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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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @03:39PM (1 child)
You can note anything you want, but we're not discussing recently-purified 238U. Any uranium ore that hasn't been purified also contains the whole chain of decay products, in equilibrium proportions corresponding to their half-lives.
In equilibrium, for every α decay from 238U to 234Th, there's 7 additional α decays and 6 β− decays down the chain to 206Pb.
(Even for 238U that has been purified in human history, and thus is far from equilibrium, the first two β− decays are going to happen essentially at once, since 234Th and 234Pa have t½ of 24 days and 70 seconds respectively.)
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday February 22 2019, @07:45PM
Sure, but there won't be very much of those in the sample since they do have a short half life. Note that beta isn't really that much of a problem either except at very high levels. Most of the decays in the chain are alpha. There are no gamma emissions in the decay chain to lead.A solid chunk of something that beta decays with a short to medium half-life might be a problem, but that's not the case here.
As a gauge of relative danger, tritium lights utilize the beta decay of tritium to power their glow and the thick plastic is enough to make them safe.