If something is radioactive then a Geiger counter will tell you at a distance, it'll even triangulate it.

Asbestos? It can be everywhere and the only way to know is to collect samples, pay $100 a piece to a lab to do phase contrast microscopy and wait.

Then do it again the next time you find something suspicious.

And once you've cleaned it out..well hope your handling was good coz who knows if you got it all - without collecting a lot of samples and testing again.

My house has a few asbestos pieces, and in digging up the yard I've pulled a huge amount of asbestos fiber cement from cheap renovations by previous owners - the stuff was about 10 cm below the surface.

If you ignore the health effects, asbestos is a fucking brilliant material, strong(if used with a binder) exceptionally fireproof, UV stable and fairly inert.

Why _wouldn't_ you use it? To use modern parlance; only melts wouldn't use it, thats who (this message brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor...)

The problem is that it still kills now[1]. Because its a time bomb, with a dwell time of well over 10-20 years, its very lard to pin point the cause.

The only way that its _stopped_ being put into building materials is through regulation. The problem now for us, especailly in the UK is the power of regulation is being ablated through incompetence, funding cuts and a concerted effort by those who stand to benefit from a weakened regulatory system.

Most regulation is formed from the blood of victims. We may not _like_ what the regulation is, and lord knows it needs improving. But to not have it, or worst, have it and not be enforced, is a terrible state of affairs.

[1]https://neu.org.uk/latest/library/what-real-risk-asbestos-sc...

I lost my father when I was 30. I thought I’d been lucky because I’d had him through my “adult” life. Now I’m 40 and have a 2-year-old son, and over these past ten years I think it’s when I would have most liked to have him — when more questions came up about what he was really like as a person, beyond his role as a father. He died at 72 from lung cancer; he had been smoking since he was 13 and never went to the doctor. I guess I was lucky after all…

https://www.reddit.com/r/DIYUK/comments/133jq4r/the_is_this_...

https://imgur.com/V1QcX7I

I’ve also just posted his great article on British Summer Time, I would have that would have been more popular;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45710093

Now, asbestosis is more common in long term exposure so it might be fine, but the idiocy of not bothering to tell me to wear a respirator and ignorance after I brought it up years later makes me disgusted. So now I have to wonder whether decades later I'll have complications without clear ways to address them.