Remember the story last week about the stolen radioactive waste material in Mexico? Well, it has been found, and the container was broken and it was scattered about. What does that mean? There are going to be some dead people in Mexico.These thieves are the latest Darwin Award Winners (people who are so stupid that they cause their own demise). STORY: Stolen cobalt-60 found abandoned in Mexico
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was abandoned in central Mexico, the country's nuclear safety director said. The highly radioactive material had been removed from its container, officials said, and one predicted that anyone involved in opening the box could be in grave danger of dying within days.
The truck was found abandoned Wednesday, Dec. 4 about 40 kilometers (24 miles)
from where it was stolen, and the container for the radioactive material
was found opened. The cobalt-60 pellets were left about a kilometer
(half mile) from the truck in an empty rural field, where authorities
said they were a risk only to anyone who had handled them and not the
surrounding population.
On Dec. 6, an official familiar with the case confirmed Mexican media reports that the six have been admitted to the general hospital in the city of Pachuca and may have been exposed to a stolen source of cobalt-60.
FULL STORY: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_UN_MEXICO_RADIOACTIVE_THEFT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-12-04-18-37-59
On Dec. 6, an official familiar with the case confirmed Mexican media reports that the six have been admitted to the general hospital in the city of Pachuca and may have been exposed to a stolen source of cobalt-60.
FULL STORY: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_UN_MEXICO_RADIOACTIVE_THEFT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-12-04-18-37-59
BTW- A co-worker told me that he remembered a
1970s case that mirrored this one. He said that the initial discovery of the radioactive material occurred when a truck bearing steel
reinforcing rods triggered a radiation detector in the U.S. Southwest.
The thieves had sold the container for scrap, and
the metal had been reprocessed into the rods. The U.S. wanted to fly
airborne radiation detectors over the area where the dead man was found,
but Mexico refused. The thieves had broken the CO60 container apart
with sledgehammers, spreading the radioactive
debris around their back yard.
