Stolen cobalt-60 found abandoned in Mexico
Is there a Mexican idiom for ‘Hoist with his own petard’?
But…
So maybe the thieves weren’t exposed, and the ‘death sentence’ warning is just a ploy to flush them out as they seek treatment.
Co-60’s a gamma emitter. Once the large protective casing has been opened, I think you’re getting zapped if you’re near some pellets. There have been a few accidents before with thieving scrap hunters contaminating themselves and whole neighborhoods. Google Juarez and Radiation incident, as well as the Thai one mentioned at CNN. Quite a lot of rebar had to be scrapped after the Juarez fiasco, after it had already been used in concrete. The Goiana incident in Brazil involved Cs-137, not Co-60, but nevertheless killed several people.
That they can’t say for sure whether any of the cobalt is missing is really not good.
That would be really not good even if it hadn’t been stolen. Shouldn’t they be keeping precise counts on this sort of thing?
The guys here at work were wondering why there wasn’t a second driver, or maybe a guard with a gun?
So are the authorities:
Dude, it’s Mexico. They can’t even manage to have drinkable water or functioning law and order. What makes you think that radiological safety is high on their list of things they take care of?
‘Forget about it, Jake. It’s Olvera Street.’
Dude, Americans have their follies and with potentially far more dangerous results.
"In 1965, for instance, an improperly secured airplane carrying nuclear arms rolled off the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga and sank into 16,000 feet of ocean off the coast of Japan. In another maritime accident in 1981, a nuclear bomb being carried off the submarine fell seventeen feet and nearly crashed into the USS Holland – an emergency brake caught the fall just above the hull. The Carolinas seem to have bad luck, too. A B-47 bomber flying over Mars Bluff, S.C., in 1958 accidentally dropped an atomic bomb and left a crater 75 feet wide and 35 feet deep. A separate incident in North Carolina was less destructive but much scarier. Just three years later, a B-52 bomber carrying two 24-megaton hydrogen bombs crashed in Goldsboro, N.C. Neither bomb exploded, but only one of the six safety devices worked in one of the bombs. It would have been a disaster 1,800 times more powerful than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima "