The Cobalt-60 Accident of Ciudad Juarez (2019)

116 点作者 respinal超过 4 年前

21 条评论

kens超过 4 年前

There's a rather alarming photo of a Cobalt-60 source with the label "drop and run". This is a 3540-curie source (i.e. a lot). Someone did the calculations and figured if you followed the instructions quickly you'd probably survive.<a href="https://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2018-august/_assets/docs/1663-32-CarefulWithHotObjects.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2018-august/...</a>

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barnacled超过 4 年前

"HBO’s Chernobyl gave us a raw glimpse of the devastating consequences a nuclear reaction can have."It really frustrates me when a show that contains many significant factual errors [0] (e.g. the exploding like a nuclear bomb thing, a very harmful error) is then used as a basis for a factual column.Now I don't really trust the contents of the article.And here we see the same kind of misrepresentation:"but they also spread these pieces all over the street on the way to the dumpster and left basically a bomb of cobalt-60. Bear that in mind."This 'nuclear energy is like a nuclear bomb' delusion is really harmful and pushes a narrative that many ordinary believe - if you use nuclear material for non-weapon purposes it risks behaving like a nuclear weapon. Journalists should take some responsibility for this kind of thing - it has very real impacts on public perception of nuclear and therefore govt decision making.[0]:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsdLDFtbdrA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsdLDFtbdrA</a>

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lmilcin超过 4 年前

Poor writing style, lack of understanding of units (equating emitted and absorbed, comparing total dose with dose per unit of time, etc)The accident is pretty interesting and you can find some good articles, much better written.

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copperx超过 4 年前

I'm originally from Cd. Juárez. And the house next to my parents' house had to be demolished and rebuilt because it had been constructed with Cobalt-60 contaminated rebar.Decades later, just in our block, there have been many cases of cancer (1 renal carcinoma -- my mom, 1 testicular cancer, 1 melanoma, 3x breast cancer). Sometimes I wonder if that's the natural incidence or if it is in fact a cancer cluster caused by remnants of Cobalt-60.I'm tempted to go back there with a radiation counter of some sort, inside the houses, but I have no idea if a regular geiger counter would suffice (a neighbor who had a radiation counter for construction already checked it out and found nothing when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if he was using the right equipment or if it was sentitive enough. This was in the 90s, and the counter looked like a car battery with a single needle meter).

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FiatLuxDave超过 4 年前

It's interesting how radioactive sources are often detected while looking for something else. About 10 years ago, I was pulled into a situation where PET imaging patients were setting off radiation detectors coming back into the US at border crossings. Now, it's not unusual for patients who have been given radioisotopes to set off detectors at airports, etc, what was unusual is that PET isotopes usually have very short half-lives. In this case, the patients had been given Rb-82, which has a half-life just over 1 minute. Yet they were setting off detectors weeks after getting PET scans.What was happening was that there was contamination of the isotope. They were getting more than the allowable amount of Sr-82 along with the Rb-82. Sr-82 has a half life of about 25 days.The way that Rb-82 is made, is the pharmacy is provided with a generator or 'cow', which is a bunch of Sr-82 which decays to make Rb-82. The 'cow' is 'milked', which means passing saline through it, and if all goes well the Rb-82 comes out with the saline and the Sr-82 stays in the cow. Some Sr-82 always gets out but usually it is a small amount.Now, Sr-82 is not easy to measure, and the limits are very small. Sr-82 only has a few very low energy gammas. I happen to be an expert in the type of device normally used to measure it (a re-entrant dose calibrator). The QA check used in the clinics was, shall we say, optimistic about the ability to detect it.Here's an article about the situation: <a href="https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-drug-safety-communication-planned-return-cardiogen-82-market-new-boxed-warning" rel="nofollow">https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-d...</a>

xtracto超过 4 年前

Oh I've heard and read about this. There's a great Mexican podcast that talks about this "accident".The outrageous thing is how incompetent, corrupt and lazy our Mexican government is. That this radioactive material was used for construction. And there ARE still radioactive houses all around the country. And of course nobody is responsible. It was just due to the USA intervention that the stupid Mexican government did something (albeit half asses).My country is a joke.

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wp381640超过 4 年前

Similar incident in Brazil:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident</a>Short YouTube doco:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8</a>

nl超过 4 年前

NY Times coverage from 1984: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-juarez-looms-as-one-of-worst.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-...</a>

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tptacek超过 4 年前

What they didn’t know is that by breaking the box, they unleashed 6,010 pellets of cobalt-60, a synthetic radioactive isotope of cobalt with the force of 1,003 curies. To put it into perspective, being exposed for a significant amount of time to a single curie could fry some of your organs.Anyone want to say more about this? This description seems a little frustrating.

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adelpozo超过 4 年前

What would be the best sensor one could get so that it could pick up random radiation sources like this? Are there any good ones in keychain form?The thought process is that if there is random steel laying around releasing unhealthy amounts of radiation, would it be nice to know before going to the doctor?

