Reply to post: I work in the field

Crooks swipe plutonium, cesium from US govt nuke wranglers' car. And yes, it's still missing

DCFusor

I work in the field

In my case, fusion work, but we need to calibrate our detectors too. It's really hard to get hands on a cal source over about 1/4 micro-curie... (yes, that's .25 millionth...of an equivalent gram of Ra).

If what they were talking about here were actual cal sources, while you wouldn't want to swallow one there's no real danger involved...(if you swallow one, you might choke, after all...)

If you want radiation exposure, fly in a commercial airliner...

This is actually pretty good and very nicely done: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Now, collecting uranium ore - including that from the natural reactor in Africa which has all sorts of nasty fission products still going in it - is totally legal, and the stuff can be bought by the pound. And isn't hard to extract the fun stuff from, just illegal.

Grams in a test source? Micro grams, maybe. Speculation isn't fact or in this case, likely to be correct at all. Maybe counting the epoxy encapsulation and the box it came in?

So I rate this "scare mongering" on the level that they had to rename "nuclear resonance imaging" to Magnetic resonance imaging" because as soon as people hear nuclear, what sense they had flies out the window. Even though it's nuclei that are resonating like spinning tops in the magnetic field, the equipment is the same no matter the name.

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