[HN Gopher] Goiania Accident
___________________________________________________________________
Goiania Accident
Author : joering2
Score : 192 points
Date : 2023-02-01 12:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| olliej wrote:
| One of the more stupid accidents. Here a judge decided that
| security of a radioactive source that belong to company A was
| secondary to a lease agreement with company B, and so contributed
| to multiple people dying.
|
| The people who stole and opened the source obviously shouldn't
| have, but given the period I think it's more reasonable that they
| didn't understand what was going on. The judge doesn't have that
| excuse.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Total failure by the people in charge.
| intrasight wrote:
| Sad tragedy that is the judge's fault for sure. Hope he or she
| rots in hell - from radioactive poisoning.
| Trufa wrote:
| For those who can speak Spanish here's a Uruguayan folk song
| about the incident
|
| https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A&feature=share
|
| I mean you might like it anyway but the lyrics are central.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| That was a good surprise, I'm from Goiania and I would never
| guess that a Uruguayan song would be made about it.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| > One of IGR's owners and the clinic's physicist were ordered to
| pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building.
|
| Why were the owners liable? They notified the court and were
| prevented by the court from removing the machine, so my first
| thought is they should be blameless: The court assumed control
| and therefore responsibility.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| We humans can screw up anything. Whether it's not protecting
| others or just not being cautious enough. Why would you ever
| bring an item that glows and you have absolutely no idea what it
| is around your family?
|
| Shame on the authorities for allowing this to happen in the first
| place. Their job is to protect society from things they
| don't/can't understand. And let's not forget money probably
| accounted for why the source wasn't removed in the first place.
| [deleted]
| Maursault wrote:
| Obligatory.[1] Fox Harris (1936-1988) was a wonderful yet
| underappreciated actor.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VKzqAefBVY&t=0m38s
| warent wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127586
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _The Goiania Accident (1987)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127586 - Nov 2021 (121
| comments)
|
| _Goiania Accident_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664402 - June 2020 (2
| comments)
| [deleted]
| aarchi wrote:
| > Other contamination was also found in or on: three buses, 42
| houses, fourteen cars, five pigs, and 50,000 rolls of toilet
| paper
|
| Why such a large figure for toilet paper? Is it somehow more
| easily contaminated by radiation?
| jll29 wrote:
| The roughly 150 combined military and civilian incidents that the
| two respective Wikipedia lists contain demonstrate that
|
| 1. military and civilian use of technology both go wrong roughly
| similarly often (approx. 55% and 45%, respectively)
|
| 2. in just about 100 years of "nuclear technology", there have
| been more than a mean of 1 1/2 incidents per year.
|
| I'd be surprised if the Wikipedia list is complete, there are
| probably substantial numbers of unreported/suppressed incidents,
| although I expect them to be small (large incidents would have
| been detected by others measuring radiation).
| koch wrote:
| I found this one[0] the other day where a radiation source ended
| up in the concrete wall of an apartment building. A whole family
| got leukemia, took 9 years to eventually have it removed.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
| oskob wrote:
| An excellent video on the topic:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Well There's Your Problem has an episode on the incident as
| well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34rdxDgpaaA
| jasmer wrote:
| This is the issue with nuclear in general. In short, we are not
| responsible enough. If we were fully responsible as people, we
| could do it. Once rich countries did it, poor countries would
| demand it, and they are especially unprepared. A bit of economic
| and political risk and voila, regions devastated.
|
| There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and
| garbage, you can't handle nuclear technologies.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Nuclear medicine in middle-income countries has almost
| certainly saved orders of magnitude more people than it's
| killed.
|
| Even the specific source in the Goiania accident could easily
| have been responsible for saving more lives than it ended up
| taking.
|
| Of course these things have risks. But these radiotherapy
| sources aren't being used for fun; the benefits are
| substantial. That an accident that killed 4 people is
| significant enough to get its own name and Wikipedia article
| suggests to me that the risk isn't actually that high.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| You could say the same about almost all types of industrial,
| chemical and medical waste.
| jasmer wrote:
| Nuclear has a fundamentally different risk profile. Nuclear
| failures mean possibly a hugely disproportionate number of
| deaths, entire regions unusable, and very risky
| externalizations such as someone using waste to make most of
| Manhattan unlivable, which is absolutely a possibility that
| exist, and does not for almost all other technologies.
|
| People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's
| 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are
| possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations
| with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
| sofixa wrote:
| > entire regions unusable
|
| True.
|
| > hugely disproportionate number of deaths
|
| Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial
| disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official
| numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal
| poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong
| went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws,
| resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the
| WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it
| kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of
| employees and are usually far away from big population
| centers.
|
| The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil
| tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the
| power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.
| murat124 wrote:
| The issue with the nuclear power is the nuclear warhead.
| Mankind would be perfectly fine with nuclear power but will
| always be at risk as long as it is weaponized. Some folks being
| fatally radiated does not impose risk to our kind.
| kergonath wrote:
| But then people don't know a thing about isotopes, fertile
| and fissile nuclei, or what actually goes into a bomb. The
| reactors that produced the plutonium used in warheads largely
| came from specialised reactors designed for this purpose
| only. You cannot get the same stuff out of civilian reactors.
| zirgs wrote:
| I'd argue that nuclear warheads have saved millions of lives
| by preventing another world war. MAD prevents nuclear weapons
| states from waging war against each other directly.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but the way the western
| countries managed their garbage problem was to send it to those
| especially unprepared countries (think: sending container ships
| with trash from the US to China).
|
| I think you're mixing a perceived sense of responsibility and
| power dynamics.
|
| A better solution would involve putting more effort in helping
| those poorer countries have the means to handle these problems
| better. It's the 21st century, we're much more intertwined than
| we've ever been.
| ars wrote:
| > think: sending container ships with trash from the US to
| China
|
| That's not a real thing. It's a persistent myth, but it's not
| actually real.
| kergonath wrote:
| This is the issue with people in general. Any industry is going
| to cause a certain number of deaths. And nuclear is _far_ from
| being the worst. Particularly nuclear medicine, which has saved
| untold number of people.
| duped wrote:
| > This is the issue with nuclear in general
|
| nuclear what? chemistry?
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| This is the issue with fossil fuel technology in general. In
| short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully
| responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries did
| it, poor countries would demand it, and they are especially
| unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk and voila,
| regions devastated.
|
| There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage and
| garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The kind of damage a few malicious or negligent individuals
| can cause in an afternoon from nuclear operations can't be
| matched by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have caused damage
| through the effort of billions of people over centuries.
|
| The history of fossil fuels also shows us that humans are
| negligent over time, which seems to me a good argument
| against building a large infrastructure of nuclear
| operations.
| scarmig wrote:
| The difference:
|
| When nuclear energy goes wrong, thousands of people die.
|
| When fossil fuels go right, millions of people die.
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| Fossil fuel technology is easy. You dispose of the waste
| products into the atmosphere which is like infinitely vast!
| Most of the really damaging stuff will be washed out by rain,
| and stored in all of these previously-useless lakes and
| rivers. Let's be honest, what has a lake or river done for
| YOU lately?
|
| If those dinosaurs didn't want us to burn their decayed
| corpses so we could have McMansions in the suburbs and still
| commute to the office every day, they shouldn't have been hit
| by that big meteor!
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage sewage
| and garbage, you can't handle fossil fuel technologies.
|
| I know this is sarcastic but the UK is in the middle of an
| absolutely massive scandal with raw sewage being continuously
| discharged in rivers and the sea for many years now:
|
| https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/sewage-in-rivers
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
|
| _Why is raw sewage pumped into the sea?_
|
| >> Pollution warnings for dozens of beaches in England and
| Wales were issued after water companies discharged untreated
| sewage and wastewater into the sea.
|
| >> Raw sewage was pumped into rivers and seas about 375,000
| times in 2021, the Environment Agency says.
|
| >> In 2022, Ofwat, the water regulator for England and Wales,
| launched cases against six water companies over discharging
| sewage at times when this should not have happened.
|
| And of course there's the little-known matter of
| anthropogenic climate changed caused by CO2 emissions from
| burning fossil fuels. I know it's hard to believe, but it is
| starting to become a bit of a problem.
| jasmer wrote:
| ? There is no analogy here.
|
| There are no existential risks from Oil. Danger is small and
| proportional to an installation. You have a big refinery fire
| and five people die? That could happen with any tech.
|
| Fukishima is unusable for generations. Chernonbyl same.
|
| Spent fuel from a nuclear reactor could feasibly make most of
| Manhattan unlivable in just a few hours.
