This Apartment was HOW Radioactive? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Brew

[bami]

Just call the wall-embedded cesium-137 container a "negative ion air purifier" and charge extra $100 per month in rent.

[Merennulli]

That is absolutely terrifying. It reminds me of the Co60 contamination in Mexico where Co60 from a therapy unit was just thrown into a junkyard and melted down with steel to become rebar used in buildings all over Mexico and the US. That one they found out because a truck hauling the rebar took a wrong turn and passed through Los Alamos National Laboratory, setting off their detectors.

[BigTylt]

"Two--WHAT?"

Off to a great start already...

[Zleet]

I live in Western Australia, it's a really, really big place to lose a cesium capsule! That road is 1400Km of mostly nothing and they did a really good job to find it so quickly.

[darthkarl]

There was one case of a lost nuclear source getting added to scrap metal at a furnace, it contaminated tons of steel construction material. was discovered by complete accident when a lost truck transporting finished goods used the service road of a nuclear power plant to turn round in. The gate radiation sensors went haywire so the security guards stopped the truck and a big investigation started that found enormous amounts of contaminated material.

[zetsumeinaito]

Yep, the thing in the aquarium is indeed a tardigrade.

[blahorgaslisk]

That hunt for the radioactive material in Australia was on the news here in Sweden. I remember that there were daily reports even if they usually could be shortened to "Still not found" There was also information about the search methods and the areas searched. When it was finally found and you got to see just how small it was it really felt scary. If that little is dangerous enough to cause that much chaos then I don't want to think of how bad it could be if someone was mad enough to spread radioactive materials willingly. Some things are scary when you know more about them.

[ND]

The “Into the Shadows” channel has a post about another radioactive source loss named “Cobalt-60 Rods: Totally Silent, Totally Deadly”.

[barefootalien]

How I always explain cancer's statistical nature to laypeople is with skin cancer.

Any given photon of UV (or higher) light is capable of damaging a strand of DNA in the cell it hits, with a very small chance of doing so.

Your cells do repair that damage fairly quickly, and usually correctly, but occasionally the cellular machinery makes a mistake and causes a mutation.

It takes at least _three_ specific mutations in a single cell to cause cancer.

So you have a photon of ionizing EM radiation coming into your body, with a very small chance of hitting a DNA strand, then a very small chance of breaking that strand, then a very small chance that it gets repaired incorrectly, then a very small chance that the resulting mutation is one of the specific ones that can cause cancer. Then another photon enters your body and has all those very small chances _and_ a very small chance to even hit the same cell at all, and the chances are _ridiculously_ small.

Even so, a total shut-in who lives in a lead bunker all their lives, could wave a hand through a single beam of sunlight once in their entire life, and three of those quadrillions of photons could hit exactly the right strands of DNA to cause cancer. It's _extremely_ unlikely, but still possible.

But compare that to someone who has a hobby of sunbathing or swimming without sunscreen, soaking in millions of quadrillions of UV photons in their lifetime, and that tiny chance becomes not-so-tiny, closer to a roll of the dice. _And yet_ an old leathery beach babe who's spent thousands and thousands of hours sunbathing in her life could absolutely _never_ get skin cancer.

So it's just luck of the draw. It isn't like "if you soak in enough sun, you get skin cancer", it's just probability and how much risk you're willing to accept.

For me, personally, going swimming fully clothed from neck to wrists to ankles, is too high a price to pay for the amount of risk mitigation it provides. So is getting out of the pool every 15 minutes to reapply sunscreen. But spraying it on before I go feels about right. My sister-in-law is one of the "swim fully clothed" ones, and that's fine, too. She's probably less likely to get skin cancer than me, but that's our individual choices to make.

[seymourpro]

My radiochemistry prof at uni recounted the incident of some Cobalt60 going missing in storage in Japan. It had been sold for making high tensile re-bar for a tower block and the whole block was slightly radioactive. The decision was to leave it in situ as the concrete protected the people from the radiation. Health monitoring was put in place and because of this monitoring the residents lived longer lives than their neighbours because every other disease was detected early enough to be curable.

[bulwinkle]

The incident that makes me laugh occurred early in the current Ukrainian conflict was the case of the Russian general who made his HQ at the Chernobyl power plant despite strong advice that it was dangerous. He had his men dig trenches in the irritated soil. Needless to say he and many of his men never survived long enough to see action in the conflict. A real candidate for a Darwin Award.

[briankale]

Sorry to hear about your father, I lost my mother a similar way, suddenly found already stage 4 colon cancer.. Just having a comfortable quality of life won out over trying to endure the treatments.. Cancer is wack.

[sundoga]

I live in Western Australia. When that capsule was lost, the entire state went on a high state of alert, and anyone travelling on that highway was stopped and scanned. Specialized detection equipment was used from the nuclear medicine lab in one of our hospitals and flown in from the Eastern States. All hands on deck alerts were sent for Police, volunteer firefighters and other specialists. They just did not stop until that vial was found - and of course, they did.

[Tasarran]

Gotta love the label on the Cobalt-60... "DROP AND RUN"

[zacharytaylor]

New kyle hill nuclear vid dropped btw. Its about a glass nuclear reactor simulator and whats left of nuclear in Germany. Id love to see your take on it.

[Astinsan]

17:28 you gotta also take in to account that when someone gets sick.. they sleep it off.. its a death trap

[AlainChenard-uiwp]

Tyler, I work with x-rays and when we do Radiation surveys, our radiation meter can measure in Sv/h or R/h. We use R/h because most x-ray techs will tell you it’s the most comprehensive to use. If we measure around 300 to 500 microR/h (sorry I don’t have the mu sign) this becomes very dangerous. Normal for an X-ray scanner is between 0 up to 250 microR/h over that we have to find a way to lower it down such as changing curtains (lead induced) sometimes when curtains get old they need a change…

[KamiNoBaka]

The critter in Brew's tank is a giant tardigrade. Either that or Brew and the other characters on the channel are very tiny. Either way it's a Tardigrade.

[mikefochtman]

Guess I'm showing my age, when I went through school, we called the twin peaks of the fission product yield curves, the 'Mae West" curve, not Dolly Parton. lol

[orchdork]

I think you were right that the creature is a tardigrade. I imagine it was mentioned when this channel first started, but I don't care enough to put on the effort to find out 😅

I actually remember when this channel became popular and the controversy that was caused. It is part of a collection of other channels that collaborate and have a similar presentation style. If I'm remembering correctly, the controversy was that this collection of channels is technically run by a corporation, which people felt had been intentionally hidden in order to make it seem like individual people had decided to collaborate on this project. I didn't look into it much at the time, so idk. It's interesting to see one of the channels now all these years later.