Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

This fight is for everything.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

You are here: Home / A Pocket Full of Death

A Pocket Full of Death

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The thieves who stole the radioactive Cobalt 60 source from a Mexican hospital had a surprise coming:

[…] [T]he IAEA indicated that the strength of the cobalt 60 was 3,000 curies (a unit of radiation), making it an IAEA Category 1 source—the most dangerous of the organization’s five classes of radioactivity. […] At a distance of 30.5 centimeters (1 foot) from an unshielded source with an activity level of 3,000 curies, the dose to a bystander would be about 37,000 Rem per hour (a measure of radiation exposure). This means that anyone within a foot of the source when it was out of its shield was being exposed to about 10 Rem per second, a level that would typically kill half of a population exposed to it for 30 seconds. Since some reports suggest that the source capsule was found 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from the teletherapy unit, the person or persons who removed the source probably received fatal doses. […]

The capsule weighed 300 grams, or a little over 10 ounces. At least it was found before it was dispersed all over Mexico and the US, unlike another case where cobalt 60 was involved:

In late 1983, a scrap yard in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, obtained a medical radiation unit containing 6,010 small, silvery cobalt-60 pellets that looked like cake decorations. When the scrap yard disassembled the equipment, the pellets were sent to foundries and factories where they were mixed into what became steel rebar, table pedestals and other products, some of which were exported to the United States.

The problem wasn’t discovered until a truck carrying rebar took a wrong turn into the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico one day in January 1984, setting off radiation sensors.

Retrieving the contaminated metal took months, and some of it was found in restaurant tables in active use in U.S. restaurants. Mexican authorities demolished 109 houses built with the radioactive rebar.

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  2. 2.

    Elizabelle

    The interesting point to me was the lax standards for transporting the stuff. Truck was stolen while the sole driver rested and waited for facility to open. Not clear to me he had a secure place to park, or couldn’t have been truckjacked en route.

    The thieves may have done the greater world a favor here.

    Themselves? Not so much.

  3. 3.

    eldorado

    half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it’s bad for you. pernicious nonsense!

    everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. they oughta have ’em, too.

  17. 17.

    Cermet

    @eldorado: Sorry, but I got three hundred in a CAT scan and far, far more in another medical procedure (A cath.) Radiation is given by MD’s like aspirin – it is scary how much one can get without realizing it!

  18. 18.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @eldorado:

    And we have this thread’s Poe’s Law entry!

    On edit: Or, It’s Art Robinson posting!

    As I read this, my old NBC officer training was recalled, when the rem exposure numbers were mentioned. Yikes!

  19. 19.

    scav

    2, 9,10, 10.58 . . . .

    everybody run! it’s exploding!

    (pedantry shrapnel. should be international treaties.)

  23. 23.

    some guy

    exciting news, the warehouse full of supplies that the Fee Syrian Army handed over to Al Qaeda this week included Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Al Qaeda would like to thank the taxpayers of the United States for upgrading their weapons systems.

  24. 24.

    jheartney

    We need to remember that the real evil is guv’mnt regulation. The magical invisible hand of the marketplace will make everything as good as it can be. Free enterprise will stop all that radiation from hurting non-brown people; we can all buy shielding vests from dodgy ads in the back of Soldier of Fortune.

  25. 25.

    srv

    We are all radioactive now, or soon will be thanks to Fukushima. It is a gift that will keep giving for generations.

    While this kind of nasty stuff is moved around the US all the time and nobody dies, at worst the USAF misplaces thermonuclear warheads for a couple of days.

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @jheartney:

    The magical invisible hand of the marketplace

    I believe in this case it’s the magical invisible hand of nuclear radiation.

  31. 31.

    CaseyL

    In a weird way, I wish I would still be around in 200 years. The world’s going to be a very strange place then: humans living in stilt cities, all of the “charismatic megafauna” extinct in the wild (no lions, tigers, or bears; no rhinos, gorillas, or whales), and the few animals that are left will be mutants of some sort.

    Or maybe I wish I could still be around in 500 years. Might not be any humans left at all; be interesting to see what species take(s) over. Mutant racoons seem to be the best bet.

  32. 32.

    ArchTeryx

    To give you an idea of the scale, in my virology lab, we used to get regular shipments of radioactive isotopes for use in labeling DNA. (32P, to be specific).

    The amount we handled? 250 *micro*curies at a time. Just opening that container was enough to send a Geiger counter into a screaming fit at max scale. (Mind, 32P is a high-energy isotope, but STILL).

    So, .00025 of a Curie was enough for some pretty major Rems. Try to imagine what 12,000,000 times more would do to you.

  33. 33.

    Ruckus

    @ArchTeryx:
    At that rate you really don’t have a lot of imagine time left do you? Some sure but the evidence of your fuck up shows up pretty quick. Not like shooting yourself in the head with a nine but still.

  35. 35.

    dmsilev

    @ArchTeryx: Yeah, no kidding. Where I work, we have a couple of Co-60 sources. I think they were about a microCurie each when new, and they’re a couple of half-lives old at this point so a factor of four or so weaker now. Not hugely dangerous at that level, but not something to play around with either. I had to ship one to someone else once, and the number of hoops to jump through was pretty impressive.

  43. 43.

    muricafukyea

    Glorified reddit poster muckymux phones another one in, 90% cut/paste. Do you have any other week old news to cut and paste?

  44. 44.

    dmbeaster

    @Roger Moore: Not only that , but those sources daily exceed by a vast amount any exposure someone in the US could expect from Fukushima. So tired of Fukushima rafiation bs. Its a real mess in the locale — not so much anywhere else, including the oceans, which have vastly more natural radioactivity across the Pacific basin than anything being added by Fukushima.

  45. 45.

    Robert Sneddon

    The six people involved in the hijacking went to hospital and left a few days later. They’re in custody as far as I know. Whether they actually received enough exposure to cause even minor radiation poisoning never mind catching a fatal dose is still to be determined. The hysteria about this case is because radioactive materials were involved. In other news the state of Texas is still prevaricating over whether fertiliser plants should be inspected more often. Fifteen people were killed, more than 160 were injured, and more than 150 buildings were damaged or destroyed when an uninspected and inadequately-regulated but, thank the Lord, non-radioactive fertiliser plant in the town of West blew up earlier this year.

    Cobalt-60 has a short half-life of about five years so sources “wear out” over time and need to be replaced or repurposed. Co-60 emits highly-energetic and penetrating gamma rays, the reason it’s used in industry and medicine. Phosporus-32, used for labelling DNA and the like has a very short half-life, a couple of weeks or so but only emits a beta particle which is stopped by clothing, latex gloves and goggles. It would trigger a counter or detector quite handily though.

  47. 47.

    MikeJ

    @dmsilev:

    I had to ship one to someone else once, and the number of hoops to jump through was pretty impressive.

    More big government bureaucratic meddling.

  49. 49.

    Gordon, the Big Express Engine

    @Ben:
    He was, too, you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he come to the door in a dress.

  54. 54.

    ArchTeryx

    @Robert Sneddon: Yeah, 32P is a beta-emitter, so the radiation is fairly easily stopped. At the radiation level of a fresh batch of 250 uCi, though, it wasn’t the smartest idea to hold your hand directly over the source, and of course we always worked behind acrylic shields, and dressed with long sleeves and heavy gloves. We didn’t screw around with that stuff, even working with 10 uCi at a time.

  55. 55.

    Roger Moore

    @Robert Sneddon:

    Phosporus-32, used for labelling DNA and the like has a very short half-life, a couple of weeks or so but only emits a beta particle which is stopped by clothing, latex gloves and goggles.

    OTOH, 32-P is very nasty if accidentally ingested, since the betas it emits will stop inside your body rather than going straight through, and it is readily absorbed and incorporated by your body.

