Police and emergency hazardous material workers were searching late Monday for a box like this one provided by the Fort Worth Fire Department.
Posted on 12/04/2007 3:26:24 PM PST by VRWCmember
FORT WORTH -- A box containing depleted uranium that fell from a truck yesterday has been found. Police and emergency hazardous material workers searched an area of northwest Fort Worth overnight for the device that is used to X-ray construction welds.
A driver with a company identified as Desert Industrial X-Ray was transporting the device through the area of Blue Mound Road and U.S. 287 just before 11 p.m. when the box apparently bounced out of the back of his pickup, police said.
Lt. Kent Worley, a spokesman for the Fort Worth Fire Department, said this morning that a man found the device on a roadway and took it to his house near Meacham Airport in north Fort Worth.
The man's wife saw news reports this morning about the device and call 911, Worley said.
Worley said that the box was recovered by a fire department HazMat team, which determined that its casing was intact.
"No radiation leak occurred," Worley said. "We figured as long as it wasn't breached, it was fine.
"We were just trying to find it, but apparently this guy found it early on and he took it home."
Police and emergency hazardous material workers were searching late Monday for a box like this one provided by the Fort Worth Fire Department.
If it’s depleted, what’s the problem?................
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
Does this story smell like fish to anyone besides me?
I just posts ‘em as I sees ‘em.
It really does!
Whatever you do, don’t cross the streams.
I think it’s not being used as an X-Ray source. The article states that it is used in the welds.
This guy was a home x-ray hobbyist. See he put the uranium under his pillow, then put the on the other side of his head. He checks to see if the aliens have inserted brain probes.
Helen Thomas’ cosmetic case?
Maybe it fell off a turnip truck?
ping
They do use a radioactive source for taking x rays of welds. But not depleted uranium. The sources for metallurgical x rays are mighty strong. You wouldn’t want to be exposed to the beam.
The person who took this device home took an enormous risk. This is a ‘camera’, a radiography source. It is a stainless steel container filled with depleted Uranium (DU).
The DU, while somewhat naturally radioactive, is actually the shielding for the extremely radioactive source that is stored inside. Most commonly, the source consists of up to 100 curies of Iridium-192.
The dose rates on contact with this source, while not immediately dangerous to life, are more than high enough to cause grave physical damage and illness in a very short period of time.
There are numerous incidents on record of these sources not being stored properly in the camera or actually becoming detached and loose.
Thankfully, this source seems to have remained inside the shield and the shield case intact.
For example...SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR -- In February 1989, an accident took place at an industrial irradiation facility near San Salvador where medical products are sterilized by irradiation from a cobalt-60 source. The accident happened when the source rack became stuck in the irradiation position. The operator bypassed safety systems and entered the radiation room with two other workers to free the source rack manually. They were exposed to high radiation doses and developed acute radiation syndrome. The legs and feet of two of the three men were so seriously injured that amputation was required. The most-exposed worker died just over six months after the accident.
"But what's in the box???"
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