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Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?
by idiotsecant 1y ago
Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?
- hinkley 1y agoWe will likely never know. Once you melt the evidence and stir it with tons of other molten metal there’s not much to track.
- m4rtink 1y agoIIRC all sources are tracked at manufacture and it migh also be possible to try to match the isotope ration to the original source material ? Not to mention the whole "spraying deadly radiation all over the place" that can be detected with modern sensitive detectors, possibly tracing back all places where the original source was miss-handled.
- hinkley 1y agoIf the metal is still radioactive they can probably narrow it down to a couple of train cars of scrap that were likely sources, but short of adding sensors to prevent a repeat, and auditing their partners…
- Sanzig 1y agoCs-137 is commonly extracted from fuel used as a source for radiation therapy, although less so these days, due in part to incidents with misplaced sources. The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiânia accident where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of radiation poisoning, including a six year old. My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended up in the scrap metal stream.
- grues-dinner 1y agoIt's also used as a gamma source for metallurgical testing. Which is what the sources that caused the recent Thai and Russian incidents were used for.
- huedaya 1y agoBased on latest update, it came from nearby iron smelter that caried through ashes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WeiGvAOD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WeiGvAOD4