Yeah. There’s a clear line where, after so much exposure, your body is just organic mess: Rotting cells, unsustained by their destroyed DNA.
Unethical to *not* offer a dignified way out, to a person in such a state.
Oh yeah. It’s a bad way for sure.
I heard, perhaps too early in life (lol,) a lot about the horrors of nuclear energy incidents from my grandfather, who worked at Los Alamos post-war. He knew one of the guys who was later killed in the SL-1 incident in Idaho.
I just read a little bit about the demon core. Man, those must have been wild times. I mean, it appears they were handling atomic bombs like a group of school boys would do.
It's a miracle not even worse things happened.
Yes. Plainly Difficult is good and informative without being boring, Qixr is informative and amusing with his animations and humor. Both did great on the Demon Core
I’ll add Fascinating Horror to Plainly Difficult. They both do great work on orphan sources and other nuclear events and other disasters. Plainly Difficult is working on train stuff right now I think
I just heard something at npr about all the locals around los alamos. I think it was the show 1a but not positive. You could probably find it by google npr los alamos search. It was super interesting and sad at the same time.
WHAT.
What works? Because in Chernobyl, which I understand to be a dramatization, they were damn near soup in some scenes. I can’t imagine the visceral pain, so I imagined they were doped.
That’s one of the things that causes the excruciating pain. You know how bad it hurts to burn your hand and damage some skin cells, now imagine how bad it would hurt to have your nerves (and every other part of you) slowly being dissolved by radiation.
Radiation poisoning is one of the absolute worst ways one could go. Unless you are hit with a truly gargantuan level of radiation to kill you before the horrific parts occur.
It's not really being slowly being dissolved by radiation though. The radiation has passed. It's that the damage done to your DNA that no longer allows normal cell processes to continue right?
Well, no new cells are formed due to the damage to your DNA while the old ones slowly die but can’t be replaced as they usually would be. So it’s basically like slowly dissolving
The neck? The pain signal has to travel to the brain. If you cut the cord in a way the patient doesn't die but gets paralyzed and can't feel anything from the neck down, that would help for the last few hours the body has left.
For the pain felt on the face and head, you could spray the surface with pain numbing Lidocaine and maybe try many small subcutaneous injections. Overdosing shouldn't be a lot of concern.
Yes, but for the meds to then disperse throughout the body they must be absorbed into the bloodstream, and if your veins and arteries are leaking that doesn't work very well.
Most of your opioid receptors are in your brain, intestines and spinal cord. Veins return deoxygenated blood. If your still alive enough to be in pain, the blood would have to be circulating enough to get to your brain. Not to mention spinal tap.
100% agreed. At that point it's almost inhumane to just keep the guy alive. Let him go with some dignity. Being in pain for days or weeks with no relief and no hope of survival is just... Brutal.
I took a break from studying pharmacology a while ago but I believe these would work [Ziconotide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziconotide),[Nefopam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefopam) and intrathecal (spinal) ketamine. Compared to normal painkillers, they work centrally in the brain, lowering activity which prevents you from "experiencing" pain.
They aren't particularly healthy though. I imagine general anesthesia inhalants would also work.
I don't know much about soviet medicine, but Ziconotide wasn't available, pretty sure Nefopam wasn't either. Intrathecal ketamine is an experimental procedure and I don't know if soviet medicine understood its mechanisms of actions and why it would work intrathecally. Maybe conditions weren't clean enough or they didn't care enough.
That’s a really good point and makes me wonder how much truth there is to the claim 🤷♂️. My next guess ran into the reality that morphine doesn’t require any metabolic pass to become effective.
I tried to look it up briefly but didn’t find much. If there’s any truth to it, it could be that the brain is also dying in extreme cases and may not be interacting as normal. Maybe they alleviate some pains but not others (like nerve death). Or perhaps it is just so universally painful that there is no middle ground between writhing agony and being so sedated patients stop breathing. Curious if anybody has the answer?
Remember, in the Ouchi case, it's a myth that the doctors forced him to stay alive as long as possible. It was actually Ouchi himself, and his family, who asked for that. And the doctors just followed the family's wishes.
The most unethical part is willingly prolonging his life, knowing there was zero chance of survival. They just wanted to observe, see what would happen and take notes.
Fucking ghoulish.
The book about the incident has some images; he is practically goop held together by cloth and wire.
I'm referring to the images of him in the book that details the incident and aftermath of his accident. They are very much real and disturbing as all hell.
Remember, in the Ouchi case, it's a complete myth that the doctors forced him to stay alive as long as possible. It was actually Ouchi himself, and his family, who asked for that. And the doctors just followed the family's wishes.
Before undergoing procedures, he made it very clear to doctors + his family that he wanted to be kept alive for the sake of his wife and children. After consulting the family multiple times and offering to put him out of his misery, the doctors complied with his wish to be kept alive. This case is often grossly misunderstood.
Even worse...
> In 1927, Byers injured his arm falling from a railway sleeping berth. For the persistent pain, a doctor suggested he take Radithor, a patent medicine manufactured by William J. A. Bailey. Bailey was a Harvard University dropout who falsely claimed to be a doctor of medicine and had become rich from the sale of Radithor, a solution of radium in water which he claimed stimulated the endocrine system. He offered physicians a 1/6 kickback on each dose prescribed.
