Grand Canyon Visitors May Have Been Exposed To Radiation For Years (azcentral.com)

joeflies writes: Park safety manager Elston Stephenson provides details about buckets of uranium that exposed visitors to radiation, and the subsequent cover up. The radiation was detected by a teenager that brought a Geiger counter to the building, and was subsequently "cleaned" up by employees equipped with dish washing gloves and a broken mop handle. "If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition," Stephenson wrote. "The radiation readings, at first blush, exceeds (sic) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's safe limits. [...] Identifying who was exposed, and your exposure level, gets tricky and is our next important task." Stephenson said he had repeatedly asked National Park executives to inform the public, but never got a response.

"According to Stephenson, the uranium specimens had been in a basement at park headquarters for decades and were moved to the museum building when it opened, around 2000," reports AZCentral. "One of the buckets was so full that its lid would not close. Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute."

Comments

kudos

[bugs2squash]

Kudos to the teen with the Geiger counter. Maybe this will spark a trend of citizen radiation hunters.

Only low and constant levels.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"Radiation is good for you" That's what Ann Coulter says and I believe her. I rilly do.

Actually (presuming your genetics is typical of the population and you don't already live on a high mountain, in an otherwise high radiation area, or spend much of your time on airliners in flight), a low level of additional ionizing radiation IS good for you.

(Not pulses, like chest X-rays or radiation therapy, though. And not high levels of bio-binding or concentrated particulate radioactive material, like radio-iodine from being downwind of the Hanford experiment, generalized nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests, battles, or reactor accidents, strontium-90 from dirty bombs, etc. Low, constant, somewhat-raised background is the ticket.)

This was discovered in the early atomic era: The medicos were looking for an increased cancer risk among the people living in Denver and other places with higher background radiation (from altitude and cosmic radiation, or local low-level radiation from minerals like granite). But they found lower risk instead. WTF?

Turns out that ionizing radiation creates free radicals in your cells. These aren't the ONLY way it damages DNA, but it's a major one. And your cell's metabolism puts out a LOT MORE free radicals than the background radiation does.

Your cells also make free radical detoxifying compounds (and DNA repair cellular gadgetry). But it's expensive in nutritional energy and components. So over evolutionary time cells made a tradeoff, buiding a feed-forward mechanism to adjust the amount of block-it/fix-it molecule production according to the level of nastiness, to save the valuable resources for other aspects of staying alive.

People in the first and second world generally don't have any problem getting enough food energy and nutritional components. (Quite the opposite, in fact, as the fad diet industry will attest.) But they still have this conservative "thermostat" adjusting the "air condidtioner".

But it happens that (until the level is high enough to start saturating the mechanism at the high end), raising the background radiation from what's typical raises the protective-molecule production by MORE than the amount needed to compensate for the added radiation. Like turning on a heater under the air-conditioner thermostat leading to the apartment getting colder, the extra background radiation provokes extra protection that blocks MORE damage from other sources than the radiation itself adds. There's a net improvement.