|
| Oil and Nuclear don't share the same risk profile.
| hexplate wrote:
| > There are no existential risks from Oil.
|
| You uh, sure about that one?
| spoils19 wrote:
| This is the issue with sewage technology in general. In
| short, we are not responsible enough. If we were fully
| responsible as people, we could do it. Once rich countries
| did it, poor countries would demand it, and they are
| especially unprepared. A bit of economic and political risk
| and voila, regions devastated.
|
| There should be a simple rule: if you can't manage garbage,
| you can't handle sewage technologies.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| This sounds like "Great White Father" stuff to me. Are wealthy
| countries really so suited to telling poorer ones what they may
| and may not do to join the wealthy?
| jasmer wrote:
| Yes. It's imperfect but that's the way it is, it's already in
| place with 'Nuclear Non Proliferation' [1] and many other
| things. It's a 'free world' until interests are threatened,
| then you see where the balance of power is, moreover, there
| are legitimate issues of responsibility here. Canada, Japan,
| Ukraine, Brazil, Cameroon - all different places in so many
| ways, it is what it is. That's diversity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-
| Proliferatio...
|
| EDIT: FYI I'm being a bit tounge-in-cheek with the garbage
| thing, I realize 'Rich Countries' don't do sewage and garbage
| perfectly well either, which is partly the point. The other
| point is that other places are objectively much worse.
| poyu wrote:
| Boy, I have an article for you
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
| icambron wrote:
| We seem to manage nuclear very well, and one piece of evidence
| is how horrifying it is that four people died in this story,
| and the degree of concern it generated. Nuclear stuff is like
| airline safety; there's a good cultural and governmental stance
| around taking its risks seriously.
|
| But more importantly, not responsible enough compared to which
| alternatives? In this case, it was a device for radiation
| therapy. The solution here can't be that lots of people die of
| cancer because nuclear is too dangerous. That just doesn't add
| up. For nuclear tech more generally, I posit that we are far
| less responsible with fossil fuels, and that they have done,
| and will continue to do, vast amounts of damage. Using nuclear
| would save a lot of lives. You can't just weigh the risk of
| some course of action against the absence of that risk; you
| have to weigh it against the risks of the alternatives or the
| risk of not solving the problem at all. No one is using this
| tech just for fun.
|
| I think some of this is a psychological effect: awful things
| that are (or seem like) the status quo get priced into our
| sense of risk, while exotic-seeming tech with very-differently-
| shaped risks seem irresponsible. We're also bad at weighing
| widespread, generalized damage against the low risk of
| disasters, even if some simple thought experiments make it
| clear which is better.
| abyssin wrote:
| You could also compare nuclear power to hydroelectric power.
| Hydroelectric power causes orders of magnitude more deaths.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Such comparisons will also indicate that tigers are safer
| than dogs and guns are safer than cars.
| jasmer wrote:
| Different risk profiles.
|
| Oil accidents are limited and proportional.
|
| Nuclear accidents have massive externalizations.
|
| Fukishima and Chernobyl are unlivable. Waste from Nuclear can
| do such damage in other places.
|
| Other forms of energy do not have this kind of risk, Nuclear
| is completely different.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Sadly not even enough. Formerly well-managed countries have
| revolutions and get into wars.
| caned wrote:
| Rich countries only manage sewage and garbage to the extent
| that it's out of sight and out of mind. Arguably nobody is
| "responsible enough."
| alerighi wrote:
| Well so nobody can handle nuclear technologies, since nobody
| handles garbage correctly. Just look at how many stuff that can
| be recycled get tossed into general waste, or how much
| electronic waste we send to poor countries since we can't deal
| with it.
|
| In reality fortunately the management of nuclear waste is
| completely different than everything else, it's highly
| regulated and controlled by international inspectors. In fact
| this incident doesn't prove that nuclear power is unsafe, since
| it didn't interest a nuclear power plant but rather a medical
| device with radioactive substances in them (and radiation
| sources are used commonly in the conventional industry, in
| every country, even the one that doesn't have any nuclear at
| all).
| jasmer wrote:
| Where are the regulations around combat teams hiding in
| Nuclear Power plants? Artillery shells landing 500ft from
| reactors? Small quasi-accidents happening because one regime
| wants to 'blame it' on another? Nuclear staff being locked
| into the facility?
|
| Regulations exist until someone decides they don't because
| they don't want to pay for something, they are lazy,
| incompetent.
|
| Google 'Jamie Metzl' who is a very respected researcher who
| lays out the history of the establishment of Biolabs in
| China, and points at the very strong likelihood that COVID
| was created in a lab and is the result of a long series of
| regulatory, oversight, political and scientific failures.
|
| Biolabs are 'safe' until the host country decides to screw
| the regulators because they want to save money on
| construction, or some person installs substandard materials
| because somewhere down the long globalized value chain,
| someone replaced one thing with another, on purpose or by
| accident, and it compromises the entire system.
|
| Those are the kinds of systemic risks that exist with things
| like viruses and Nuclear tech that normal thinking doesn't
| account for.
|
| Likely we need an approach that works even if humans fail
| completely, or, that can be maintained in more stable
| systems.
| barelyauser wrote:
| Demand it? From who? Countries are sovereign. This post reads
| very badly.
| jasmer wrote:
| 'Sovereignty' is a social construct.
|
| Most social groups do not allow children or crazy people to
| have guns, and they enforce a whole range of other rules as
| well.
|
| This notion that 'that group is sovereign' but 'that other
| group' is not - is a decision we make, not some kind of
| innate thing.
|
| More specifically - the rules are already in place for
| Nuclear Weapons. 'Rich countries' will not allow messed up
| nations to get them, or rather, it will be very difficult.
| [1]
|
| It's the same with Nuclear technology of the same risk.
|
| Colombia can go ahead and try to make Nuclear Weapons and see
| what happens.
|
| [1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/
| anthk wrote:
| Spaniard here. You are deluded.
|
| There are weapons far more dangerous today than nuclear.
| erredois wrote:
| I think statistics do not support this fear. This is in Brazil
| that probably has been running thousands of this equipments
| over decades, with this one significant incident. Also runs two
| nuclear power plants and enriches uranium locally without any
| relevant incident. I think this irrational fear of atomic poses
| more danger because it's something we need , oil kill much more
| people and renewables alone won't cut it. Even Brazil that runs
| a lot of hidro eventually needs to run fossil fuel
| thermoelectric because of low volume of rains.
| misterS wrote:
| Plainly Difficult has a nice video about this accident:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhL0xQzPSy8
| riffic wrote:
| this happens so ridiculously frequently. look at wikipedia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| from that list
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
| dom96 wrote:
| > He soon developed a burn on his hand in the same size and shape
| as the aperture - he eventually underwent partial amputation of
| several fingers.
|
| > On September 15, Pereira visited a local clinic, where his
| symptoms were diagnosed as the result of something he had eaten;
| he was told to return home and rest.
|
| Hopefully the partial amputation occurred after the visit,
| otherwise I would really love to know what the clinic thought he
| ate that could cause partial amputation!
| BizarroLand wrote:
| "You ate something so we need to cut off your fingers" is a
| sentence I hope is never spoken aloud to anyone ever.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Don't read about the people who are paralysed or die from
| eating slugs as a dare...
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I'm posting a yahoo page about it because of a text
| preference for HN, but the Chubbyemu YouTube video is mildly
| terrifying. It's my understanding that this sort of thing is
| vanishingly rare, but serves as a reminder that it's better
| to have modern medicine than not.
| https://news.yahoo.com/teenager-legs-fingers-amputated-
| eatin...
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| https://archive.is/KKrYN
|
| >> both of his legs and and all ten fingers amputated
|
| > better to have modern medicine than not
|
| Fuck no! Never let modern medicine butcher me like that.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > They learned that JC only received the first dose of
| the meningococcal vaccine just before he entered middle
| school. And once he reached the age of 16, JC did not
| receive the recommended booster for the vaccine.
| dom96 wrote:
| wow, so it totally is possible to lose your fingers after
| eating something. This also show the importance of
| vaccination and makes me wonder: how do I know if I missed
| some vaccines as a kid? how do I know whether I need a
| booster of something since school?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Get your medical records and visit a doctor?
| mrexroad wrote:
| Well, they clearly didn't think much of the doctors advice...
| the next day:
|
| > "September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's
| aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep
| blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He
| inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of
| the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of
| gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not
| ignite."
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| When I first read about this, I wondered how you wouldn't be
| afraid of something glowing with a deep blue light.
|
| I feel like that would get the ol spidey sense tingling for
| most.
| jeoqn wrote:
| [flagged]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So... You just lost your empathy for ~200 people?
| voakbasda wrote:
| It was not forgotten. It was neglected by the government, which
| then then tried to blame the owners that had been begging for
| months for someone to address the issue. The government
| actively prohibited them from removing it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The owners also neglected to properly secure the device. In
| their place I'd have at the very least seal the room with a
| brick wall.
| peteradio wrote:
| How are you going to get permission to erect a brick wall
| when you are barred from entering the grounds to retrieve
| the device?
| rbanffy wrote:
| The person who forgot to remove it from the device was not
| among the people who died.
| jeoqn wrote:
| Good, it wasn't his fault.
| amelius wrote:
| Anyone having a good reference to a cheap radiation measurement
| instrument that would catch this?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If you're curious, there's some reasonably priced ones on
| Amazon that might satisfy your curiosity (but are not safety
| rated or scientifically accurate).
|
| If you're actually feeling anxious about this, there's a
| laundry list of things far more likely to harm you that you can
| act on right now, such as making sure you have sufficient smoke
| and CO alarms, a CO2 measurement tool to see if your popular
| rooms are getting enough fresh air, and a radon detector
| (though depending on region this may not apply).
| roywiggins wrote:
| To catch this specific thing, all you'd need is a pair of
| eyeballs, since it actively glowed...
| kazinator wrote:
| From the Wikpiedia description, it looks like the IGR owners and
| doctors were treated badly by the system in their country. They
| made steps to warn about the radioactive material left behind,
| but were prevented by a court order and guards from retrieving
| it. Then in the aftermath, they became defendants in civil
| litigation and criminal prosecution.
| sneak wrote:
| This, along with the Gimli Glider, are my favorite wikipedia
| pages.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Why this?
| verytrivial wrote:
| Warning: People not prepared to read about harm coming to
| children should probably scroll past this one.
|
| I'm still haunted from the first time I read about this.
| jonas21 wrote:
| [flagged]
| deely3 wrote:
| Whats wrong with warning? Its not like all people on HN
| should be forced to read all wiki articles about all horrible
| thing that happens with people.
| pflenker wrote:
| What's wrong with that? I once read the plot of a horror
| movie on that page and it haunted me for months. And that was
| even though I fully expected the article to be unpleasant.
| tiagod wrote:
| Same here... probably the same movie.....
| blueflow wrote:
| You made me curious. Whats the title?
| unwind wrote:
| Seconded, I stopped reading at that point. Thanks anyway, good
| idea to issue a warning.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In light of the little bitty thing lost/found in Australia, this
| is a good example of why they spent such an effort to find it.
| Forget making dirty bombs, just have a "committed to the cause"
| person just carry something like this around as they tour the
| city. At least a dirty bomb would be obvious something happened,
| and people could know how/why they were getting sick in the
| aftermath.
|
| This kind of thing would be the worst example of Silent But
| Deadly. Once the committed to the cause person was too affected
| from doing the work themselves, just have the next member pick up
| and carry on the mission. Ammo that never needs reloading. You
| just have to reload the delivery mechanisms.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >Just have a "committed to the cause" person just carry
| something like this around as they tour the city.
|
| Please don't fear-monger; the impact of radiation on the human
| body is _cumulative_ and the inverse square law makes it hard
| for any point source to have a ton of impact (particularly with
| how much attenuating concrete and metal exists in cities).
|
| A person walking around a city with a Cs-137 capsule would emit
| a _very_ dangerous field around themselves, but the impact
| would be very localized _and_ require long exposure times for
| there to be a meaningful impact. Your scenario would primarily
| be a confusing suicide mission, where _maybe_ a random
| assortment of people would have elevated cancer levels in
| future years.
|
| Hell, even the guy _next to Slotin_ at the Demon core
| criticality survived 20+ years (before dying of a _heart
| attack_ )[0]
|
| The most deadly disasters are the ones where a radioactivity
| source _is in one place for a long time_ and people interact
| closely with it, frequently (usually because they don 't know
| it is there).
|
| Take the Goiania accident [1] as an example. Only the scrapyard
| employees who spent a few days with the capsule ended up dying.
| Other people with shorter interaction times were fine.
|
| Or take the Kramatorsk Accident [2], only _the families in the
| apartment_ died of leukemia, despite it being a full building.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_C._Graves
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you took this seriously after Silent But Deadly to come
| away with I'm trying to practice fear mongering, "well, boy,
| I don't know."
