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Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

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Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#81

Post by dsfyu404ed »

your-nanny wrote: post #78
sandwall wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roentgens are historical units of exposure, it's simply what a lot of older meters read. Roentgens can be assumed to safely equal RADs (although they don't, conversion is less than 1 for kV), the historical unit for "Radiation Absorbed Dose." For photons this would be equal to REM "Radiation Equivalent Man." All old units; conversion to S.I., 100 rad = 1 Gray (J/Kg), 100 rem = 1 Sievert. Essentially, who ever wrote t…

assuming inhalation if dust was not an issue..

5gal buckets are designed to be handled by all manner of people who don't have enough time to give a crap and still get to their destination without leaking.

A properly sealed 5gal bucket will remain air tight even if it's bouncing around inside a tote in the bed of a truck on rural gravel roads for ~10mo (the tote flooded at some point but the bucket wound up dry).

Sitting in a cabinet the risk of dust making it out of the bucket would have been nonexistent so long as the lid was on it.

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#82

Post by yesenadam »

lostlogin wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium is toxic too, but I bet that was depleted uranium, which isn't all that radioactive and the bigger danger is its regular toxicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

Can any of the down voters add a comment? Is this inaccurate?

I didn't downvote, but I was surprised to read in that link that "DU used in US munitions has 60% of the radioactivity of natural uranium". I knew already that the US fired a lot of it at Iraqis not long ago and it's still killing them. That wiki page links to this 2013 story:

"Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. ..."My colleagues and I have all noticed an increase in Fallujah of congenital malformations, sterility, and infertility," he said. ... the Fallujah health crisis represented "the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied". ... Doctors in Fallujah are continuing to witness the aforementioned steep rise in severe congenital birth defects, including children being born with two heads, children born with only one eye, multiple tumours, disfiguring facial and body deformities, and complex nervous system problems. Today in Fallujah,...many families are too scared to have children..."

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/03/201331517...

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#83

Post by dwighttk »

They've issued a correction clarifying that it is Uranium ore, not straight Uranium.

This paragraph didn't make sense to me: "Photos provided to the newspaper by Stephenson show technicians arriving in June 2018 to take away the buckets of uranium ore. The technicians reportedly dumped the buckets at an old uranium mine 2 miles away, then for some reason brought the buckets back to the building."

I'm guessing they mean "dumped" the contents of "the buckets"

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#84

Post by En_gr_Student »

The f*ed up part is the impact on the fetus. The dosage level before harm or death for kids is 10x smaller than for adults. For babies in the womb it is way smaller than that.

These folks may have covered up something that resulted in the miscarriage, or birth defects of the child of any pregnant woman who stood near that closet for just a few minutes.

I think the folks who covered it up for 8 months, or the morons who (threw the rocks in a hole and brought the nuclear-contaminated buckets back) should lose all their power and position. That is an amazingly bad decision.

Lucky thing some kid walked around with a geiger counter. He recorded the levels, so the numbers that officials are hiding, he knows them. His counter can be tested and certified by a decent national lab, and the exact and calibrated level of the radiation determined. And those contaminated buckets tell something about the material that was in them.

Ore shmore. It is a radioactive substance that gives off dangerous levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, as well as nuclear byproducts like radon and other gaseous nuclear isotopes.

Get more than the "top paragraph summary" that NPR did on the original AZ Central article by reading it in its entirety.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2019/02/2...

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#85

Post by austincheney »

adrianN wrote: post #75
austincheney wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, your source says the opposite. > Toxic metals sometimes imitate the action of an essential element in the body, interfering with the metabolic process resulting in illness. Many metals, particularly heavy metals are toxic Metal toxicity is the correlation between density and reactivity. Iron and manganese are limited exceptions where iron is about 84% of hemoglobin, which is about 80% of red blood cells, but i…

Gold is nearly twice as dense as Lead, but it's completely safe.

