4 ms·

Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident https://en.wikipe

Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c... There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.

corpMaverick 4y ago
My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.
orbital-decay 4y ago
There were several incidents like this, ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide... A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.
- masklinn 4y ago
  There were also several incidents from the russian army just up and leaving orphan sources in the wild when the URSS failed e.g. Lilo and Lia (both in Georgia). Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004. Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.
joezydeco 4y ago
It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-recovered-in-40-states/6600449730000/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-r...
- xtracto 4y ago
  Yes! apparently the only reason why this thing was discovered and talked about was because a trailer taking contaminated rebar to the US passed near a military airbase that had reactive material detector and detected the contaminated material. Then the US blew the whistle and pushed Mexico to do a proper investigation. Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...) Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.
pxeger1 4y ago
It seems like an amazing coincidence that they were able to work out so much about how this happened. It makes you wonder how often this happens and noone finds out.
- clucas 4y ago
  Nah, I think it would be more surprising if you couldn't track this stuff down. In the industrial and construction world, everything works off of POs and work orders. When a company buys or sells anything, there's almost always a paper trail, and usually some internal records showing what material went where. If you have the money to spend on the investigation (and an easy-to-detect signature in the material itself, like radioactivity) you can probably trace contamination all the way back to the hole in the ground it came out of.
reaperducer 4y ago
There are people in America who live in houses built out of radioactive uranium mine tailings. https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter-wants-uranium-cleanup/ https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter... They've been begging the EPA for help for decades.
eloisius 4y ago
This also happened in Taiwan. A metalworks reused Cobalt-60-contaminated rebar and then hundreds of apartment buildings were constructed with it in the 80s. The government tried to find and buy them, but it seems that some people didn’t want to sell because of the amount offered. There are still some of them around.

corpMaverick 4y ago

My father built our house in Chihuahua city around 1985. We lived in that house for 25 years. I never thought about it until we had a case of brain cancer in the family 3 years ago.

orbital-decay 4y ago

There were several incidents like this, ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide... A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.

masklinn 4y ago
There were also several incidents from the russian army just up and leaving orphan sources in the wild when the URSS failed e.g. Lilo and Lia (both in Georgia). Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004. Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.

joezydeco 4y ago

It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-recovered-in-40-states/6600449730000/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-r...

xtracto 4y ago
Yes! apparently the only reason why this thing was discovered and talked about was because a trailer taking contaminated rebar to the US passed near a military airbase that had reactive material detector and detected the contaminated material. Then the US blew the whistle and pushed Mexico to do a proper investigation. Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...) Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.

pxeger1 4y ago

It seems like an amazing coincidence that they were able to work out so much about how this happened. It makes you wonder how often this happens and noone finds out.

clucas 4y ago
Nah, I think it would be more surprising if you couldn't track this stuff down. In the industrial and construction world, everything works off of POs and work orders. When a company buys or sells anything, there's almost always a paper trail, and usually some internal records showing what material went where. If you have the money to spend on the investigation (and an easy-to-detect signature in the material itself, like radioactivity) you can probably trace contamination all the way back to the hole in the ground it came out of.

reaperducer 4y ago

There are people in America who live in houses built out of radioactive uranium mine tailings. https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter-wants-uranium-cleanup/ https://navajotimes.com/reznews/grand-canyon-gateway-chapter... They've been begging the EPA for help for decades.

eloisius 4y ago

This also happened in Taiwan. A metalworks reused Cobalt-60-contaminated rebar and then hundreds of apartment buildings were constructed with it in the 80s. The government tried to find and buy them, but it seems that some people didn’t want to sell because of the amount offered. There are still some of them around.