Poll of the Day > What would you do if you found this?

(+) Yeah! (+)

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Call the authorities and ask them to get someone that is supposed to handle that and also go to the hospital to check for radiation poisoning.

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Eat it.

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Drop it and run. It's just a fancy stink bomb.
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I'd never touch it in the first place

I generally don't pick up random shit anywhere I go

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obviously NOT pick it up, but let the police know about what it is and its location

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It's clearly marked as Cobalt-60, and it was 3540 Curies (131 TBq) in 1963. Cobalt-60 is intensely radioactive, undergoing beta decay into stable Nickel-60 and releasing gamma rays in the process, but it only has a half life of 5.27 years. In the 58 years since that sample has decayed until only 0.05% of the rod is still Co-60, or about 1.7 Curies (62.9 GBq). While I wouldn't recommend wearing it as jewelry, it's safe enough to handle for short periods.

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High-level radiation is scary AF. Speaking of that, FPS w. RPG elements Chernobylite is out on PS4 for those interested.

yutterh posted...

Call the authorities and ask them to get someone that is supposed to handle that and also go to the hospital to check for radiation poisoning.

This. And ask how the fuck something like that got there.

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put it in my ass

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Far-Queue posted...

Eat it.

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Put it in a terrarium with a bunch of spiders, then let all the ones who survived bite me

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Metalsonic66 posted...

Put it in a terrarium with a bunch of spiders, then let all the ones who survived bite me

So far, this is the best idea Ive heard
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DirtBasedSoap posted...

put it in my ass

This is the best idea so far.

Metalsonic66 posted...

Put it in a terrarium with a bunch of spiders, then let all the ones who survived bite me

Instead of Spider-Man you'll be called Metal Spider.
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El Marsh posted...

I'd never touch it in the first place

I generally don't pick up random shit anywhere I go

This

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Revelation34 posted...

This is the best idea so far.

Instead of Spider-Man you'll be called Metal Spider.

You mean Iron Spider

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I'd just leave it.

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Metalsonic66 posted...

You mean Iron Spider

Nah Metal Sonic with spider powers.
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Call hazmat.

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

put it in my ass

I knew if I scrolled down enough I'd find this answer. PoTD has not disappointed me.

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I wouldn't touch it, but I would inform the authorities about it.

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It depends. Joke shop? I might buy it. Tour of a nuclear facility (is that even a thing)? I'd let somebody know. But if it were just laying around, like on a sidewalk, I'd take it as a prank and leave it be.

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KJ StErOiDs posted...

It depends. Joke shop? I might buy it. Tour of a nuclear facility (is that even a thing)? I'd let somebody know. But if it were just laying around, like on a sidewalk, I'd take it as a prank and leave it be.

I know a few decommisioned nuclear facility give tours. I've been around one in Wales, don't know if any active ones do, I would suspect not but I wouldn't completely rule it out either. There's also a couple of nuclear facilities that were never activated (one in Mainland Europe was turned into a theme park).

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In case you don't think this sort of thing is likely, Wikipedia has an entire page with a list of orphan source incidents. More people have died from lost or stolen radiation sources than all nuclear power plant accidents combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents

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Pikazard1 posted...

obviously NOT pick it up, but let the police know about what it is and its location

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Is running a good way to avoid radiation? Just wondering.

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wpot posted...

Is running a good way to avoid radiation? Just wondering.

Depends if you're running towards it or away from it.

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It looks like a battery.

wpot posted...

Is running a good way to avoid radiation? Just wondering.

It's generally not going to hurt. The further away you get from a source of radiation, the less irradiated you'll be and the better your prognosis. In the vast majority of cases, it's not going to make a significant difference, since there's a pretty narrow window of radiation intensity where you'll suffer significant negative effects if you don't run but will escape them if you do, but it's worth trying, at least.

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Set it down, put some distance between myself and it, and get on the phone the SCP can come pick it up and and give me a Class A retrograde amnestic

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adjl posted...

It's generally not going to hurt. The further away you get from a source of radiation, the less irradiated you'll be and the better your prognosis. In the vast majority of cases, it's not going to make a significant difference, since there's a pretty narrow window of radiation intensity where you'll suffer significant negative effects if you don't run but will escape them if you do, but it's worth trying, at least.

That is a very sober, reasoned response and you're right. I just had a mental picture of Ralph Wiggum running from the winter of our discontent. :)

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Pop some Rad-Away

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wpot posted...

Is running a good way to avoid radiation? Just wondering.

Most of the deaths from orphaned sources were people who picked up the source and then did something stupid like put it in their pocket, take it home, try to open the container, or sleep with it (three lumberjacks found a pair of strontium-90 RTG cores in the middle of the road. They had melted all the snow around them for 1 meter, so they kept them and used them as personal heaters. One of them required extensive skin grafts because of the radiation burns and eventually died from infection.)

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captpackrat posted...

Most of the deaths from orphaned sources were people who picked up the source and then did something stupid like put it in their pocket, take it home, try to open the container, or sleep with it (three lumberjacks found a pair of strontium-90 RTG cores in the middle of the road. They had melted all the snow around them for 1 meter, so they kept them and used them as personal heaters. One of them required extensive skin grafts because of the radiation burns and eventually died from infection.)

Yeah, anything you find randomly lying around likely isn't going to be so intensely radioactive as to put you in immediate danger just for being next to it (at least, not the kind of danger where saving a few seconds by running instead of walking will make a difference). You should keep your distance and ensure somebody with the proper equipment and training disposes of it, but as long as you aren't keeping it close to you for several hours, you're probably okay.

Remember that the intensity of energy coming from a point source (which we can reasonably simplify these items to) varies with the cube of the distance. If you're 10 metres away from a radiation source, you're getting 1000 times less radiation than you would be if you were only 1 metre away. Exposure time, on the other hand, increases linearly (being exposed for 10 minutes gives you 10 times as much exposure as being exposed for 1 minute, ignoring half-life for simplicity's sake), so if you're ever in a position where you need to choose between getting rid of it more quickly or taking a longer time to dispose of it from further away, the latter is going to be the better option. That's a pretty contrived hypothetical situation (even in the context of "you find a random radioactive object on the ground"), but it's an interesting bit of physics to consider.

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