|
| We have so many movie/book plots, that this is exactly how
| they start. Someone reads something, and then just plays with
| the idea. I'm not a writer, so it's not like I'm ever going
| to use the idea. But who knows, maybe somebody else reads and
| turns it into a good idea.
|
| We can still have fun in this world even with deputy downers
| like you ruining for everyone "because it's not accurate".
| [deleted]
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Aside from both incidents happening in countries not
| particularly well known for long-term follow-up on the
| consequences of failures by the state...law of inverse
| squares is what saved a lot of people in these incidents. The
| source wasn't actually that close to them. In a dense city, a
| hypothetical terrorist probably wouldn't have to work too
| hard to get around this.
|
| Some radiotherapy sources are stamped "DROP AND RUN." If
| you're able to read that, by the time you've read it, you're
| already in deep dogshit. The levels of radiation involved
| cause near instant cell death and odd sensations due to,
| well, the frying of the nervous system. You might live - but
|
| The impact wouldn't be that high in terms of people
| injured/killed. The real impact would be on the public
| psyche, as well disruption of the health system when people
| showed up in ERs and doctors offices thinking they were
| exposed, clogging those systems for care of other patients.
| In that sense, as a terror attack, it would be highly
| successful.
|
| It's really bizarre seeing a bunch of HNers downplaying how
| serious these sorts of incidents are. We're very lucky that
| the lost sources have never ended up in the hands of anyone
| but non-malicious actors. Now 'bad' people are far more aware
| of them...
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| This kind of attack might be detectable with any digital
| camera. I'd hope the level it takes to produce visible noise is
| less than the level to be harmful.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2GNvHRjcz8
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > just have a "committed to the cause" person just carry
| something like this around as they tour the city.
|
| They'd be dead in a day or two, with no ill-effects for anyone
| else.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I asked in a previous thread about the relative strength of the
| device in Goiania and the recent device in Australia. cosama
| replied:
|
| > _The wikipedia article you linked mentioned that the Goiania
| source was 50.9 TBq (1,380 Ci) when lost, the source in
| question here [in Australia] is probably 1-10 mCi, so about a
| million times weaker. See this other thread about the
| incidence:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34549126 ._
| mrexroad wrote:
| Thanks, appreciate you posting it here. Was skimming for that
| comparison but didn't see it.
| rimunroe wrote:
| The source in Australia was about 19 GBq (514 mCi) according
| to https://www.aap.com.au/news/search-for-radioactive-
| capsule-i...
| gus_massa wrote:
| 50.9 TBq / 19 GBq = 50,000 GBq / 20 GBq = 2,500.
|
| Can I round it to 1000?
|
| Thanks for the data. So it's 1000 weaker, not 1000000
| weaker.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| ...which is still a very, very serious danger to public
| health? Particularly since symptoms might not be as
| acute?
|
| Downplaying the seriousness of the Australian incident is
| a really weird flex. The lost source was still easily
| lethal.
| twelve40 wrote:
| its terrible, but given that after smearing this stuff all over
| the place only 4 people died, it seems to take a bit more
| effort than just walking around the city. Those shooters like
| Las Vegas etc we get here cause way more destruction without
| having to use such extravagant methods.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i don't know if it's just because we've become numb to these
| events, but they just don't get the reaction from something
| esoteric like someone irradiating the local stores causing
| people to get sick invisibly. then again, maybe i'm giving
| the new "scary" too much credit. overall, we didn't take
| covid seriously. i could see people having radiation parties
| of groups of people convinced it's not real.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "committed to the cause"
|
| Ignorance is enough already, you don't need any malice. A child
| that didn't have had the chance to learn about radioactivity is
| enough to kill plenty of people.
|
| That's why you control radioactive elements. Not exactly
| because of some antagonistic group. Any such group could
| probably kill way more people, way more easily by messing with
| something else.
| dylan604 wrote:
| An ignorant child doesn't make for nearly as compelling of a
| plot though.
| liendolucas wrote:
| They have done a movie about it, and I remember it wasn't bad at
| all: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259956/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
|
| Other terrible accidents (not related to the nature of Goiana):
|
| * Hisashi Ouchi: Fatal dose beyond imagination. Accident during
| manually mixing a bucket of radioactive material (yes, you read
| that right) in a room. They did this in order to bypass the
| regular procedure to finish the job earlier as they were already
| delayed. Doctors (if I recall correctly) kept him alive for 2
| months while the poor guy was begging to let him go.
