That’s not really “casual” handling. That’s fairly extensive contact.
And my point was that it was far more a danger if the capsule is breached.
The big problem with the “radium girls” was that they were ingesting the paint when they mouth-pointed their brushes. Once in the body, the radium attached itself to their bones and teeth, after which they were constantly irradiated by their own bones and teeth.
Radium, being an alkaline earth metal, is biochemically analogous to calcium so the body uses it in bone and teeth. Which is bad because that means molecules (both radium and its decay product radon) emitting all the major radiation types are incorporated into living cells, which is a great way to kill those cells and everything nearby.
“Radium jaw” is characterized by spreading bone necrosis. Late stage cases often have terrible symptoms like jaws breaking off of the head.
That’s the “standard interpretation”, but there’s more to it than that. From what I’ve read, they weren’t extremely careful with the radium, and weren’t treating it like the very hazardous material it was. There was dust from the stuff all over the place. You didn’t have to be “pointing” the brush with your lips to ingest the material.
One story I have heard – and for which I have no corroboration – is that sometimes they painted some paint on themselves to have sort of “temporary tattoos” that flowed. I can easily believe it – it’s a very human thing to want to try. But, as I say, I can’t find it attested anywhere. The real point is that no one seems to have realized how dangerous the radium paint was, and took no precautions (this was the era when “radithor” water was sold, containing both radium and thorium salts. At least one person died from ingesting the stuff regularly)
And here’s more of a scandal – What happened after they learned how dangerous radium paint was? After all, they had highly publicized hearings about the problem, and the “radium girls” wee big news in the 1920s and 1930s
Answer – they continued using radium paint on military aircraft dials into the 1960s.
The Australian authorities had cautioned that picking up the capsule with a bare hand risked injury. Such radiation sources are usually transported in thick casks that mitigate the radiation, the capsule that contained this source did not provide significant shielding.
Oddly enough it’s hard to find pictures of radiation injuries from handling cesium sources. Probably because there are a lot of protocols to prevent such handling.
That sort of thing would be in the various International Atomic Energy Agency accident reports,
https://www.iaea.org/publications/search/topics/accident-reports
I haven’t read a description of the exact way the capsule was lost that makes complete technical sense to me. More detail may come out.
But from what I understand, the capsule was (nominally) secured within a piece of equipment. The piece of equipment was being transported. Somehow, a bolt shook loose (perhaps due to transportation vibration) and the capsule fell out through the hole left by the missing bolt.
This doesn’t entirely make sense to me because:
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presumably the capsule wouldn’t (usually) just be rattling around loose inside the equipment, which implies that the loosening of the bolt is what permitted the capsule to come loose, but…
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It is unusual for the diameter of a bolt to be larger than the item it is holding in place. So if the bolt was holding the capsule in place how could the bolt have left a hole large enough to allow the escape of the capsule?
Perhaps the bolt was holding a bracket which held the capsule. Or maybe there was more than one component that vibrated loose. I don’t know.
If anyone is familiar with this type of equipment I’d be fascinated to hear how it may have occurred.
We had to move a piece of specialized test equipment to a vendor’s site, and our dumb-ass manager thought he could do the company a favor and move it in the back of his pickup truck, instead of having a moving company take care of it. That would have been fine, but the piece had a 700-pound slab of granite, making it somewhat top heavy. He had to pass through Minneapolis, where he managed to roll his truck taking a freeway clover leaf exit too fast. The responding state trooper saw that there was a radioactive-source warning sign on it, so he closed the exit until a hazmat team could take care of it. It was at the intersection of two major highways, at rush hour. Oh my!
The warning sign was because there was a basic, residential grade smoke detector inside.
He got fired a few years later, but not for that.
Probably better that way.
snicker
This was the article I found in the US media, which I imagine is mostly a rewrite of an Aussie news source article.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/02/business/australia-radioactive-capsule-investigation-intl-hnk/index.html
I agree that so far what they have is a packaging surprise (the missing bolt) and the capsule out in the wild and not the umpteen other steps in the middle. I’m gratified to hear various experts with no role in the screw-up commenting that they find it baffling too. So far.
Some portable nuclear densitometry gauges like the kind a mining company might use have a retractable rod that goes into a hole in the ground. The cesium is embedded into the tip of the rod. I can see a scenario where an improperly stored gauge could have had the rod extend and get broken off while being transported in a truck going over rough ground, especially at mining sites.