Gold is toxic if consumed regularly. The symptoms of gold poisoning are no different than other forms of metal poisoning. The primary difference between gold and uranium is that gold isn't very reactive and so it has virtually no contact toxicity. Also, some people are allergic to gold, which does manifest contact toxicity.

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#86

Post by austincheney »

crottypeter wrote: post #74
austincheney wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, your source says the opposite. > Toxic metals sometimes imitate the action of an essential element in the body, interfering with the metabolic process resulting in illness. Many metals, particularly heavy metals are toxic Metal toxicity is the correlation between density and reactivity. Iron and manganese are limited exceptions where iron is about 84% of hemoglobin, which is about 80% of red blood cells, but i…

> Weird, your source says the opposite. No, it doesn't. Your quote truncates a sentence that supports GP's point.

The remainder of that sentence does not suggest anything about density. But, I will ask your expert opinion: What makes metals toxic and what makes heavy metals more or less toxic than other metals?

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#87

Post by your-nanny »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #81
your-nanny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

assuming inhalation if dust was not an issue..

5gal buckets are designed to be handled by all manner of people who don't have enough time to give a crap and still get to their destination without leaking. A properly sealed 5gal bucket will remain air tight even if it's bouncing around inside a tote in the bed of a truck on rural gravel roads for ~10mo (the tote flooded at some point but the bucket wound up dry). Sitting in a cabinet the risk of dust making it out…

I assumed it was open so people can look at the ore

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#88

Post by mauvehaus »

dmckeon wrote: post #51
tinus_hn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do get a lot more exposure if you’re working at the museum every day though.

Note that the South Rim of GCNP is at 7,000 feet (2100m) elevation. Also, next week, Feb 26, GCNP is 100 years old.

Note also that GCNP contains all kinds of radiation sources. I was there with my wife a year ago doing some backcountry hiking.

We went in via Horseshoe Mesa. There are signs near the campground on Horseshoe Mesa warning you to stay out of areas where there was mining activity. We shoved on from there because our permit for the night was for further down rather than any concern about radiation.

More titillating is the warning in the backcountry hiking guide for the Tonto Trail from the Bright Angel Trail to the Hermit Trail:

"There is water in the bed of Horn Creek about half the time, but unfortunately it is radioactive so don't drink it unless death by thirst is the only other option. The source of the radioactivity is a deposit of high quality uranium contained within a collapsed cave system geologists call a breccia pipe." [0]

[0] https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/campsite-information....

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#89

Post by sigi45 »

saul_goodman wrote: post #58

Jeezus Cripes, way over reaction. I have Fiestaware plates that put out over 30uSv/h / 3mR/h / 9200cpm. Unrefined uranium ore puts out waaaay less that. As long as you're not sleeping with the junk under your bed or working with it next to your desk all day long you're fine. Even then, it's still less exposure than air crews that fly every day receive. No one was harmed by this.

While there is nothing to harm you, apparently, shouldn't it be still a goal for us humans to try to use materials which do not radiat at all?

How much impact does radiation has on our cancer rates we at the moment?

I mean, i would accept the risk of flying and getting a xray but i would probably try to choose my building materials differently if it would make sense.

Re: Grand Canyon Museum Had Buckets of Uranium Sitting Around for 18 Years

#90

Post by sandwall »

Spooky23 wrote: post #52
sandwall wrote: post #20

As correctly pointed out by other readers, this is a non-issue and complete overreaction. All feeding into misconceptions and irrational fear of radiation. The "safety professional" was out of his depth and clearly undereducated about the risks of radiation and uranium ore in particular. Hence, the true risk of a "dirty bomb" -- is psychological, i.e. it would be a weapon of mass disruption (not destruction), triagin…

On a purely radiation focused scale, sure. But this is a big deal, as it’s an indicator of the lack of effective management and controls surrounding it. Where did it come from? Why was it stored where it was stored? Why did employees just dump the material?

They're rocks that someone undoubtedly collected from the surrounding area. Radioactive rocks, emitting low levels of mostly self-shielded radiation. Not great, but not a disaster deserving of national news.
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