Radioactive material is useful for more than just weapons, but handling it always poses a risk - especially when the general public get involved. Let's take a look at...
- The deadly health tonic
- Hot metal in Georgia
- Thieves with hot goods
- Blue stone souvenirs
- The radioactive road
- The killer capsule
- The potting shed reactor
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| Radiation can be found everywhere on Earth... (GoranH) |
The Deadly Health Tonic
Given what we now know, the idea of consuming radioactive material seems a little insane... but perhaps you would be won over by the wonders of "Radithor." This triple distilled water was guaranteed to contain at least one microcurie of Ra-226 and Ra-228 while being completely harmless - one of those guarantees turned out to be very wrong.
One major advocate of Radithor was Eben Byers, president of the A.M. Byers Company in Pittsburg. After injuring his arm playing golf in 1927, Byers started drinking Radithor on the advice of his physician. Initially it seemed to help - he felt so invigorated by the drink that he gave it to friends, business associates, paramours and even his racehorses.
Though he had a three bottle-a-day habit, Byers stopped drinking Radithor in 1930 when his teeth began falling out. An investigator for the Federal Trade Commission describes Byers as having lost sections of his jaw as his skeleton decayed - he even had holes forming in his skull. Byers died and was buried at Allegheny Cemetery 1932, with his radioactive bones sealed in a lead-lined coffin.
Hot Metal in Georgia
If you found an unexplainably warm object lying in a pool of melted snow, would you take it home? That's what a group of woodcutters did when they found a pair of strange cannisters in Georgia - reasoning that the heat would be useful, they took them back to their camp.
It would later be discovered that the objects were parts of an old Soviet communications system containing strontium-90. The woodcutters were unaware of this, becoming ill after spending the night stretched out in their warmth.
All of the woodcutters developed acute radiation syndrome and one would eventually die due to complications from a simultaneous tuberculous infection The cannisters were recovered by the IAEA... but there is a real possibility that more cannisters are out there, waiting to be found.
Thieves with Hot Goods
In 2013 Mexico, a group of truck thieves got rather more than they bargained for - the object of their heist was transporting a capsule of cobalt-60. Should the protective tube holding the cobalt fail it would have meant death for anyone nearby - and been a nightmare if it got into the water supply.
The capsule was recovered after being abandoned in a cornfield, presumably after the group saw the warnings being issued over media broadcast. The iron casing had been stripped, but fortunately the protective tube had not been tampered with.
The thieves were arrested after they showed up at a hospital, understandably worried that they had been irradiated. A farmer who had handled the capsule was hospitalized, but all-in-all it looks like the farmland avoided contamination.
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| Radioactive material can end up being collected by unsuspecting salvagers... (vkingxl) |
Blue Stone Souvenirs
Medicine has plenty of uses for radioactive material, such as x-ray machines and radiotherapy units. In 1987 Brazil an abandoned radiotherapy machine was "salvaged" and sold to a scrapyard, where workers disassembled it for parts. Inside the unit was a portion of glowing blue stone - thinking it would make for an interesting gift, the workers sent portions to friends, family and acquaintances. It wasn't long before the recipients became sick.
The glowing blue stone was cesium-137 and it claimed four lives before it was recovered. Around a huge number of people had to be monitored for contamination and over forty properties had to be demolished due to their radiation levels.
The Radioactive Road
In 1999 Kenya, maintenance of a dirt road in Kenya went horribly wrong - officials discovered that the soil used for repairs contained dangerous levels of thorium 232.
The material came from Mrima Hill, a large nearby niobium mine... and niobium forms salts called niobates, including one which contains thorium. Not only did the twenty-five thousand people who either worked on or lived near the road need to be checked for radiation, around three thousand tons of the contaminated material had to be removed from the road.
The Killer Capsule
In 2023 the Australian government frantically scoured a fourteen-hundred kilometer section of desert highway for a tiny capsule (less than a cubic centimeter) that had gone missing in transit.
The capsule contained caesium-137, which can be used as a form of sensor in the mining, oil and gas industries - technicians can monitor the contents of a pipe by measuring how much radiation the contents block. The release of gamma rays meant that standing near the capsule for an hour would be the equivalent of receiving between one and seventeen x-rays. Beta-particles would be able to flood out if the capsule broke - proximity to this would result in burns, radiation sickness and possibly tissue death.
The capsule was found by a search team driving a specialized vehicle that could scan as it traveled. Fortunately it seemed that no-one had handled the tiny terror.
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| Couldn't possibly be dangerous... could it? (matthiasboeckel) |
The Potting Shed Reactor
There's a saying that "curiosity killed the cat." In 1995, an American boy scout with a great deal of curiosity nearly irradiated his town with a homemade reactor.
This all occurred at the Golf Manor division of Commerce Township in America, a quiet place where the arrival of a government task-force was quite a surprise. Neighbors describe how suited agents swarmed the Hahn residence, sawing apart a potting shed and transporting it away in metal drums. What the townsfolk didn't know was that the shed was dangerously irradiated... and that an estimated forty-thousand residents were at risk. This was all the work of David Hahn, a boy scout attempting to earn a merit badge with a homemade breeder reactor.
Hahn was able to trick members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get his hands on information and radioactive material, then used jars and coffee filters to handle substances including radium and nitric acid.
It is unknown how effective the homemade reactor was, but the rising radiation levels eventually led Hahn to dismantle his reactor. His project was discovered after he was stopped by the police - his explanation that a sealed toolbox held radioactive material led officers to suspect he had an atomic bomb.
When the dust settled, the potting shed was buried in the Utah desert (at significant expense.) Hahn is still obsessed with the power of radiation - though he was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
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