It is "absolutely certain that whoever removed this material by hand is either already dead or about to die," Juan Eibenschutz, director of Mexico's CNSNS nuclear safety authority, told Milenio television.
Not quite absolutely certain ... it was probably a tactic get them to hand themselves in :P
Not the first time something like this has happened
Also this one shows how a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Apparently six men have been arrested
I heard on the news that 6 people have turned up at a local hospital,
2 of them seriously ill with what looks like radiation poisoning. The hospital was cordened off.By the way, this was very common along the northen USSR coastlines, where many isolated lighthouses were powered by radioactive heat generators, which were often broken apart by thieves, many of whom got sick as a result.
John Rumm scribbled...
Like the couple of pikeys who get splattered every year trying to nick copper from transformer chambers.
Well maybe, maybe not, but one has to ask the question about unsuspecting others who might come into contact with this stuff afterwards.
Brian
Maybe they now glow in the dark do they?
Brian
Yes, some people just have to be so thick do they not? I mean normally there are waring signs all over the place near such dangerous items, I mean even my old smoke detector had a sticker, when I enquired about it the experts said you would need to have ingested about ten of them to do any damage as they were only giving off beta radiation, which cannot penetrate very far. I guess the old Trimfones were safe after all, as their luminous dials used betalite tubes as i recall with a radioactive gas inside which energised the phospher. Brian
Little Willy, full of glee, Put radium in Gramdma's tea. Now he thinks it quite a lark, To see her glowing in the dark. - Spike Milligan
Actually trimphones are not now considered to have been such a good idea. Old ones were collected and dumped at Harwell for a while, and I believe that bit of site has now had a (doubtless costly) clean-up.
Although you can still get tritium-based "emergency lights".
The last time it happened it was detected at Los Alamos when RSJ and rebar s going into the site triggered radiation alarms. Mechanism was essentially the same a bunch of geezers had removed and sold on a radiotherapy machine as scrap with the Co60 still inside it.
It happens about once a decade. There are plenty of similarly nasty hot sources floating about in the former SSSR.
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