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Grand Canyon tourists exposed for years to radiation in museum building, safety manager says
For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
Although federal officials learned last year that the 5-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park's safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.
In a rogue email sent to all Park Service employees on Feb. 4, Elston "Swede" Stephenson — the safety, health and wellness manager — described the alleged cover-up as "a top management failure" and warned of possible health consequences.
[...] 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.
Also at NPR.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @04:27AM (9 children)
What a wonderful world you must live in, where the employees get to keep their job for years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 22 2019, @04:35AM (8 children)
We like to call it the real one. Most people leave their jobs by choice for pastures they perceive as greener before then but that's their choice. Most jobs can still be held for as long as you care to hold them, though the tech industry is generally not within the set of "most".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @04:56AM (7 children)
Do all of them involve radioactive containers nearby? If so, those jobs may be actually a large scale scientific study.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday February 22 2019, @05:27AM (6 children)
If the container is made of a huge variety of organic material (at least, carbon 14), most stone (uranium and thorium plus decay products), most metals (same as stone plus some radioactive isotopes of various elemental constituents of the alloys), exposed to sunlight or cosmic rays (various radioactive isotopes are created by interaction with sunlight and cosmic rays, that's where all that carbon 14 and potassium 40 came from in the first place), dyed (carbon 14 and various other radioactive isotopes), has a biofilm on it (even if it didn't start with carbon 14, bacteria and algae will quickly add it to the surface) or any sort of indoors human-produced dust (carbon 14 and potassium 40), exposed to the various human-created radioactive waste sources of the past 75 years, then it is radioactive. Dose is what makes the poison, not the mere fact that something is radioactive.
So yes, if you work a job that has containers nearby, then you work at a job that has radioactive containers nearby. Sure, a bucket of uranium ore is somewhat more radioactive than most of these things, but you didn't make that distinction.
Incidentally, "study" indicates more than just doing stuff. Humans and their evolutionary ancestors have been exposed to radioactive materials for millions of years, including copious amounts of uranium ore (wasn't like there was some agency back then to keep it from happening). I doubt anybody was looking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @06:44AM (4 children)
If you can prove sunlight* can create radioactive isotopes you are in for a Nobel price.
*
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday February 22 2019, @08:02AM
Easy: Just accelerate the matter so it moves at sufficiently high relativistic speed towards the sun. Thanks to the Doppler effect, it will see the sunlight as hard gamma radiation, which, by making the speed high enough, can be made hard enough to cause nuclear reactions, which may result in activation of the nuclei.
Where's my Nobel prize? ;-)
Oh wait, you said Nobel price — damn, does it mean I have to pay now? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 22 2019, @01:35PM (2 children)
[...]
But also including gamma rays from solar flares. That's sunlight too. I however was in error in that higher solar activity despite the increase in solar radiation results in lower production of atmospheric radioactive isotopes due to a decline in cosmic rays. Such isotopes would include carbon 14, beryllium 10, and chlorine 36, but not include potassium 40 which comes from the decay chain of uranium and thorium,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2019, @10:22AM (1 child)
Quite a good number of errors for somebody arguing from pedantic positions like "but you didn't make that distinction."
No, sunlight is light. You refer to gamma rays as radiation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 23 2019, @01:54PM
And none of them were relevant. Nor quite that "good" a number either.
And those gamma rays. Not everything gets through the atmosphere. I notice the previous AC claimed sunlight was EM, now another AC is claiming something far more restricted (and does "light" include UV and IR BTW)?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday February 22 2019, @08:55AM
Let me break the news to you: It's you who is a radioactive container. Run everyone... oh wait... run harder...