Radioactive Metal Tissue Box Holders Pulled from NY Stores
January 13th, 2012Via: NBC:
Health officials said they’ve removed a dozen metal box tissue holders containing small amounts of radioactive material from four Bed, Bath and Beyond stores in New York.
None of the boxes were sold to the public, said the company.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission notified state health officials Tuesday that a shipment of metal box tissue holders to four Bed, Bath and Beyond stores were found to contain low levels of Cobalt-60.
Cobalt-60, a man-made product using cobalt, has been used to sterilize medical equipment and in radiation therapy for cancer patients.
The level of radiation exposure from holding the tissue box against the body for one hour would be equivalent to a chest X-ray, said state health officials.
The NRC said scrap metal containing Cobalt-60 could have inadvertently been incorporated into the product during smelting. The products arrived in a shipment from India on Dec. 27, and 220 were distributed to Bed Bath and Beyond stores nationwide.
You have got to be kidding. How did these make it through customs at the dock? Where are the rest of the 220 CASES and were any of those sold? One chest xray per hour? How many times have you fallen asleep with a box of kleenex on your chest when you are down with a really bad cold or sinus infection? or worse, with the box adjacent to your head? Co-60 is seriously nasty stuff and the scrap yard should have detected it immediately. What country shipped the scrap to India? It’s happened before and idiots even busted open the container with the cobalt in it and got lethal doses. That incident is why scrap yards in the US have radiation detectors big enough for semi-trucks to drive through.
I’m more surprised that this was discovered.Are there actually people going around to stores with geiger counters?
I’m not surprised by this in the least. There have been numerous reports of metal recycling in India, where they accidentally or intentionally dumping radioactive materials into the same smelting rigs with other metals.
Here’s a 2009 story on exactly this. I know there were American outlets carrying the story too, but they didn’t play for long. It was a quick mention.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,607840,00.html
Most likely they are getting these by the container full, and dumping the whole mess in to melt. I wouldn’t be surprised if the source was (wait for it) American companies.
It’s expensive here to dispose of radioactive materials. Large scale recycling companies fill up huge shipping containers, generally sorted by material type. It would be easy to dispose of undesirable wastes in such a way.
When it gets to the offshore plants, they don’t really care what’s in there. Most of the undesirable stuff burns off, emitted into the atmosphere. That would be paints, paper stickers, plastics, etc. For something cheap, like a stamped tin tissue holder, the metal doesn’t really need to be all that great. Unfortunately, as you’ll notice in the Spiegel story, we’re not talking about just a couple isolated cases. We’re talking about tons of metal.
You and I both know perfectly well that the Indian company wouldn’t just say “oh shit, it’s radioactive, we have to dispose of it properly.” Nope, they just look at it as a refused shipment, and they ship it right back out to a new destination.
Beyond the radioactive concerns, you have to realize that it means these metals are not what they are being sold as. If it was used in constructing a building, it risks collapse because that “steel beam” was really “some steel and other assorted materials”. Notice they mention steel cables, and valve housings. Think plumbing works. Radiated public water supplies. If it wasn’t detected immediately, it could take an awful long time to find where the source is.
I’ve been considering getting a good multi-purpose alpha/beta/gamma/x-ray detector. They’re a bit pricy, but what’s my life worth? For all you know, the frame of your bed, metal parts in your car, or other seemingly safe things may be hot. The incident in Japan has drive up prices, and made supplies a bit more scarce.
Then again, do you really want to know? What if many seemingly innocent things in your home are really hot? What do you do? Sell them to an innocent victim? Pay a fortune to get rid of your radioactive waste?
Everythings copascetic folks, no worries.
http://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets%5CMgmt%5COIG_11-28_Jan11.pdf
I think they’d rather humiliate humans at the airport than give two shents about what comes through as cargo.
jwsmythe- well said.
Metal recycling for surgical use 🙂
There is a lot of really top quality metal used in labs and other atomic projects that could find its way back into people.
Its really, really good quality metal, just a tiny bit radioactive.
As for a good detector, they seem to start at $400-500?
Metal Tissue Box holders from Bed, Bath and Beyond?
