131–140 of 277 posts
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My heart sank when you mentioned a BLE-enabled pacemaker. Has technology gone too far? /s
It sounds like the bluetooth functionality is only there for telemetry.
eliminating RF/BLE bullshit from talking to the pacemaker.
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Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c... There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.
It was a thing in the US too. My favorite coffee shop in the suburbs of Chicago got a shipment of tables that had contaminated metal from this incident. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/02/Radioactive-tables-r...
Otherwise, Mexico (my country) being Mexico, I am sure nobody would have known anything about it. Specially during that time when we had a "soft dictatorship" that buried all bad things under the ground (not that nowadays is that much different...)
Anyway, thanks for the read, I have always found very interesting to know the extent of the contamination.
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The absolutely arrogance to assume a keyboard switch and a pace maker are anywhere near the same thing…
Indeed, the keyboard switch people have to produce a device that's manufacturable at scale for pennies per unit, and can be fitted in unforgiving environments by the untrained.
If it is a dead body and it is being cremated you take it out so it doesn't explode in the crematorium. I say this as a former funeral director who had to remove them.
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A number don't. But as far as the number that needs some kind of pacemaker tune-up or revision during that time-- it's a really big share.
If battery life doesn't improve much, I don't die prematurely, and I continue to materially benefit from having an implant, I personally could be realistically looking at 3 replacement devices and at least one lead replacement over the years. In the unlikely event that I suffer from ventricle enlargement long term, I'd need two more leads installed as well.
> I personally could be realistically looking at 3 replacement devices and at least one lead replacement over the years. In the unlikely event that I suffer from ventricle enlargement long term, I'd need two more leads installed as well.
This is the point I'm making, though: realistically, you have a high chance of needing 2 additional procedures for non-battery reasons, which are likely good times to replace the device, too.
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Ooh, the Cobalt-60 incident in Mexico is also pretty crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c... There were houses built of contaminated rebar! The story gets crazier the more you read about it.
There were several incidents like this, ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide... A caesium-137 source from an industrial sensor has been lost and ended up inside a concrete wall of an apartment building; four people died from it.
Lia was two RTGs, which the URSS used quite a lot, and which regularly got lost or into accidents e.g. two degraded RTGs were found in the north of russia in 2003, one on the Cape of Navarin and one near Kola Bay, and two got dropped by a helo transporting them in 2004.
Though from the Plainly Difficult channel, I feel like the most frequent radiological accidents aren't even orphan sources but either misused / defective radiological devices (à la Therac 25), or commercial irradiation facilities whose opsec degrades until fatal exposure occurs after a jam.
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RTGs have been around since the 50's and 60's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... For example Russia used them to power lighthouses in super remote parts of their coast. Space probes, mars rovers, etc. use them too.
Yes, there's a Russian movie with a guy that is guarding a weather station in the North and playing games all day. He somehow gets into a conflict with his supervisor, dissasembles a RTG beacon and uses the Strontium 90 to poison his supervisor's dried fish supply. They both get irradiated and the military cleans up the mess. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1588875/ Only the Soviets were daft enough to build RTGs using St…
The United States did too.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory technical report "Strontium-90 Heat Sources"
https://technicalreports.ornl.gov/1971/3445605716035.pdf
Introduction
Compact electrical generators powered by heat from radioisotopes have been under development in the United States since the early 1950s for space, marine, and terrestrial uses. Essentially all the generators developed for marine and terrestrial uses have been powered by 90 Sr. This report summarizes the development work done by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Hanford Atomic Products Operation, and Martin Company, Nuclear Division, which led to the production of 90 Sr heat sources for use in the generators.
It was a natural choice since strontium 90 is an inevitable byproduct of operating any fission reactor, and was readily available as a coproduct from weapons plutonium production reactors. Making better RTG isotopes like plutonium 238 required additional infrastructure.
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RTGs have been around since the 50's and 60's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... For example Russia used them to power lighthouses in super remote parts of their coast. Space probes, mars rovers, etc. use them too.
Absolutely. And not without incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident Short summary: Soviet engineers installed RTG powered radio relays to support the construction of a damn in Georgia. Political instability lead to the abandonment of the RTGs. Someone scavenged the generators and removed the radioactive cores from them. Two of the radioactive sources were discovered by men gathering firewoo…