The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiânia accident where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of radiation poisoning, including a six year old.
My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended up in the scrap metal stream.
> It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.
Is it even possible to clean this up, if true?
Edit: You can read about one such cleanup after the incident linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...
There was also a famous case in the 80s where a scrapyard in Mexico sent some steel contaminated with Cobalt-60 to a foundry where it was melted down into rebar. It was detected when a truck transporting rebar to a construction site took a wrong turn and ended up at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it triggered contamination alarms. By that point, the rebar had been used in a whole bunch of construction that had to get torn down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...
trebligdivad•1h ago
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioacti...