7 ms·

Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand

119 points by quanto 4y ago

userbinator 4y ago
"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.
pvaldes 4y ago
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.
JohnClark1337 4y ago
[dead]
Fatnino 4y ago
You'd think the radiation symbol would be universally understood by even the least educated metal thieves. Apparently you'd be wrong.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  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-Individual-botella/dp/B01H5VYBPG https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Radioactive-Mulberry-Marciano-In... * http://rad-60.com.ar/ 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.
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    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.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  They probably thought "eh, there's no way they'd throw it away with the dangerous parts included".
- vidanay 4y ago
  Very wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    > 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
    - farnsworth 4y ago
      https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39u6p1 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39u6p1
- duskwuff 4y ago
  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-warn-public-about-radiation-dangers 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.
  - c7DJTLrn 4y ago
    Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!
  - asddubs 4y ago
    to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"
    - gus_massa 4y ago
      Too similar to https://www.gjplastics.co.uk/fire-exit-sign/ https://www.gjplastics.co.uk/fire-exit-sign/ ?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    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.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      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.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  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.
m3kw9 4y ago
Someone could have been very unlucky if that smelted piece of nuke ended up as one of their chairs
- Finnucane 4y ago
  You'd be in the hot seat for sure.
kalimanzaro 4y ago
If you felt that the featured article was weaseling, here is one with less ambiguous wording. They isolated 24 tonnes of contaminated dust, 70 personnel took blood tests. https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cylinder-in-thailand-found-at-smelting-factory https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cyl...
- stirlo 4y ago
  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.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    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.
    - ISL 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - pixl97 4y ago
    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.
saalweachter 4y ago
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.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
  - contravariant 4y ago
    Reading about that particular disaster should be mandatory for people designing software.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Indeed, nightmare fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...
  - ugjka 4y ago
    Goiânia accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
    - xp84 4y ago
      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.
latchkey 4y ago
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
- kube-system 4y ago
  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
mikewarot 4y ago
So they took a vessel with a reactive alkaline liquid in it and smelted it? The vaporized cloud could spread far and wide.
- drjasonharrison 4y ago
  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."
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    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=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs 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.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  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.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
What does a coal-fired power plant need that stuff for?
- drjasonharrison 4y ago
  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-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ 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/ 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.network/hunt-for-missing-radioactive-caesium-intensifies-in-thailand-as-health-worries-grow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230316103321/https://asianews....
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jebr224 4y ago
  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.

119 points by quanto 4y ago

"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.

pvaldes 4y ago

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.

JohnClark1337 4y ago

[dead]

Fatnino 4y ago

You'd think the radiation symbol would be universally understood by even the least educated metal thieves. Apparently you'd be wrong.

gus_massa 4y ago
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-Individual-botella/dp/B01H5VYBPG https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Radioactive-Mulberry-Marciano-In... * http://rad-60.com.ar/ 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.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  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.
phendrenad2 4y ago
They probably thought "eh, there's no way they'd throw it away with the dangerous parts included".
vidanay 4y ago
Very wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > 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
  - farnsworth 4y ago
    https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39u6p1 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39u6p1
duskwuff 4y ago
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-warn-public-about-radiation-dangers 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.
- c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!
- asddubs 4y ago
  to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Too similar to https://www.gjplastics.co.uk/fire-exit-sign/ https://www.gjplastics.co.uk/fire-exit-sign/ ?
- kube-system 4y ago
  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.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    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.
HarryHirsch 4y ago
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.

m3kw9 4y ago

Someone could have been very unlucky if that smelted piece of nuke ended up as one of their chairs

Finnucane 4y ago
You'd be in the hot seat for sure.

kalimanzaro 4y ago

If you felt that the featured article was weaseling, here is one with less ambiguous wording. They isolated 24 tonnes of contaminated dust, 70 personnel took blood tests. https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cylinder-in-thailand-found-at-smelting-factory https://thethaiger.com/news/national/missing-radioactive-cyl...

stirlo 4y ago
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.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  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.
  - ISL 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pixl97 4y ago
  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.

saalweachter 4y ago

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.

p0pcult 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- contravariant 4y ago
  Reading about that particular disaster should be mandatory for people designing software.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Indeed, nightmare fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...
- ugjka 4y ago
  Goiânia accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
  - xp84 4y ago
    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.

latchkey 4y ago

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

kube-system 4y ago
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

mikewarot 4y ago

So they took a vessel with a reactive alkaline liquid in it and smelted it? The vaporized cloud could spread far and wide.

drjasonharrison 4y ago
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."
- gus_massa 4y ago
  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=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs 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.
gus_massa 4y ago
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.

MarkusWandel 4y ago

What does a coal-fired power plant need that stuff for?

drjasonharrison 4y ago
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-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ 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/ 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.network/hunt-for-missing-radioactive-caesium-intensifies-in-thailand-as-health-worries-grow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230316103321/https://asianews....
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jebr224 4y ago
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.