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.
The devise is a radiographic camera. The depleted uranium is used to shield a highly radioactive source, usually iridium 192. If it was cobalt the camera would weigh around 500 pounds. The 192 is usually in a stainless steel capsule about a quarter of an inch long and about an eighth of an inch wide with a small cable (pig-tail) attached to one end. The capsules when fresh are about 100 curies in strength and a short contact exposure (against the skin) can be lethal depending on where it’s at. If it’s in your shirt pocket be sure your will is in order.
We Germans had a more dangerous case a few years ago. In Karlsruhe (southern Germany) we had a small nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that produced several tons of PU 239 over the years. It is closed in the meantime. A idiot who had to clean up took away 2 or 3 grammes of Plutonium to take it home. He contaminated his car, his house, himself and -last but not least- his girlfriend with a deathly dose of radiation. The police worked quite fast but it was already too late.
I received my information on DP from a company called PatCo who developed 30mm sabo rounds for the Israeli air force and later on for our A10’s ... (have relatives who worked there) ...
U-235 is what made the first A-Bomb go bang ... U235 is an isotope of U238 and it’s the separation of that from U238 ... get enough of U235 together and run .....
The depleted uranium may have been used in the device for shielding against the X-rays.
Right, but is it more or less radioactive than my basement here in New Hampshire?
Why? You'd just die tired.
Actually, Doc Brown used the contents to make several journeys in his Delorian and his steam engine. Because he was careful about the Space-Time Continum, there are no apparent changes here, but course Hillery is now a Right-wing Conservative and John Edwards is a girl.
It is more radioactive than your basement unless your house is sitting on a pitchblend outcrop.
Most likely ....but you have to try ....
Who cares? It's uranium! PANIC!!!
“All I know Clark, is my garden has been giving 25lb tomatoes and my teeth have never been whiter.”
It looks like an x-ray source used to image pipe welds, like those in pipelines (hence the cable).
The dose-rate from external radiation in the vicinity of DU is very low. One kg DU at a distance of 1 m produces a dose of less than 1 mSv per year. In comparison, an average person in Switzerland accumulates about 3 mSv per year from natural radiation sources.
Apparently. The way the article was written, you would think it was the ‘source’ and not the shielding.
What would be the advantages of using depleted uranium versus lead, anyway?
Depends on how you define radioactivity. If you defin it as dose at 1 meter, then the reason the dose rate is low for DU at 1m is that it is a beta and alpha emmitter, and these particles don’t travel far in air. If you look at total particles emitted it is a LOT higher than background.
“It is not fissile, meaning you can’t create a critical mass of depleted uranium, but it is radioactive.”
Weakly, mostly emitting alpha particles, and an even (much) smaller amount of neutron radiation. Even consumed it’s a minimal danger, unless it’s in the form of uranium oxides - although I still wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, its radioactivity is weak enough that it can be used as shielding for much stronger sources of radiation, while not requiring (significant?) shielding itself.
“I would definitely NOT take it to my house. “
Maybe the guy was bucking for a Darwin Award.
Only to someone trying to be argumentitive and change the definition of radioactivity to absorbed dose
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