Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand

https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40025846

by quanto • 3 years ago

119 50 3 years ago

nationthailand.com

Fatnino• 3 years ago

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

Apparently you'd be wrong.

vidanay• 3 years ago

Very wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5tEjXGHNeg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

spywaregorilla• 3 years 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

duskwuff• 3 years 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-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.

asddubs• 3 years ago

to me the added message reads more like "death, exit"

kube-system2• 3 years 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.

c7DJTLrn• 3 years ago

Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!

HarryHirsch2• 3 years 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.

gus_massa4• 3 years 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-In...

* 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.

HarryHirsch2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

They probably thought "eh, there's no way they'd throw it away with the dangerous parts included".

m3kw9• 3 years ago

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

Finnucane• 3 years ago

You'd be in the hot seat for sure.

kalimanzaro• 3 years 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-cyl...

stirlo• 3 years 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.

pixl97• 3 years 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.

londons_explore• 3 years 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.

saalweachter• 3 years 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.

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

Indeed, nightmare fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contam...

ugjka• 3 years ago

Goiânia accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

kneebonian• 3 years ago

The Goiânia accident would validate that concern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

sneak• 3 years ago

The mention of the film has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. It may be urban legend.

https://commonplacefacts.com/2015/05/08/how-herbie-goes-bana...

weinzierl• 3 years ago

Small, highly mobile, clumps of radiation are easy to detect and to collect. The 1.5 million litres of contaminated water that leaked in November from Monticello's nuclear plant are not. Actually this is so common that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the US have had leaks of tritiated water in the past. It does not taste differently, it does not smell differently and it does not make you sick immediately but it sure is a health risk that frightens me more than a lost medical source.

pfortuny• 3 years ago

1.5 million liters contaminated by how much? The former number is meaningless without the latter.

VLM• 3 years ago

tritium is quite expensive, makes gold look cheap, runs about "one new car" per gram. Its quite valuable. It would be like accidentally losing some gold coins in my backyard, that's not anti-enviro garbage dumping that's an accident. So if its a substantial leak they don't need govt regulation to clean it up, the financial market will force them if they lost a hundred million bucks or similar crazy amount.

I was unable in a short google search to find any information on the size of the leak beyond assurances they know they've cleaned up 20% of it, which is amazing that they know a percentage of a nearly perfectly censored number. When there is a cover up that strong, you know the amount is either incredibly small or incredibly large. They haven't reported a financial loss on par with an enormous leak, so it must be incredibly small.

Note that all water on planet earth, including before humans, runs around three or so pCi/L of tritium as its a natural ... substance. And the earth has a lot of water and as such a lot of tritium. So dilution is the answer for tritium leaks. That and time, the half life only being around a decade.

Lets say it was a leak of your standard 500 TU test standard that PerkinElmer will happily sell to you for for something like $50/ml. That would be a $75B financial loss, enough to paper over some recent bank crashes. So it wasn't that big LOL. 500 million liters would dilute a million liters of 500 TU test solution to merely twice background radiation levels. 500 million liters sounds like a lot but is only 0.0005 cubic kilometers. The "famous"? San Luis reservoir is, to one sig fig, 2 cubic kilometers so imagine a puddle a two thousandth the size of that reservoir... a large puddle but not that large.

So the risk to your health is a leak financially valued at Panama's annual GDP is about 2000 times too small to contaminate a pretty small lake in CA. I don't think you have much to worry about.

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

Nuclear reactors produce small amounts of Tritium during normal operations. It’s released into the environment as standard procedure because the amount is so negligible that it doesn’t matter, but it must be closely monitored and reported. Any time it escapes in an unplanned manner, it’s a “leak”. That doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, though.

You could drink water from a well contaminated by a titriated water spill for a year and only get about 1/10th the radiation dose of flying cross country in an airplane. It also decays rapidly with a half life around 12 years and it doesn’t accumulate in the body.

Radiation exposure is a huge spectrum and we can detect tiny amounts with modern equipment. There are a lot of detectable amounts of radioactive material out there that just don’t matter at all to your health: Bananas, smoke detectors, tritiated water from nuclear reactors, etc.

p0pcult• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

contravariant2• 3 years ago

Reading about that particular disaster should be mandatory for people designing software.

latchkey• 3 years ago

The container in the image has Ohmart on it. Looked them up...

https://www.vega.com/en-us/company/vega-americas/our-story

kube-system2• 3 years ago

Looks like it is, more specifically, an Ohmart "SR" series "source holder":

http://www.appliedmc.com/content/images/32867-US.pdf

mikewarot• 3 years ago

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

drjasonharrison2• 3 years 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_massa4• 3 years 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=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_massa4• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

jebr224• 3 years 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.

drjasonharrison2• 3 years 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-...

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/

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....

userbinator• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand

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