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Comment by helipad | Hacker News Reader

I love the bureaucracy. Not a plight against Italians, most would be the same, but "Woah, this is more radioactive than Fukushima and none of us will go within 250 yards of it!" - 12 months, $700,000 later, government and port authority decide it's probably worth opening up. Good job, everyone!

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> this is more radioactive than Fukushima

... and is contained in a steel box. This gave them time to decide what would be the proper course of action.

And there is more than one of these in every hospital radiotherapy machine, in every machine for sterilizing surgical instruments or medical supplies and even in machines for preserving seeds.

Amazing this sort of thing doesn't happen more often

You mean... like being discovered?

I'm quite sure these accidents happen more frequently than they are discovered.

Hospitals tend to notice clusters of people dying of radiation poisoning - at least in places with hospitals.

In places without hospitals - I'm sure the contents of a lot of these machines end up being dumped in the 3rd world, to be 'recycled' like most toxic waste

Only if it is acute poisoning and only if they cluster in time and space. Devices as nasty as this, of course, would be detected, but less deadly materials would easily go undetected until someone, 50 years later, notices something like leukemia being 20% more deadly in a given region than the surrounding areas.

Very sound engineering attitude.

This container is emitting X, as long as we put Y tons of shielding around it and stay Z meters away it's safe.

Or we could just immediately rip it open and see what happens.

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