perihelions
7 hours ago
- "This particular example came from a 55 gallon drum of tape dispensers that the U.S. Army was about to dispose of as radioactive waste."
This is a common beach sand [0]. It illustrates something absurd, I can't quite put my finger on what, about the relation between human society and technology. No one knows anything about the physical or chemical properties of sand on the beach. No one asks; no one cares. There are no EPA surveys of beach radioactivity. No beach signs warning beachgoers "do not eat the sand", or, "this beach is known to the state of California to cause cancer". But you take one handful of the beach into a plastic box, and accidentally walk it past the wrong regulatory compliance officer, and suddenly the US Army is burying your one-handful-of-beach-sand in a 55-gallon drum packed in bentonite.
It's one lens for nature, and one lens for the anthropogenic.
snakeyjake
4 hours ago
Monazite isn't common. Well, it's somewhat common but not on beaches. Beach sand is mostly quartz.
Beach sand may or may not be radioactive, but California only requires Prop 65 warnings on things for sale.
The beach isn't for sale.
Sand that is sold in the state of California does come with the warning that it is a carcinogen because regular old silicon dioxide is a carcinogen: https://mcdn.martinmarietta.com/assets/safety-data-sheets/na...
With all things the dose makes the poison, so even if you are a beach bum you're ok but if you are an industrial worker exposed to concentrated amount of silica dust on a daily basis, you should really be informed that it is a carcinogen (among other things) and be equipped with PPE.
cduzz
4 hours ago
I don't think Silicosis is cancer as much as it's just "shredding your lungs"
It's a horrifying disease and people in affected industries should always wear PPE and likely don't.
mrguyorama
37 minutes ago
Silicosis causes cancer the same way a lot of things do: If you repeatedly damage cells over and over and over, that increases the likelihood that some of the DNA will be mis-copied, fail to be repaired, and survives the biological lottery to become a cancer cell.
toast0
2 hours ago
> Beach sand may or may not be radioactive, but California only requires Prop 65 warnings on things for sale.
They're not just on things for sale. They're also required at workspaces, businesses, rental housing. I've seen them on unpaid parking structures.
If the beach was operated by a private entity instead of by public agencies or just public access with no supervision, a warning might be needed.
InDubioProRubio
4 hours ago
Wherever the car break runoffs from the highways reach the beach, the chancer rates must be through the roof too
gnfargbl
5 hours ago
I wonder if the phenomenon you're describing is the subtle and often hidden complexity of science, and our inability as humans to recognise and handle that complexity appropriately.
In this case, we have the US Army's procedure for disposing of low-level radioactive waste. That process probably says something like "if a thing has been identified as more radioactive than THRESHOLD, then dispose of as radioactive waste." Could the process be expanded to cover cases where the radioactivity is naturally occurring? Probably, but who would then take on the liability if there were any? I'm not sure. What about a case like this, where a naturally occurring radioactive source has been transformed into some piece of equipment that nobody would reasonably expect to be radioactive. Does that need special handling, or not? If so, who is responsible -- the US Army? The manufacturer? The US EPA, even?
It all gets quite complicated, and as complexity increases the risk of a procedure not being applied consistently, or at all, rises quickly. To keep the collective human machine functional, we need to ignore the complexity, and have every radioactive thing be disposed of in the same way.
There are many instances of humans handling scientific complexity badly and coming to poor decisions as a result. A well-known one is declining nuclear fission power stations in favour of coal power stations and subsequently releasing more radioactivity into the environment than the nuclear power stations would ever have done. I'm sure there are hundreds more.
alnwlsn
4 hours ago
On the other side of this you have something like the Runit Dome, which is a nuclear test crater in the Pacific which they filed in with radioactive debris and covered in concrete. It is starting to leak from rising sea levels. But when people complain about this, they are told "oh, don't worry, there's actually far more radioactive material outside the dome" because it turns out they only managed to clean up about 1% of the contamination, and the rest of the immediate area is still covered in fallout.
xattt
5 hours ago
I visited a friend in Elliot Lake once and we stopped at a plaque on the side of the highway to read. A geologist friend came along, and he recognized the formation of the rocks under our feet as uranium-bearing. I had brought my Geiger counter along, and sure enough, these were hot too.
As you mention: no warning signs, no caution tape. Being close enough to that in any “anthropoid” setting would require, at the very least, a dosimetry badge.
I can live within that cognitive dissonance, but it’s just an interesting observation.
jjkaczor
3 hours ago
In vast sections of Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Quebec (and probably many other areas) anyone with a basement has to monitor for radon gas - it's just a normal part of the environment overall because of the geological makeup.
If you can keep a window or two open - it's not so bad - we use an smart bluetooth-connected monitor that I check daily - CO2 seems to be more of a problem than the radon.
zh3
33 minutes ago
Similar in parts of the UK (where there's granite) - there's a map of radon-prone areas on the UK Government website.
tecleandor
an hour ago
Relatively common is the cities around Madrid (Spain) mountains, and then to the west and northwest due to the granite there. Specially because lots of the houses in the area were built with that local granite.
alnwlsn
3 hours ago
Yes. Live in one of those areas and "radon mitigation systems" are common. There is a sealed lid that goes over your sump pump cover, and a fan constantly pulls air from it, which goes up a tube on the side of your house and empties near the roofline.
Joker_vD
39 minutes ago
Well, what's the alternative? Walk all over the US of A, measuring radiation at every square foot? That's prohibitively expensive even today for a rather dubious benefit: most of the terrain is not (yet) noticeably radioactive, after all.
1970-01-01
3 hours ago
>No one knows anything about the physical or chemical properties of sand on the beach. No one asks; no one cares.
sandworm101
4 hours ago
>> here are no EPA surveys of beach radioactivity. No beach signs warning beachgoers "do not eat the sand",
Perhaps there should be. The idea that the natural world is somehow safe has roots in mythology, that some creator has designed the world for us and so any "untouched" wilderness is unpolluted and free of invisible pollutions. Maybe there are beaches with dangerous levels of radiation. I am open to the concept that there exists natural places nevertheless radioactive enough to justify warnings. We certainly issue warnings for other unseen natural hazards.
zh3
44 minutes ago
A while ago now, the Oklo nuclear reactor ran - according to wikipedia [0] - for a few hundred thousand years albeit only with power levels averaging less than 100 kilowatts. It was discovered because there was a discrepancy in the amount of uranium expected from a mine and the amount they actually got.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...