A small bar of radium is missing from a former uranium enrichment plant in southern Ohio,

[BurtWorm]

A small bar of radium is missing from a former uranium enrichment plant in southern Ohio, the U.S. Department of Energy reported Tuesday. The radioactive ingot, about the size of a medical gel capsule and stored in a glass vial, is not a health or security threat, said Laura Schachter, an agency spokeswoman. But the department is taking the loss seriously to ensure that the cleanup of the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant is not compromised, she said. The plant was used to enrich uranium for use in weapons and nuclear power plants. The building is to be turned over to USEC Inc., which is developing a new facility to concentrate uranium into isotopes for fuel. Workers discovered the radium missing Feb. 28. It had been kept in a wooden box encased with lead that was last moved in December to prepare for transport to Nevada. The bar still might be somewhere in the plant or even have been stolen, which Schachter said was unlikely. R. Gregory Evans, director of the Institute for Biosecurity at St. Louis University, said misplacing the radium raises questions about how Energy Department contractors are handling nuclear waste. "Yes, it's significant that they lost this," Evans said.

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?id=10341&lang=eng

[951-Riverside]

1. and man blew up himself in Lynn, Massachusetts

BFD! :eyes: :sarcasm:

...Oooops! I forgot to link to the story (don't want to get myself in trouble over a misunderstanding) http://wjz.com/topstories/topstories_story_074091904.html

[karlrschneider]

2. Heck, I know a guy who blew himself in Tulsa. Again.

:rofl:

[melody]

3. Somebody frisk Voinovich n/t

[MADem]

4. Oh, gee, darn, now WHERE did I put that bar of radium? Oh, tsk, tsk...

[AlCzervik]

5. that happens at my house all the time, if i'm not losing my car keys it's my

travel sized bars of radium, usually i end up finding them in my big purse.

[babylonsister]

6. I like research, so here goes... Radium:

Time to worry? Ugh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium

Radioactivity

Radium is over one million times more radioactive than the same mass of uranium. Its decay occurs in at least seven stages; the successive main products have been studied and were called radium emanation or exradio (this is radon), radium A (polonium), radium B (lead), radium C (bismuth), etc. The radon is a heavy gas and the later products are solids. These products are themselves radioactive elements, each with an atomic weight a little lower than its predecessor.

Radium loses about 1% of its activity in 25 years, being transformed into elements of lower atomic weight with lead being a final product of disintegration.

The SI unit of radioactivity is the becquerel (Bq), equal to one disintegration per second. The curie is a non-SI unit defined as that amount of radioactivity which has the same disintegration rate as 1 gram of Ra-226 (3.7 x 1010 disintegrations per second, or 37 GBq).

(edit) Precautions

Radium is highly radioactive and its decay product, radon gas, is also radioactive. Since radium is chemically similar to calcium, it has the potential to cause great harm by replacing it in bones. Inhalation, injection, ingestion or body exposure to radium can cause cancer and other disorders. Stored radium should be ventilated to prevent accumulation of radon.

Emitted energy from the decay of radium ionizes gases, affects photographic plates, causes sores on the skin, and produces many other detrimental effects.

[BurtWorm]

7. Very interesting.

Sounds like a dangerous material in any quantity.

[babylonsister]

8. No SHIT! And you brought it up!

:eyes:
But I'm glad you did. :( Sort of.

[BurtWorm]

10. It hit me that there were these two incidents at nuclear weapons plants on the same day

in the good ole US of A. This is an industry well hidden from American eyes, but it's kind of hard to hide it when something goes wrong.

(See also: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?id=10354&lang=eng and http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x422863 )

[pinniped]

9. Doc took it to use in the Flux Capacitor.

[NuttyFluffers]

11. Homer! I really wish you'd be more careful!