  56. 56.

    billgerat

    We had a guy wear his grandfather’s glow-in-the-dark watch to work and it set off the detector alarms when he was walking past them out in the passageway more than 10 feet away. They are sensitive little buggers. 10 rem a second is a scary amount of radiation. You might as well just walk in to a live reactor.

  60. 60.

    Robert Sneddon

    @ArchTeryx: You treat it with respect, basically but you probably work with dangerous chemicals and biologicals every day in the same lab, stuff that would kill or poison you in minute amounts if you were careless around them. Cue the usual reference to “Things I won’t work with” at Corante.

    I used to work with chemical explosives, the high-velocity stuff used in detonators. I was trained, I knew what I was doing when I was handling them. Just the presence of a bag of “stuff” (sorry, Official Secrets Act 1911 as amended still applies, I think even after all this time) scared the shit out of some folks who weren’t as knowledgable. Funnily enough I got the best reaction ever from a nuclear physics guy at one of the site’s nuclear reactors when I kicked the bag containing some samples we were radiographing with a neutron beam chamber. He knew what he was doing around the reactor site and wasn’t worried about all that radiation stuff but simple chemicals terrified him.

    Working with beryllium scared the shit out of ME, though.

  64. 64.

    Another Holocene Human

    @some guy: I thought Al Qaeda and the FSA were leftist freedom fighters and the US was an imperialist colonialist blood-drenched monster for supporting Chemical Assad by not invading or… something…

    I can’t keep this narrative straight!

  67. 67.

    Yatsuno

    @CaseyL: Crows. Watch those suckers. Smartest of the avian species and capable of using tools. Get them fire and the future belongs to corvids.

  68. 68.

    Another Holocene Human

    @WereBear:

    Bailing on WWII to advance his career among other value judgments.

    John Wayne is the perfect embodiment of evangelical spirituality, patriarchal construction of masculinity, and the authoritarian follower’s demands of a leader. Performance, miming all the right words and gestures, not backed up by action. Like Reagan, he starred in war movies, not in the war. And his fans’ admiration of him reveals a not-so-subtle contempt for those who did walk the walk, but who weren’t white enough, privileged enough, penised enough. Instead of taking up arms with the millions to fight fascism, he retreats to a narcissistic fantasy realm where a white male, by virtue of his performance of masculinity (walking and talking “hard”) instills social order and “wins” the west.

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @Robert Sneddon:
    I’ve had some similar experience with the radiation safety guy at work. He said he felt OK around radiation hazards because he has a counter and knows what he’s doing, but he’s worried about chemicals because he doesn’t have a chemical sensor. My feeling is that I have a very competent chemical sensor as built-in equipment but no equally capable radiation sensor, so I’m a lot more comfortable around chemicals than radiation. I guess it all depends on what you know.

  70. 70.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Robert Sneddon: Duh, that’s why he got into nuke phyzz, radiation is MUCH easier to understand/model than fucking chemicals. That’s more a game of “I know the class, so I think it will probably have these properties” and there are oodles and oodles of classes to keep straight. Plus, you learn about all the energy those little buggers can unleash in the presence of the right reactant and you rightly give it respect.

    Hell, my grandmother was a chemist and she died of a host of wicked reproductive cancers so yaknowut? Physics lab for me. Imma stick to eldritch powers I can confine to a force field, kekekeke.

    But it seemed like all the jobs for people my age were going to be stuff like making new flat screen technologies for Samsung or doing biophys for the pharmacoindustrial complex, oh, and defense, fuck that shit, so I jumped ship.

    Out of frying pan and into fire, I’m now at risk for immune system cancers from shift work. And diabeetus. And thyroid damage. Oh well, at least I enjoy my work.

  71. 71.

    Jebediah, RBG

    I had some major rem exposure, well over an hour, in the late 80’s, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt me any.

    They closed with an a cappella version of Moon River.

  72. 72.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Robert Sneddon: It’s not hysteria. I think people are rightly concerned about stuff that can spread around and linger, like MBTE blooms, arsenic, and radioactive dust. Or mercury from your friendly rock crushers. Or the coal plant. Or unexploded ordnance.

