DescentBB

I always wondered when this would happen to one of these old radioactive medical waste shipments.

http://news.yahoo.com/un-mexico-truck-r ... 13544.html

Then I wondered what would happen once they got into the stuff if they were too stupid to know what they had.

http://news.yahoo.com/police-block-mexi ... 02180.html

Your not gonna make any friends if you start wondering :p

I love that the medical center appears to be named after Marie Curie........

On a more serious note, that stuff is inbetween and very friggin hostile to our current surroundings. I'm almost convinced that pollution will be our very undoing. It will cause rapid atmospheric and evolutionary change.

flip wrote:Your not gonna make any friends if you start wondering :p

Well, I was wondering if handling cobalt-60 would cause a person to glow blue, if that person survived that is.

Looks like the stuff is extremely dangerous to even get near, let alone handle. I figured they'd get caught when I heard about this story days ago. They said that when they found the truck, the protective casing on the equipment had been opened and the cobalt-60 pellets spread around like rice. Someone was bound to get sick very quickly if they touched it or got near the stuff, so the culprits had a 100% chance of being found.

flip wrote:On a more serious note, that stuff is inbetween and very friggin hostile to our current surroundings. I'm almost convinced that pollution will be our very undoing. It will cause rapid atmospheric and evolutionary change.

I wonder how the Mexican government was going to dispose of the cobalt-60? Do they have their own radioactive waste burial site? It's not like they can just pop it into the trash or something.

tunnelcat wrote:[I wonder how the Mexican government was going to dispose of the cobalt-60? Do they have their own radioactive waste burial site?

yes, it is called Panama.......

It's not like they can just pop it into the trash or something.

they probably do just that with tritium, phosphate and other weak isotopes.........

tunnelcat wrote:I wonder how the Mexican government was going to dispose of the cobalt-60? Do they have their own radioactive waste burial site? It's not like they can just pop it into the trash or something.

They do, and the truck was originally en route to that facility. Unfortunately, the driver was an idiot and decided to take a siesta while parked on the side of the road...which isn't exactly a bright move in Mexico, much less when you're hauling around radioactive waste. I was really surprised to learn that the thieves had gone through the considerable effort of breaking open the container, since common thought was that they were probably only interested in the truck. You don't exactly need a physics degree to know that you shouldn't screw with a big sealed vessel that has radiation symbols all over it.

Maybe they were illiterate and symbol deprived. I bet they wondered why all those pellets glowed blue and it fascinated them. Either way, they're probably good as dead.