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Geezus_42超过 4 年前

Well There's Your Problem did an episode about this I believe.<a href="https://pca.st/episode/2bf5024d-d237-451c-af69-61d4e2aa386b" rel="nofollow">https://pca.st/episode/2bf5024d-d237-451c-af69-61d4e2aa386b</a>

joezydeco超过 4 年前

Ah, I remember this one. There was a truck full of metal tables being driven to various restaurants around Chicago, the metal included scrap from Juarez. My favorite coffee shop was going to be one of the stops.<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/02/03/a-chance-encounter-led-to-the-detection-of-radioactive-metal/4ee945a6-372f-44fa-873a-18b59bae491c/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/02/03/a...</a>

timzaman超过 4 年前

Article is interesting but seems quite exaggerated;> (Compared to chernobyl) the Cobalt-60 accident of Ciudad Juarez is by far bigger, precisely because it’s impossible to really know and determine the number of victimsWut?

guillermo_elia超过 4 年前

I've never heard of this one before, but it's remarkable how many similarities it shares with the Goiânia incident <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident</a>

pragnesh超过 4 年前

similar case happened in india <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/cities/killer-cobalt-60-delhi-university-admits-mistake-416646" rel="nofollow">https://www.ndtv.com/cities/killer-cobalt-60-delhi-universit...</a>

throwaway_pdp09超过 4 年前

> and left basically a bomb of cobalt-60It wasn't a bomb. This is an amateurish article.

holler超过 4 年前

non-cancerous mirror <a href="https://archive.is/5ffIg" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/5ffIg</a>

ogurechny超过 4 年前

Orphan sources of radioactivity are pretty common in industrialized world. Most are not really harmful until you start breaking them or cutting them in half. There's Soviet plutonium smoke detectors, luminous radium paint on various gauges (mostly dark today, but its dust is still dangerous if it gets inside the body), even some unmanned boiler rooms used radiation-based water level switches.There is a notable topic on Russian enthusiast forum, “Stuff you shouldn't touch”:<a href="https://caves.ru/threads/То-что-не-надо-трогать-руками.8503/" rel="nofollow">https://caves.ru/threads/То-что-не-надо-трогать-руками.8503/</a>There are many examples, mostly from the guy working in the official hazardous materials control in Vladivostok region dealing with radiation alarms on freight trains and scrap metal yards.Old pictures are dead, but you can recover them by visiting <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/threads/8503-%D0%A2%D0%BE-%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%BD%D0%B5-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BE-%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C-%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B8" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/th...</a><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/threads/8503-%D0%A2%D0%BE-%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%BD%D0%B5-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BE-%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C-%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B8/page2" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/th...</a><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/threads/8503-%D0%A2%D0%BE-%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%BD%D0%B5-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BE-%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C-%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B8/page3" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20111028135515/http://caves.ru/th...</a>etc. (It was pain in the ass to find these, because the forum has switched its engine (and URL format) at least four times, and the Web Archive only sees slashes as meaningful path delimiters, so all the topics on a typical forum are recognized as one big mess of individual web pages that are on the same level of hierarchy. Anyone trying to filter something based on a parameter in the link should better get the full dump of saved URLs for the website from CDX server API and deal with it locally.)Another link to a different forum:<a href="http://forum.rhbz.org/forums.php?forum=6" rel="nofollow">http://forum.rhbz.org/forums.php?forum=6</a>You probably won't read the discussions, but there is a lot of photos and links in the topics. For example,<a href="https://realt.onliner.by/2019/03/14/mchs-18" rel="nofollow">https://realt.onliner.by/2019/03/14/mchs-18</a>Dead grandma was a chemist, so her relatives had to dump a full basket of various uranium salts when cleaning the garbage.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwXc2X2qlM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwXc2X2qlM</a>Indian news report on a 2010 Cobalt-60 incident.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCH3vKIGNlg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCH3vKIGNlg</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAEoSE7eITo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAEoSE7eITo</a>Unloading the '70s radiotherapy machine (with '70s technology, and mostly by the '70s people).So, if you see some cylindrical or ovoid thing that is heavy and strong that seemingly has no use apart from being heavy and strong, don't try to find out what's inside.

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octoberfranklin超过 4 年前

Holy clickbait title, Batman!Spoiler: there was no reactor involved.

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olliej超过 4 年前

This is the stolen/abandoned medical radiotherapy machine.The TLDR is a hospital shutdown but a lawsuit meant that they could empty it. This left equipment inside, including a radiotherapy machine.People broke in to steal stuff that look expensive, and decided the radiation source (they didn't know what it was or contained) looked like it would be a worth a lot, and was portable enough to be stolen. So they did.They tried to disassemble it, in doing so managed to get to the raw radioactive pellets. From there people played with it, and it spread around, before they eventually took it to a junk yard.A number of people got sick, at least one died (OTOH).

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ryandward超过 4 年前

Something isn't adding up. I grew up about twenty miles from here in the 1980s and 1990s and never heard of this. How is this possible?

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