Comment by En_gr_Student | Hacker News Reader

Comment by En_gr_Student | Hacker News Reader

The f*ed up part is the impact on the fetus. The dosage level before harm or death for kids is 10x smaller than for adults. For babies in the womb it is way smaller than that.

These folks may have covered up something that resulted in the miscarriage, or birth defects of the child of any pregnant woman who stood near that closet for just a few minutes.

I think the folks who covered it up for 8 months, or the morons who (threw the rocks in a hole and brought the nuclear-contaminated buckets back) should lose all their power and position. That is an amazingly bad decision.

Lucky thing some kid walked around with a geiger counter. He recorded the levels, so the numbers that officials are hiding, he knows them. His counter can be tested and certified by a decent national lab, and the exact and calibrated level of the radiation determined. And those contaminated buckets tell something about the material that was in them.

Ore shmore. It is a radioactive substance that gives off dangerous levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, as well as nuclear byproducts like radon and other gaseous nuclear isotopes.

Get more than the "top paragraph summary" that NPR did on the original AZ Central article by reading it in its entirety.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2019/02/2...

> Lucky thing some kid walked around with a geiger counter. He recorded the levels, so the numbers that officials are hiding, he knows them. His counter can be tested

Neither the linked article nor your's said anything about what kind of "geiger counter" this kid had; whether it was something picked up off ebay, an old civil defence unit, or some kit or custom made thing from Electronic Goldmine (a native AZ electronics surplus and education kit supplier - https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/)...

It's very well possible that the kid has no real numbers; that is completely unknown.

I'd be willing to bet you could walk into an old mining bar in Flagstaff and have more exposure to natural radiation used in the building materials than you'd experience from these buckets of old ore. Natural radiation sources like these are all over the place in Arizona.

The only real danger I could see and understand, though, is whether these buckets were covered or open; could someone or a kid have "dug through them" with their hands, or been in closer proximity to the material inside - where the dust or whatnot could be left on their hands to be ingested or inhaled in some manner.

That would be a much different situation than merely being near it for a small amount of time.

> where the dust or whatnot could be left on their hands to be ingested or inhaled in some manner.

This by far would be my number one concern. Proximity doesn't seem to be much to worry about (238-Uranium has an alpha decay and doesn't travel far in air). But inhaling or ingesting radioactive material completely changes the danger level.

> Natural radiation sources like these are all over the place in Arizona.

Or... Grand Central Station. But... you have to consider context, which a lot of reporters don't. Consider this quote.

"It's worth noting that if Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant, it would be shut down for exceeding the maximum allowable annual dose of radiation for employees."[0]

Yikes! We can trace down the dosage level to 120mrem/yr[1] (1.2mSv), which we can indeed see is on the order of average dosages for radiation workers [2] or 1/20th of the allowable dosage! BUT we can look at [2] more and see that 100mSv is "Lowest annual level at which increase in cancer risk is evident (UNSCEAR)" (threshold model).

So when I see articles like this I'm always a tad hesitant to even read them. They frequently focus on the first part of the last paragraph and give no indication to what these things mean. Or even worse, are misleading like that gizmodo article (I would in fact call this dangerous reporting). Radiation quotas are purposefully (and I agree with this) put to be far below what one might also call "safe" (I'd _upper bound_ "safe" as <100mSv/yr but think most would agree 20mSv is "safe"). Yeah, we should pay attention and not expose ourselves to radiation unnecessarily, but let's also be realistic about the danger (especially when we're in such dire need if we're going to solve our climate problem).

[0] https://io9.gizmodo.com/grand-central-station-is-radioactive...

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inte...

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and...

[3] https://jciv.iidj.net/map/ (just for fun, now that we have some understanding of what these numbers mean).

Hysteria like this is why it's almost impossible to have rational conversations about things like radiation or nuclear power.

> ...something that resulted in the miscarriage, or birth defects of the child of any pregnant woman who stood near that closet for just a few minutes.

If we really are talking about a couple of buckets of uranium ore, then no, standing near them for a few minutes will not cause miscarriages or birth defects. Even the AZ Central article, in the midst of its fear mongering, says, "Just 5 feet from the buckets, there was a zero reading." The rest of the article is no more helpful, giving not nearly enough context to the cited measurement for readers to draw any conclusions.

> It is a radioactive substance that gives off dangerous levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, as well as nuclear byproducts like radon and other gaseous nuclear isotopes.

Radon yes, and as I learned from another HN thread regarding this same story, radon can be generated at much higher rates than I ever realized. However this is highly unlikely to affect anyone who didn't spend extended periods of time in an enclosed (or sub-grade) space with the ore.

Gamma radiation here wouldn't be significant. Alpha radiation is stopped by mere inches of air. As with alpha, beta radiation is only hazardous if the material is inhaled or ingested. And aside from radon, there are no gaseous elements in uranium's decay chain.

I suppose, if the rocks were chalky and they were taken out the bucket and played with frequently, there could be some kind of inhalation risk. On the other hand, mineral dust is heavy, and typically settles out of the air too quickly to be a significant inhalation hazard. We see something similar with lead, where leaded dust from paint and vinyl mini-blinds is mainly a hazard to babies and little kids who can get their faces right in it, or eat things off floors and window sills.

Otherwise, it's hard for me to imagine how this material could have posed a health hazard to visitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com