|
| * Anatoli Bugorski: Literally put his head in a particle
| accelerator. Happened because a light indication was off when it
| should have been on. He described seeing the light of a billion
| suns (or something like that). Survived but with serious
| consequences.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Not only did he survive, but he's still alive.
| [deleted]
| Koshkin wrote:
| Discussed previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127586
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _The Goiania accident was a radioactive contamination accident
| that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiania, Goias, Brazil,
| after a forgotten radiotherapy source was stolen from an
| abandoned hospital site in the city._
|
| I wish we would put more emphasis on supporting the body as a
| means to improve health instead of assaulting the body in the
| name of assaulting the illness.
| msie wrote:
| I saw a video depiction of the incident that wasn't listed in the
| wikipedia. Does anyone recall?
| [deleted]
| iamgopal wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance but How could any radioactive material whose
| half life is 30 year could survive billions of years on earth and
| still be radioactive?
| Sharlin wrote:
| It took us a few hundred years, but we did finally realize the
| alchemists' dream of transmuting elements into other elements.
| It's just a little expensive.
| jerf wrote:
| You are correct. It can't. It is made:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Uses
|
| "As an almost purely human-made isotope, caesium-137 has been
| used to date wine and detect counterfeits and as a relative-
| dating material for assessing the age of sedimentation
| occurring after 1945."
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| This reminds me of a cottage industry that developed to
| recover iron/steel from shipwrecks that sunk before
| atmospheric nuclear tests began.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
| jl6 wrote:
| It hadn't survived for billions of years, it was made of
| caesium-137 which was manufactured in a nuclear reactor.
| vandahm wrote:
| Cesium-137 is made in nuclear reactors, but some radioactive
| isotopes with shorter half lives (well, short compared to the
| age of the Earth) exist in nature because they are a product of
| the natural radioactive decay of other, long-lived materials
| like Uranium.
| haunter wrote:
| Here is the IAEA report from 1988 https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub815_web.pd... (mind you
| with some injury photos too)
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Similar accident in Chihuahua Mexico
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
|
| It talks about 4000 people. My father built our house in
| Chihuahua around 1985-86. Our family lived in that house for 30
| years. We don't if we were affected, but it hit me when my sister
| died of brain cancer two years ago.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| Similar to both incidents is Kramatorsk, where a Ce-137 capsule
| was found in an apartment block, embedded inside a concrete
| wall, after it fell out of a piece of quarry equipment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
| verytrivial wrote:
| I'm very sorry to hear about your sister.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I'm from Juarez, Centro Medico de Especialidades was the
| hospital we all went to back in the day.
|
| I only know about this story because my father told me how one
| of the biggest radioactive accidents happened in Juarez when
| discussing radioactive events after watching the show
| Chernobyl.
| sgt101 wrote:
| If civilization collapses there will be lots of terrible stories
| like this over the next 500 years or so as enterprising folks
| raid old sites and find amazing "treasure".
| nocoiner wrote:
| There was an instance maybe in the '90s where a few hunters
| found an abandoned Soviet radioisotope thermal generator in the
| woods and used it to keep warm overnight. I think one or two of
| them may have ultimately survived, but at least one died and
| they all suffered terribly.
| karlzt wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127586
| major505 wrote:
| I remember this when I was a kid. Most amazing was that the
| federal goverment didn't had a protocol to deal with things like
| that, even at the time we where building our second nuclear power
| plant.
|
| But the military was aable to perform a fast response for the
| incident. And shows that even if nuclear energy is the future, we
| could never understimate it.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| can you clarify 'even at the time we where building our second
| nuclear power plant'
| igortg wrote:
| Brazil has only 3 nuclear power plants. The accident occurred
| when the second one was being built.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > That night, Devair Alves Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard,
| noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the
| capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he
| immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days,
| he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing
| substance.
|
| The blue glow of death.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It really reads like a horror story about stealing a cursed
| artifact from an ancient tomb.
| labrador wrote:
| > On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's
| aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep
| blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He
| inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of
| the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of
| gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not
| ignite.
|
| Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Last scene
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtApnSjX1Y
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
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