[Mr. K]

I wonder if they belong to any ‘religious’ group?

[C210N]

Ebay, great place to buy antiques...

Could it be an Omega?

[MrEdd]

Yawn.

Is this going to be another idiot bureaucrats blunder off in a panic over uranium pottery glaze story?

We get that sort of incident every few years and the complete derth of information coupled with apparent governmental embarrassment makes this suspect.

[kingu]

Huh, the ‘radiation’ described in the story is .5 to 1.5mR, which last I checked indicated exposure over a year not radiation emitted... (Typical person living in the building would experience 334mR from environmental radiation over a year...)

So I have to assume the media didn’t copy down the right information from the press conference yet again.

[no-s]

It would take a warehouse full (hundreds of thousands to millions) of smoke detectors to make anything substantially dangerous. For one thing, the radiation emitted by the smoke detector can be stopped by a sheet of paper. I supposed you could extract enough from a few hundred to feed to someone and poison them or give them cancer maybe, especially if you can get it stuck inside a person.

OTOH you can use the material to make sensitive instruments, like neutron diffractometers & scintillators & such. This is actually quite fun. But don't do it where you live. Get a lab with a fume hood and other safety gear because you're going to need some strong acid to do it right and accidents with strong acids are unpleasant for the unprepared.

[bgill]

What mosque do they attend?

[freedomlover]

[Brother Cracker]