Slashdot Mirror
Cobalt-60, and Lessons From a Mexican Theft
Lasrick writes "George Moore and Miles Pomper examine the theft of a truck containing Cobalt-60 and find that, while Mexico did the right thing and reported the theft promptly, they were under no obligation to do so according to international rules and the IAEA. This was true even though the stolen material was 3,000 curies, making it a Category 1 source (the most dangerous). Quoting: 'At a distance of 30.5 centimeters (1 foot) from an unshielded source with an activity level of 3,000 curies, the dose to a bystander would be about 37,000 Rem per hour (a measure of radiation exposure). This means that anyone within a foot of the source when it was out of its shield was being exposed to about 10 Rem per second, a level that would typically kill half of a population exposed to it for 30 seconds. ... The number of fatalities will not be nearly as high as it would have been if the source capsule had been left in a public place. Cobalt 60, like other high-risk radiological sources, is more lethal when it is kept intact as a high-strength source than it would be if spread using a radiological dispersal device such as a so-called “dirty bomb.” Nonetheless, had the Mexican source been used in a dispersal device, the economic consequences could have been extremely significant.'"
An account of what happened and what could have happened via Steve Weintz https://medium.com/war-is-boring/26b40dd869fb
Had a terrorist put this under a seat cushion in a bus terminal, they could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands before it would eventually be tracked down.
Damn dirty bombs, sneak attacks are more deadly.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There was no warning pictogram on the layer that the victims interacted with, which was found at the scrapyard that the thieves had sold the dismantled machine to. When the capsule was brought to a hospital, the staff couldn't figure out whether it was dangerous until a visiting nuclear physicist borrowed equipment from a government lab to check.
The only person that 'played with' or smeared it on their skin was a six-year-old girl who died after eating a sandwich some of the grains/powder had fallen onto.
Evidently only the initial scavengers/thieves were uneducated & poor. The guy that found the cesium-137 didn't handle it in a way that suggested a lack of money (sharing it, wanting to have it turned into a ring for his wife, offering rewards for helping extract it, etc.). The city the families lived at the edges of is similar to a standard major North American city and has a similar educational system, so chances are that they were as educated as anyone up here.