I'm familiar with was a cancer cluster associated with county roads, which were tarred gravel until the late 1970s. A local factory would kindly "donate" waste oil loaded with various nasties to the county, who would tar the roads with it, there were elevated rates of lung cancers along those roads. Because the "cluster" was a strip, it didn't meet a geographic threshold. Other common nasties include old rail depots and military depots. The stuff they used to clean locomotives was awful. I read a local article about a local military depot issue and a program called "Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS)". The New York/New Jersey District estimates it has $500M of cleanup to do, with an annual budget of $3-5M.

fred_is_fred 7y ago

[citation needed]

marmaduke 7y ago
> their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried
- flimflamm 7y ago
  Well you can allays publish them anyway - even in HN for public review.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
    Yes, we would be all very interested to read them. I'm aware of these kinds of things happening in the 50s, but a few years ago - that's unthinkable and should lead to criminal investigation. All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.
    - akuji1993 7y ago
      > All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months. I think you meant, talk about it on page 5 of the paper or on some sidebar on the website, be enraged for exactly two days and then immediately drop the topic and don't do any followup?
      - john_minsk 7y ago
        It is not the case. The fact that people tend to forget news nowadays is because there are so many of them. And there are so many of them, because more people are able to break stories like that. The situation above is a major fuck up of the local authorities. A lot of journalists out there would make a career if they break a story like that and ride the hype wave for the next year or two. So if you want to make something public it is much more difficult to stop you nowadays rather then to publish anything.
        Intermernet 7y ago
        How many people had heard of Erin Brockovich before there was a movie made about it? Not zero, but nowhere near as many as after the movie. A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story. People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized. See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better? I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec. If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.
        pjc50 7y ago
        The Flint water crisis took years to resolve. Authorities and businesses poison people all the time, but usually those people are poor and irrelevant enough that news coverage makes no impact at all.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  this smacks of the conspiracy fallacy... "the guilty are hiding the evidence"

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rhcom2 7y ago

I wonder if this was it, Alba Craft Laboratory, Inc. They processed radioactive uranium in Oxford, Ohio. https://magazine.miamistudent.net/alba-craft/ https://magazine.miamistudent.net/alba-craft/ Sounds like it got cleaned up in the 1990s.

casefields 7y ago
That is it. They published a book which the article mentions. It was reported in USA Today in 2000. OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy. This is the guy to figure it out: https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball https://www.armscontrol.org/about/daryl_kimball That's not the resume of someone not able to get the word out.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy. "Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
  - justin66 7y ago
    Excise the part you made up and simply say Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't and you have an accurate assessment of what happened.
    - vectorEQ 7y ago
      people read through their own lenses. some people read conspiracy, others see that it is generally due to circumstances and human error. perhaps, it might be somewhere in between, or perhaps both overlap in ways. i'd say people generally overestimate how 'on purpose' these things occur, but then again, with lack of clear information, both sides of the coin hold equal value...
    - 7y ago

atoav 7y ago

On Hacker News there are relatively many people arguing for nuclear fission, I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these. In an ideal society it still would be a challenge to deal with the unprocessable wastes of nuclear fission (some extremely poisonous and with half lifes well beyond thousand years). But we are far from ideal and the incentives to not just offload it onto future generations are simply not there.

blueboo 7y ago
Pollution and contamination are merely future opportunities for innovation. Let’s make more, bigger opportunities!—or so the founders-in-waiting may advocate
Ntrails 7y ago
The argument isn't that it is riskless cheap energy - but that it is far better than fossil fuels and necessary to complement other renewables in energy supply. There is no question that there are risks and they are non trivial - but they are mostly manageable through proper regulation!
- colordrops 7y ago
  It can be argued that regulation is almost completely broken in the United States.
  - ryan_j_naughton 7y ago
    >almost completely broken That seems like a gross exaggeration, almost to the degree of willful ignorance. The amount of premature death as well as increase in morbidity caused by the entire nuclear energy industry in the US is significantly lower than any other source of power. Simply the steel and concrete alone required for solar power pushes it's morality rate higher. While our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, might have had no clue what the department of energy did when he wanted to abolish it as a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, it and other regulatory bodies are quite effective an ensuring we have safe nuclear facilities.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

vectorEQ 7y ago

it is really difficult to get people to 'admit' mistakes like this due to the long term human costs often involved. Even, people will do a lot to avoid any additional financial costs incurred when such an admission is made. Hence, academics and interested non-academic parties are often boycotted from releasing such information, or if not possible ,ridiculed / discredited to avoid such financial costs to the responsible parties. it's a shame, and i'm not yelling conspiracy, but this is how business and politics works, and that's a shame / sad. If anyone was interested to follow up and research the current status of this valley you note, most likely they would meet similar resistance to publish their findings.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
moosey 7y ago
Looking from the outside, dealing with problems of this scale have a number of aspects to them: remediation of the issue, understanding, prevention, and accountability. In this list, accountability stands out. A person or organization that makes a mistake that has already been taught the other pieces of understanding and prevention of an accident has limited need for accountability. This is not how our society works or thinks, though. There is a strong current of punitive accountability. From a financial perspective, someone might argue that this makes sense: someone who causes harm to many others shouldn't be allowed to remain rich. However, implementing such a system means that organizations within will defend themselves vociferously. This is why many businesses are starting to use low or no accountability systems to make sure that root cause analysis and mistakes are brought to the forefront after issues. I'm not suggesting that such a system would be easy to implement on a much larger level, especially with our level of inequality in the US, but perhaps the solution is just not to be so damn punitive, and perhaps the other aspects of issue remediation wouldn't be so damn bad. Perhaps there wouldn't be lawyers informing business owners that they can't apologize, because that is opening the doors to being completely destroyed by accountability.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Spooky23 7y ago

There are alot of anecdotal incidents like that which don't attract attention for reasons unknown or because they fall short of a standard. One I'm familiar with was a cancer cluster associated with county roads, which were tarred gravel until the late 1970s. A local factory would kindly "donate" waste oil loaded with various nasties to the county, who would tar the roads with it, there were elevated rates of lung cancers along those roads. Because the "cluster" was a strip, it didn't meet a geographic threshold. Other common nasties include old rail depots and military depots. The stuff they used to clean locomotives was awful. I read a local article about a local military depot issue and a program called "Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS)". The New York/New Jersey District estimates it has $500M of cleanup to do, with an annual budget of $3-5M.