    Is the failure to be safe with chemical plants outrageous? Yes. Yes, it is. The completely unnecessary loss of human life is an outrage. It recalls the industrial accidents of the Gilded Age. Big industry had bought the government off then, too.

    But it’s just trolling to say that completely valid concern over diverted concentrated radioactive elements is the result of some sort of cognitive bias or fallacy of reasoning.

  75. 75.

    Roger Moore

    @Another Holocene Human:
    I think about this when watching It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart plays the guy who stayed on the home front during WWII. In reality, Stewart was a real hero who volunteered before Pearl Harbor, pulled strings to get assigned to a combat unit, and won a fistful of medals. Somehow, though, that was less important to people than talking tough and swaggering.

  76. 76.

    Another Holocene Human

    @dmbeaster: I like how the Fukushima disaster gets blamed for the death of species under siege because of rising ocean temperatures. Because anthropogenic global warming is a myth. //

    Here’s the (scary?) thing about radiation exposure: our immune systems have actually evolved to clean up the messes caused by a certain degree of radioactive exposure. But sometimes these processes fail. The wrong radiation strike at the wrong time can lead to a fatal cancer. (But then again, a virus can cause a fatal cancer; there’s more than one vector for cells going rogue.) That’s why there’s truly no safe level of radiation, yet a lot of people can be around a lot of it a lot of the time and nobody really notices anything alarming. Probably benzene and shit like that in water supplies is a bigger environmental hazard in terms of aggregated human misery. Maybe this is why Sneddon is scoffing at us.

    OTOH, let’s not forget part of the horror of Nagasaki, that it was not just the deaths of those (and that included mainly civilians) at ground zero–a conventional bomb would have done that, it was the deaths over many days of those with acute radiation poisoning. Think about the chemical attack in Syria and how all those children just died of respiratory failure and medicine was ineffective? It was like that with radiation poisoning–they could give Iodine, and did, but that was only a desperate attempt to flush the radiation out of the body. Read up on it sometimes; ugly way to go.

  77. 77.

    The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

    @tybee:

    There are several thermonuclear bombs that were lost in that era lying around—one in a swamp in South Carolina, two off Cape Hatteras, probably others.

    In those days they had the old levitated-core pit with a polonium/beryllium initiator in the middle, and it was outside the explosive lenses while in flight. On a real war mission, they would screw it in with a screwjack mechanism on the way to the target and close it up. (Not saying they didn’t practice the operation frequently.) So when these bombs were lost, there was no fissionable material in the primary. That’s why they were eventually willing to give up looking.

    You’ll notice things had changed by the time they lost those bombs over Spain in 1965. The two-point air lens primaries with accelerator neutron sources didn’t need to be (and couldn’t be) assembled in flight, so they were ready to go at all times. That’s why they moved heaven and earth to get all of them back.

  78. 78.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Another Holocene Human: In March of 1945 the USAF bombed Tokyo with chemical explosives and phosphorus-based incendiaries, blew a lot of folks to smithereens and burned a lot more, many died lingering deaths afterwards missing skin and limbs, eyes and faces, poisoned by the toxic effects of smoke and fumes as the firestorm burned, sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere. War is Hell and industrial-scale war is a particular form of Hell fuelled by chemistry but folks don’t protest outside nitrogen compound factories, they protest outside nuclear weapons manufacturing sites because, well, it’s nuclear and that’s bad because two nukes killed a few hundred thousand people in a war that killed tens of millions using primarily chemical energy.

    As for iodine, it doesn’t “flush the radiation out of the body”, nothing does. Taking iodine (usually Prussian Blue with potassium) prevents the takeup of radioactive iodine from fallout which concentrates in the thyroid. The potassium in Prussian Blue, although radioactive in itself, reduces the takeup of cesium-134 and -137 which have much shorter halflives than K-40 and which, microgram for microgram, are more radioactive.

  79. 79.