I am more surprised this product exists. I see the “hipster elimination plan” is going smoothly.
Here’s one I ran across back in the day (2001). I’m surprised this isn’t more widely known among the ‘alternative’ crowd:
Nuclear Waste Recyclers Target Consumer Products
Orthodontists could soon be giving their patients more
than they bargained for with their brand new braces: a mouthful of
radioactive waste.
Under a Department of Energy (news – web sites) plan, braces aren’t the only
product which could contain radioactive waste. Zippers, lawn chairs, hip
replacements and countless other consumer products could include trace
amounts of waste taken from nuclear reactors or weapons complexes and
recycled into scrap metal.
The Department of Energy (DOE) sees the recycling as a way to clean up waste
at decommissioned nuclear plants and weapons facilities, but environmental
groups call the idea ridiculous.
http://mailman.mcmaster.ca/mailman/private/cdn-nucl-l/0109.gz/msg00002.html
@Ahuxley , ya, I was seeing them around $300 to $600.
One of the thing I noticed was that there are a lot of places selling such detectors with very little supporting information. Take a look at eBay. There are “radiation” detectors. If you read closely, they’re for RF (radio frequency). They’d find a Mr. Microphone in the next room, before they’d find a chunk of uranium in your lap.
Some that are legit only do specific types. The CD (Civil Defense) meters that are being sold appear to only read gamma radiation, and they generally only detect high levels, such as a nuclear bomb would emit after it detonates. It’d be useful to know what buildings, survivors, or vehicles are hot, but not necessarily catch this lower level radiation.
If I get one, I’d definitely want it to do alpha/beta/gamma/x-ray. They’re all potentially harmful, and impossible to detect with our sense until it’s too late.
I’ve heard 2nd hand that grocery stores test fairly hot, because much of the food that is sold is irradiated. In reading the Wikipedia page on “Food irradiation”, it would seem to be very possible. Apparently food stuffs can be radiated at their place of origin, and sold regardless of the laws in the destination country. Next time you’re at the grocery store, take a careful look at the signs in the produce area, and packaging. Most food here in the US is not sourced from the US. While the country of origin may have rules regulating the radiation, that doesn’t necessarily to mean that the devices were recently tested and calibrated correctly.
Mr. Joe Farmer may know that if he passes his produce through this box that he bought 20 years ago, the food doesn’t spoil before it’s sold. Who’s to say it has been working properly the whole time.
It all feels like the “atomic age” stuff, where people wanted to use radiation for anything and everything, from the shoe-fitting fluoroscope (outlawed years ago in the US) to nuclear powered cars (the Ford Nucleon is one).
No kids, sucking on a uranium lollypop isn’t safe, but using ionizing radiation on your food is? Hmmm..
Reminds me of something that happened some 20 years ago. A hospital in Texas had a Cobalt 60 machine. It was basically a device that held a piece of highly radioactive Cobalt 60 along with a mechanism for opening a shielded window which would then expose selected parts of a patient’s body to limited doses of radiation exposure for therapeutic purposes. To make a long story short, eventually the machine was sold to a clinic and then to an individual physician. When the physician upgraded to a newer system, the Cobalt 60 machine (with the Cobalt 60 source still inside) was sold for scrap and ended up in Mexico where several individuals ended up with lethal and sub-lethal exposure to the Cobalt 60 at a scrapyard. At some point, the steel from the machine ended up being smelted (now back in the U.S.), along with the Cobalt 60 and one of the end products was steel reinforcement rods (rebar). Here is where the story gets interesting. Some of the rebar was shipped to a nuclear power plant to be used in construction at the facility. Since all incoming and outgoing traffic at the plant was monitored for radioactivity, an alarm went off when the load of rebar entered the facility. This prompted an investigation which eventually led back to the scrapping of the Cobalt 60 machine at the scrapyard in Mexico. Had the rebar not gone to a nuclear power plant, most or all of smelted steel would likely have ended up in consumer products, exposing untold innocent people to lethal levels of radiation exposure. Such things happen and will continue to happen in spite of all our human plans and intervention.