Officials from Indonesia’s nuclear energy regulatory agency have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology, or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed.
Investigators think that radioactive dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap metal containing cesium-137. “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind,” said Bara Khrishna Hasibuan, a senior adviser to Indonesia’s Ministry of Food Affairs, at a Sept. 30 press conference.
Scrap metal was commonly used as a raw material by PMT, according to the Indonesian outlet Antara News. It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.
They should repeat “inadvertently” a third time, then i could start believing it.
All of this from a steel plant’s smoke stack radioactive plume, from the melting down of medical equipment? …I’m still suspicious of the containers themselves. But, that’s just me.
It’s a reasonable explanation.
Cesium is highly radioactive, and the sensors are very sensitive.
When Iceland had the Huefaleflefthaflafla volcano outbreak, I could smell the sulphur from my house. In Norway. More than 1500 km / 900 miles across half the atlantic ocean.
So radioactive smoke being detectable 1.5 miles away makes sense to me.
Eyjafjallajökull
Roughly pronounced: AY-yuh-FYAT-la-YUH-kuh-dl
Felt like every tour guide was drilling this into us during our five day stay there.
I suppose that both the cloves and shrimp have been traced to the same geographic area it stands to reason that this is indeed correct. It’s just so strange and the spices contamination isn’t as fully explained. Maybe if I saw a map the plume theory would make more sense. But at that rate it seems the whole island may be experiencing this issue which is very unfortunate.
Na na na na na Shrimp Man! And Prawn the exoskeletoned wonder!
This is totally a kaiju-causing event and I expect the results looking like a giant guy in a big costume trying to hug things, but the eye holes are too small and keeps missing.
IF it’s a salt, THEN it could easily be dissolved into whatever dissolves that salt ( like, you know, water ).
Scrap gets rained on, & salts washed away, going into the waterways…
I’m not saying that is what happened, this time, but I am saying that if they’re using radioactive cesium salt, then they’re creating extra risk, that wouldn’t be the case if they were using a solid pellet of metal.
( this, obviously, applies to the spent fuel from any thorium-salt nuclear reactor, too: salts dissolve! Containment that is absolutely proof against that, for the entire required duration, … may not be possible, for some long-duration isotopes, right? )
That it isn’t an international-criminal-law offense to have such materials immediately taken to radioactive-waste-management, … is … morally-criminal.
Allowing it to just happen, when normal people aren’t competent to either recognize, or deal-with, nuclear-radiation…
Typical rejection-of-accountability & rejection-of-responsibility, though, of authority, isn’t it?
Contemptible.
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Not every salt is easily soluble in water. Salt in a chemical sense is a compound made up of multiple ions. Marble and pretty much all rocks/minerals are also salts in a chemical sense and you don’t see our mountains being washed away by one rainfall. So saying they use a thorium salt is not in itself a problem, depending on which salt they use.
I couldn’t find any definitive answer, but from what I found on Wikipedia is that they mostly use Thorium dioxide at the moment, which is practically insoluble in water and alkaline, by slightly soluble in acids.
So no, salts don’t all dissolve. It completely depends on the specific salt and its properties.
But yeah, nuclear industry in general is pretty hands off with regard to accountability and taking care of the long time effects.
I knew, when writing, that some salts are functionally insoluable ( lithium-fluoride, I’d read, pretty-much doesn’t dissolve in water ).
I’d hoped that I’d phrased it carefully-enough, but obviously didn’t.
Definitely thank you for identifying that the salt specific to thorium-salt reactors isn’t at room temperature going to be easily dissolveable into our environment…
but … I’ve also learned that hot-chemistry can be drastically different from room-temperature chemistry, & after all the … gaslighting … of various industries, through the past decades…
I want systematic & thorough testing to see what that salt can react with, under its entire temperature & pressure regime, before anybody signs-off on it.
“hands off” is a very polite way of saying it, Hoomin…
& I’d never thought of marble as a salt, you got me on that point!
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