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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."
"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."
"The canyon is fantastic! I had an absolutely glowing experience; our tour group lit up with joy."
Table-ized A.I.
Some people are able to absorb energy from broadcast radiation... but too much causes cancer... but cancer can be solved by the right dose of more radiation.
You can pick up uranium ore of the ground, it gets stuck in your shoe and sets off sensors at the airport, it's a nuisance but it's not 'dangerous', people get more radiation working a few months on the ISS and I don't see Scott Kelly dying of radiation sickness or cancer.
Moreover this was (according to the article) kept in a bucket. Any harmful radiation from these sources can be held back by a sheet of paper.
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My car didn't start this morning.
Is there any way I can implicate Trump in causing this?
There will be some lawsuits coming out of this, as the plaintiff qualifications should only include had cancer and visited the Grand Canyon in the last 18 years.
This is unfortunate, idiotic, careless, and unlikely malevolent... mostly just dumb luck of the bad variety. To put it in perspective, there are likely millions of American homes with unhealthy levels of carcinogenic radon gas.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Uranium gives off alpha radiation, which is effectively stopped by the layer of dead skin cells on your body. If you ground it up into a talcum-powder consistency and snorted it, then you'd be in trouble, but anything less than that and you're fine.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
And I thought I only got exposed during my work in smelters and military missions.
Oh well.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not understanding the flippant comments here. It certainly seems significant that children were receiving at least 600 *times* the radiation guidelines.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
more likely Ann Coulter would rail against government incompetence and the dishonesty of career government bureaucrats. Because you know, that's basically what happened here.
Kudos to the teen with the Geiger counter. Maybe this will spark a trend of citizen radiation hunters.
Nullius in verba
Would be a great name for a rock band.
Be Excellent To Each Other
> you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition Sounds like weasel words to me. Someone's trying to blow a story out of proportion. The staff may have reason to be concerned though.
Or just sudo su -
So the nation will inevitably be swept with a wave of Generation Z kids with superpowers?
Everything I ever needed to know about radiation I learned from comic books. /s
A treatment isn't a cure you apologist faggot
Thanks for raising the standard of discussion around here, anonymous couward!
The
A 10 kilogram bucket of "good" uranium ore should put out about 400 nanosieverts per hour.
The report seems to suggest about 2,000 times that.
So they either got some actual nuclear waste - or someone had the Geiger counter set wrong.
"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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's probably why it always felt so gosh darn warm and cozy in there.
But seriously, I question the accuracy of the article....you'd have to be using some sort of processed uranium to get the level of radioactivity claimed, you won't get that from common ore specimens.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The one cell phone plug in you will never see in popular use. People would die if they saw how much radiation they are exposed to everywhere.
INTENSE !
Just in case i wasn't positive enough about paid shilling in this thread, here comes ShanghaiBill to relieve my doubts.
I definitely visited the grand canyon inbrtween those dates, but don’t remember if I visited that particular museum. Oh well, something else to add to the list of things that are contributing to my eventual demise.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
After dumping the contents, the employees brought back the buckets. Certainly don't want to waste a good bucket.
Seriously though, some of these questions could have been answered if the people involved hadn't rushed to cover everything up. Also I notice nobody's talking about the significant levels of radon these buckets could have been producing, which could have been a significantly more dangerous source of radiation exposure than the minerals themselves.
Get me off this planet!
Try the command bc. You will find it is a full fledge calculator for Linux.
"So they either got some actual nuclear waste - or someone had the Geiger counter set wrong."
It's almost assuredly the latter. Geiger-Mueller tubes cannot discriminate energy levels or the difference between alpha, beta or Gamma radiation except to use different shield materials to filter out alpha, then beta.
G-M counters are also wildly inaccurate at providing dose rates unless shielded for gamma only energy compensation. Dose rates are calculated in terms of Gamma against a known standard such as Cesium 137. Shielding to get correct Gamma dose rates precludes detecting alpha.
This is exactly why you don't want random people with insufficient knowledge and cheap, uncalibrated equipment roaming around causing hysteria.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
When I was a teen the only thing I walked around with was a semi-permanent erection...
Was it ionizing?
There are houses in Colorado - all through the West, actually - that are radioactive, because they were built with concrete from gravel that contains low-level radioactive ores. That's why radon is such a problem; the radioactive gravel (with slight traces of thorium, probably) which decays, with radon as one of the decay stages. And since it's a heavy gas, it settles in basements.
LONG term exposure can cause cancers, but in much of the West, the ground itself is radioactive. And always has been.
Normally I don't agree with the strong distinction Grahm makes between name calling and ad hominem. But if we go strictly by his hierarchy:
You are an idiot.
Name calling. I WIN!
Why don't you read a book about the topic?
Ad hominem! (Implication the opponent is ignorant of the subject, an attack on "characteristics or [and] authority" without addressing the substance of the argument.) I win TWICE! B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way