@Weng said in The Grand Canyon is a hot spot for tourists!:
@mott555 said in The Grand Canyon is a hot spot for tourists!:
@Lorne-Kates said in The Grand Canyon is a hot spot for tourists!:
Noticeably radioactive, not dangerously radioactive.
Well the article mentions this:
Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission measures radiation contamination in millisieverts per hour or per year. According to Stephenson, close exposures to the uranium buckets could have exposed adults to 400 times the health limit — and children to 4,000 times what is considered safe.
Which seems impossible. I wonder if someone somewhere used the stats for the wrong radioactive element when writing this article.
I kicked the article over to my buddy who works in nuclear diplomacy (his background is in nuclear safety). Soon as he's off work he'll read it and give me the "this is a stupid overreaction" or "what the fuck" distillation.
"From a hazard standpoint this is a stupid overreaction and all the figures in the article are just wrong. I anticipate I'll be wearing my safety hat and dealing with it within the next 24 hours. I also wouldn't be surprised if we're cleaning up that damned mine now because someone threw rocks into it and contaminated it"