    The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

    @Robert Sneddon:

    I’ve gotten into numerous arguments with people who simply will not believe that there was any such thing as radiation or radioactivity prior to July 16, 1945. Not characterizing anybody here that way, but these people are out there, and they dominate any discussion of the subject.

  80. 80.

    Julia Grey

    Al Qaeda would like to thank the taxpayers of the United States for upgrading their weapons systems.

    Hey, how could the US defense industry survive if the government didn’t give away mass quantities of the surplus production?

  82. 82.

    Julia Grey

    Didn’t anyone follow up on the perpetrators of this crime and see if any of them DID get radiation sickness in the subsequent week or so. It would have furthered scientific knowledge of the processes.

    Oh, right. Mexican jails.

  84. 84.

    Robert Sneddon

    @The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: You mean Mme. Curie, famously from Poland was actually French? Incroyable!

    OK her husband Pierre was French and they worked together in France but Poland to this day is intensely proud of their famous daughter and her contributions to science (including the discovery of the element polonium, named after her native country).

  86. 86.

    Ruckus

    @Robert Sneddon:
    And I used to work with beryllium and understood how to work with it properly. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing if misused but it can also keep one from being killed or injured if not.

  87. 87.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Ruckus: I last worked with beryllium (in alloy form) forty years ago. Precautions were minimal, only the fact I didn’t handle it much, the cutting shears for the plate I was cutting up and punching holes in were behind a screen and I was careful to wash my hands afterwards probably saved my life or at least my ongoing health. I understand the rules have tightened up a lot since then after the sort of realisation that has happened with asbestos and lead in petrol in the past few decades.

    Radioactive materials used to be handled with little care or attention to exposures and releases but that changed before WWII and since then the dread spectre of the Nuclear Demon has made episodes like this Mexican hijacking incident into international news, headlines around the world. The mess at Fukushima Daiichi continues to appear in the news but did you ever hear about the fuel pipeline explosion in west Africa in 2011 that killed over a hundred people? Really dead killed, not possibly exposed to some radiation and might get sick and might die or might get a cancer a few years or decades down the line or maybe nothing at all will happen to them not-dead, but those were everyday deaths-by-chemical-energy like those who died in the West fertiliser factory explosion ho hum.

  88. 88.

    Jay C

    Wasn’t there also a case in (I think) Sao Paulo, or someplace in Brazil, where some scavengers hauled a used radiation-therapy machine out of a closed clinic (where it had just been left, good planning, folks!), and when they took it apart, they and their kids were amazed to find all these fascinating metal “beads” inside glowing with a pretty blue light. So amazing that they showed them around to all their friends and neighbors to ooh and aah over…. I think they were lucky that “only” a dozen or so people died of radiation poisoning… hopefully, they’ve tightened up the regs since then….

  89. 89.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Jay C: Common fallacy, radioactive materials don’t glow with a pretty blue light or green light or pink light or… They emit invisible alpha and beta particles and gamma rays and some heat if their radiophysical makeup allows for it (Pu-238 for example and a few other isotopes are active enough for a solid piece to be noticeably above ambient temperature).

    I’ve got a tritium light capsule on a keyring mount, it hangs on a desk lamp. It works because the capsule has a fluorescent coating on the outside of the tube, this is “pumped” by beta particles (electrons, basically) to make it glow. The tritium inside is an invisible gas.

  90. 90.

    Ruckus

    @Robert Sneddon:
    Yes, things that blow up and/or burn need to be handled properly. Chemicals that poison the air, water and earth need to be handled properly. Otherwise we have rivers that catch fire and people who die well before their time. We were heading towards that until some figured out that they had enough money to protect themselves by distance and other than that they didn’t give a shit about anyone else. IOW they have spent money not to protect everyone but they protect themselves by not living nearby. Someone in John’s thread about his car said that trucks running people off the road would end when one of the executives had a problem. I reminded them that none of the executives would be anywhere near a fracking site, they are greedy sociopaths but they are not stupid. They know what they are pumping into the ground and what happens to the water table and the land, they just don’t give a shit.

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