Where did they find radioactive wood?

[jeffreythree]

Chernobyl?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/italylithuaniaenergyenvironmentnuclear

[Chico]

Reckon they were easy to find at night ;D
Chico

[Warbird]

Wow.  I wonder if this story will hit the mainstream media?

[Cedarman]

I thought cesium137 gave off high energy gamma rays.  A scintillator should be able to tell exactly how radioactive those pellets were.  If there was much on a truck it would make a gamma ray detector sing like a spring robin.

[sawdust]

Why burn them?
You could just let them sit in the wood stove!  :D

[Ron Wenrich]

My guess would be there was some type of cross contamination.  Probably a truck or railcar that hauled some type of radioactive waste was also used to haul the pellets. 

I know our trees didn't glow after Three Mile Island.   ;)  Although they did throw out the farmer's milk as a precaution.

[Modat22]

aren't brazil nuts high in selenium naturally? which is also radioactive?

[Warbird]

That would explain why they gave my tummy that nice warm feeling?  Or maybe it was the single malt scotch...   

[Modat22]

That would explain why they gave my tummy that nice warm feeling?  Or maybe it was the single malt scotch...   

Heh I found this out watching an episode of House MD and I looked it up and found it was true. There isn't alot of selenium in a brazil nut but but there is a little  :D

[jim king]

Here is what the radio active Brazil nut shells look like when turned on a lathe.  The wood is Black Ipe.  I sold a few thousand to a woodworking chain in the States and they did bring up the radio active problem.  I told them they would be able to see after dark and they would not have any more worms.

[SwampDonkey]

 :D :D or glow worms.


Nice turning. 

[baronthered]

I could describe some of the things the stuff could be from but I'll snag a Wiki article that should have some usefull info on it. just a sec:

here we go More info on Cesium 137 than youll ever need.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesium_137

Some excerpts that condense tha material more than I would be able to.

The photon energy of Ba-137m is 662 keV. These photons can be used in food irradiation, or in radiotherapy of cancers. Cs-137 is not widely used for industrial radiography because it is chemically unstable. For example, its salts are easily soluble in water which complicates safe handling. Cobalt-60 is preferred for radiography, as it is a chemically stable metal offering higher gamma energies and higher activities. Cs-137 can be found in some moisture and density gauges, flow meters, and other sensor equipment.


Small amounts of Cs-134 and Cs-137 were released into the environment during nuclear weapon tests and some nuclear accidents, most notably the Chernobyl disaster. As of 2005, Cs-137 is the principal source of radiation in the zone of alienation around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Together with caesium-134, iodine-131, and strontium-90, it was among the isotopes with greatest health impact distributed by the reactor explosion.

The mean contamination of Cs-137 in Germany after Chernobyl was 2000-4000Bq/m², some parts in the south even 10 times higher. This corresponds to a contamination of 1mg of Cs-137 per square kilometer or around 500g Cs-137 deposited all over Germany.

Biological behavior of Cs-137 is similar to potassium. After entering the organism, all caesium gets more or less uniformly distributed through the body, with higher concentration in muscle tissue and lower in bones. The biological half-life of caesium is short at 70 days [3].

Improper handling of Cs-137 sources can lead to release of the isotope and radiation contamination and injuries. Perhaps the best known case is the Goiânia accident, when a radiation therapy machine from an abandoned clinic in Goiânia, Brazil, was scavenged and the glowing caesium salt sold to curious buyers. Metallic caesium sources can be also accidentally mixed with scrap metal, resulting in production of contaminated steel;[4] a notable example is the case from 1998, when Recycler Acerinox in Cadiz, Spain accidentally melted a source.[2] In 2009, a Chinese demolition company in north-western Shaanxi province did not follow enviromental standards, causing some Cs-137 from a measuring instrument to be melted down with other pieces of scrap into slag.

I have handled the stuff in the past doing cleanup and stuff. Relativley speaking it's like watching for bees when your in gator country. I have a couple of Geiger counters and those are always fun to bring out during parties and measure the amount of radiation in things folks are wearing driving or eating with. Truthfully the background radiation we live with every day is more than we'll ever produce with power stations or bombs the only difference is the sources are concentrated in bombs and powerstations. Did you know coal fired power plants send more radioactive elements into the environment that a nuclear power station?

[Cedarman]

When I worked in the oil industry, we used a 1.5 curie as a source of high energy gamma rays to use in downhole in the measuring of the density of the rock.  The cesium was contained in small ceramic capsules inside a small capsule inside a bigger capsule kept in a 100 pound lead shield during transport.  One source was dropped down a well near Hazard Ky and the was another problem near Accident Maryland. Go figure.  One of the places it was drilled up and contaminated a lot of surface area with Cs137 in the drilling mud. .  It's nasty stuff.