Wednesday, February 20, 2019

The problem with the uranium at the Grand Canyon story

There's a hot story right now about three buckets of uranium ore that was stored at a museum at the Grand Canyon, with a claim of it being quite radioactive and a particular employee claiming the whole thing was covered up. The problem is the employee's numbers are off by a factor of 1,000. The presentation slide has the outside background rate at 2 mRem/hr. That's gotta be wrong; an average exposure in the Colorado Plateau is about 90 mRem per year, which would be something like 0.01mRem/hr aka 10 uR/hr. The buckets at the surface were really more like 300uRem/hr, or 3mRem/hr.

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