alt Hacker News[flagged]
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> the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing
Doing this next to an aquifer was reckless. But doing it at all is just science.
> I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me
Wouldn't we expect to have solid data on this by now?
Also, "Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30.04 years" [1]. Less than a quarter of the original sample is still Cs-137. (The rest is mostly naturally-occuring barium.)
Aha likewise, I swear, between the ticks and the polluted water, a good amount of us are screwed. Grumman has put some nasty stuff into the ground too. I remember growing up how they mentioned it was slowly seeping into the aquifer. Took me ages to convince my parents to get a RO machine
You imply that experiment contaminated drinking, and other, water. How? Are you saying the Cs¹³⁷ leaked, and at concentration above that from fallout, say? Its γ-rays don't activate materials — I've used enough of them.
It may help alleviate your concerns somewhat to know that these scientists weren’t completely irresponsible: Cesium 137 is a gamma emitter, which means that it doesn’t make things around it radioactive (unlike most fissionable elements such as Uranium or Plutonium).
This was mentioned in one of the articles you linked!
Oh yes, the Gamma Forest is shown in Brookhaven Spectrum!
Here's what it looked like back in 1967... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s
Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.
I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.
That's not to say BNL hasn't contaminated the land, it is a Superfund site. They do a lot of medical experiments there (they invented the PET scan) but medical waste hasn't always been disposed of properly like now. They had "glass holes", a hole in the ground where you'd chuck in your contaminated labware.