Think You Are Safe from Radiation?

There was a really hard to believe (yet not so much... ) article in the paper recently.  It was about radioactive ore stored at a visitor site at the Grand Canyon (I am really glad we skipped the museum on our visit there in 2004).

"For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.

Although federal officials learned last year that the five-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park's safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.

In a rogue email sent to all Park Service employees on Feb. 4, Elston "Swede" Stephenson — the safety, health and wellness manager — described the alleged cover-up as "a top management failure" and warned of possible health consequences.

"If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition," Stephenson wrote.  ...

Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute.  ... 

Stephenson said the uranium threat was discovered in March 2018 by the teenage son of a park employee who happened to be a Geiger counter  enthusiast, and brought a device to the museum collection room.

Workers immediately moved the buckets to another location in the building, he said, but nothing else was done.

(The oh-so-safe method the buckets of highly radioactive ore was removed by OSHA officials...)

 A few months later, Stephenson said, he was assisting with a safety audit when employees told him about the uranium. As a former Army helicopter pilot who later worked as a safety manager in the Navy, Stephenson said he knew it was "bad mojo" and instantly called a National Parks specialist in Colorado.  ... 

Stephenson said technicians concealed the radiation readings from him and dumped the ore into Orphan Mine, an old uranium dig that is considered a potential Superfund site below the Rim, about two miles from Grand Canyon Village.

Stephenson said he drove to Phoenix in November and filed a report with OSHA, which sent inspectors to the museum building in yellow protective suits.

Stephenson said they detected a low-level site within the building and traced it to the three buckets, which Park Service technicians had inexplicably returned to the building after dumping their contents.

"You could hear their meters going off," Stephenson said."

 ...  

Story by:  https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/02/18/grand-canyon-tourists-exposed-radiation-safety-manager-says/2905358002/

Another place we skipped visiting in '04 was the Trinity Bomb site.  "On July 16, 1945, one week after the establishment of White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the north-central portion of the missile range, approximately 60 miles north of White Sands National Monument.  By 1953, much of the radioactivity had subsided (Really?  What about all the stuff we do NOT know about radiation?), and the first Trinity Site open house was held in September of that year.

In 1965, Army officials erected a monument on Ground Zero. In 1975, the National Park Service designated Trinity Site as a National Historic Landmark. The landmark includes base camp, where the scientists and support group lived; the McDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core was assembled; as well as Ground Zero.

Today, visits to the site are sponsored by the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce and WSMR on the first Saturdays of April and October."

Are you kidding me???!!!  No. No, no, no.

Now take a minute or few to look at this video.  It explains a lot and you'll get a few shocks too...