Well, there is a little more detail there, thanks. So apparently there were missing screws and a missing bolt. But still no detail yet sufficient to understand how the incident occurred.
Happens all the time in industrial radiography, or at least it is a risk with poorly-maintained equipment.
“The Radiological Accident in Gilan:”
At the end of the shift, at around 03:00 on 24 July 1996, the iridium source became detached from its drive cable, reportedly due to failure of the lock on the radiography container. This resulted in the source falling 6 m into a trench which was surrounded by a 1 m high wall made of concrete blocks. As the source was shielded by the concrete, its loss was not detected by the radiography team when they finished work and they assumed that it had been safely returned to its container, as usual.
“The Radiological Accident in Chilca”:
A Peruvian NDT company was carrying out operations in the district of Chilca, located in the Cañete Province of Lima. Three workers made a total of 97 radiography exposures over a period of about 2.5 h but did not verify whether the source was back inside the camera after each exposure. It was after completion of their tasks that one of the workers noticed that the source was not inside the camera but instead was stuck inside the guide tube.
The frequent low-level and losses of alpha- and beta- sources isn’t so concerning. It’s the high-level gamma sources that go astray that can be lethal. These aren’t as common (thank Og), but there are still too many of them. Have a look here
The Australian incident, since it concerns a gamma source, definitely falls in this category (and you see that it’s been entered as the most recent case).
You really don’t want to belittle the significance of these cases by comparing them to low-level radioactive losses that “happen all the time”. Those don’t get people killed. These do.
And I’m still not buying the “missing screws and bolt” thing. This was a massively serious oversight and possibly misdesign.
Agreed. Following on …
I know diddly beans about the radiation hazard regulatory details here in the USA, much less in Oz.
But if the attitude @DPRK shows us is typical of industry reality, and is also in compliance with the relevant regs, IMO we (society) collectively have a real problem with regulations and safety attitude out there.
Note I’m not calling out @DPRK as an individual. Merely saying that if he’s a practitioner in / near the field, and he’s typical, then the field has a problem, not him. He’s in effect our canary in that coal mine, giving us info on a hazard we (society) don’t yet recognize.
My biz is so chock-full-o-safety that we do really silly high-cost things over tiny molehills. But if we’re to get the big high-impact stuff right (e.g. strong gamma emitters in the radio-industrial context), we need to sweat the small low impact stuff too (alpha- & beta-emitters). Just to keep everyone’s mind in the right frame. Which sweating of small details applies to regulators, managers, and workers.
IMO, YMMV, etc.
Okay, that was clearly some really bad antiphrasis on my part. If it really happened all the time, they would not be calling in IAEA Response Teams and documenting and analysing these incidents so that they do not happen again. It has happened more than once or twice, though (this incident is merely the latest avoidable accident).
If it were that easy for the safety mechanisms/interlocks/training to fail then they would not approve these devices for use in industrial settings. The previous incidents I linked to show one way how it can happen that a gamma-emitting capsule falls out and gets lost (lots of grime gets into the gamma camera, nobody ever maintains it, the mechanism attached to the source eventually fails, the small bit falls out, nobody notices…) And of course the gamma radiation itself is intense and lethal; if someone takes the capsule home, as has happened, it can and will slowly and painfully kill them, their family, irradiate their neighbours…
@LSLGuy I agree that when regulators/managers/workers do not know or do not care about dangers, or do not understand what the regulations are for (and I have occasionally encountered attitudes like who needs a fume hood anyway, no goggles necessary with that high-powered laser… but I like to think those are not from people who actually have to work with the equipment in question for real on a regular basis. My friend who worked with lethal bacteria did not exactly skimp on hand-washing or on not leaving food in the refrigerator too long, quite the opposite…) leads to normalization of cutting corners where safety protocols are concerned and sets the stage for a serious accident.
We’d sure like to hope that everybody has a genuine appreciation for the real hazards. And that their managers support them having that appreciation no matter how many fewer corners get cut.
I’m pleased to understand that reality from where you sit is not as raggedy as I’d misunderstood from you earlier.
I don’t really understand this comment. If this happened due to missing screws and bolts that is a massive oversight and possibly miss design problem.
My point is that it’s more than just a missing screw or bolt. I’m the one who said it was a misdesign, not the story – the system should’ve been designed so that it would require a helluva lot more than a couple of loose screws to release the capsule. The end of the tube (or whatever) containing the capsule should have been made too small to allow the capsule to drop out, or something.