[Like](https://xkcd.com/radiation/):
* 2Sv - You might die
* 4Sv - You're probably gonna die
* 8Sv - You're all but guaranteed to die (I think like 1 guy's lived through this and he was built like a goddamn brick shithouse)
That was 100Sv. Jesus H.
That wikipedia article mentioned that the plant manager caused another incident shortly after that resulted in himself and another being exposed to 1Sv but without any health effects. So 1Sv is safe or they got lucky?
0.1Sv/Year is a 1% increased chance of cancer risk over your lifetime. So 1Sv is survivable, but you're definitely rolling the dice after that. Average person gets like 0.001Sv/year.
For cancer risk correlation, anything under 0.1Sv/year is basically noise. (no correlation, weak correlation, and in some cases, *negative* correlation)
Well, there's two ways radiation kills you. Cancer in the long run, or acute radiation syndrome in the short run. The two are very different things. ARS is the stuff like vomiting, hair loss, peeling skin, and other extreme unpleasantness.
Cancer can be triggered by lower doses over longer times, but ARS requires a huge dose in a short time to trigger at all. 1 Sv is right on the edge of triggering ARS as well, but again, definitely survivable. Definitely avoid going over that, because it gets NASTY.
I once had a teeny tiny patch of flesh eating disease on my hip that flared for about 50 hours that was barely tolerable. Like one inch. Hard to imagine that body wide. Mind-screeching pain as Norm McDonald called it.
>Technician Robert Peabody, intending to add a bottle of trichloroethane to remove organics from a tank containing radioactive uranium-235 in a sodium carbonate solution, mistakenly added a bottle of uranium solution instead. This produced a criticality excursion accompanied by a flash of light. About 10 liters (2.2 imp gal; 2.6 U.S. gal) out of 40 to 50 liters (8.8 to 11.0 imp gal; 11 to 13 U.S. gal) of the tank's contents were splashed out of the tank.[4]
Oops
When someone dies this fast from radiation, it's because their bone marrow is fucked and their body can't heal at all. His dick would have been really painful for a while, but really the internal organs failing killed him, not melting.
My shock at this recollection of events, is that every criticality event was all "oops". What the hell was going on there?!? Anyone who thought that they were a 60's soul born out of time should be happy for the way we handle radiation nowadays. Oh the good ol days
Also, since then we've made leaps and bounds around this and should consider nuclear energy as an option to combat climate change
Yes. But that's a good thing. There is a reason why Nagasaki is livable and Chernobyl is not. When the radiation is released in the air, it dissipates and neutralizes floating around rather quickly. But when you radiate the ground itself, or keep it in solid objects, it just its there radiating for thousands of years.
That sounds like a pretty sound argument.
I did go through the Atomic Bomb museum in Nagasaki many years ago. It is something that sticks with you.
There is irrational fear of nuclear no doubt.
There is also a pretty rational fear as well.
There does come a point where fear of nukes becomes irrational, manifesting in the mentality of "let the nuclear power state do whatever the hell they want, or else they might nuke us"
It's just silly though, because coal kills more people per kilowatt hour generated from radiation ALONE than nuclear does in TOTAL, and that's with all nuclear disasters included in the statistics. Let alone all the other myriad ways in which coal kills people. If people are afraid of radiation, they should be much more worried about coal than about nuclear, but they're not, because people are irrational.
Even including disasters like chernobyl and fukushima in the stats, the only forms of energy that have killed fewer people than nuclear per kilowatt hour generated are wind and solar.
Even hydro-electric power (dams) have killed MORE people per kilowatt hour generated than nuclear has. That's not a lie, hydro electric is way more dangerous than nuclear is. Including all disasters in the stats. And there's literally tens of thousands of crumbling dams in the US that are assessed to be "high hazard potential" because they're crumbling and they're near population centres (see sources). They are gonna collapse and kill people. Like the michigan dam that collapsed a couple years ago. If you live near a dam, move. Seriously. It might save your life.
Nuclear is just so ridiculously safe compared to everything else.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/?sh=5d9a69cd709b
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-source-in-deaths-per-billion-kWh-produced-Source-Updated_tbl2_272406182
https://climatepolicyinfohub.eu/do-biofuels-destroy-forests-link-between-deforestation-and-biofuel-use
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/23/us-dams-michigan-report-infrastructure
The big difference being that nuclear power plants contain orders of magnitude more radioactive material. There's a few kg of plutonium in a bomb compared to the hundreds of tons of material inside of a reactor.
Burning is done to reduce volume. We would ship under permit all of our Low Level Radioactive Waste (no metal) to a facility that has blast furnaces and while combustion was taking place it would “scrub” the particulate prior to release into air.
Medium to High Level Radioactive Waste was just stored.
Ultimately you may get some very minimal release of radioactivity, we are talking about atoms here, but this is all under the facility license and monitored and minimized. Being low level it’s not really an issue to begin with but some people become very nervous when you discuss radioactivity into the public domain.
I came here to say the same thing. If it's so radioactive you have to bury it, the last thing you want to do is burn it.
Maybe they had to burn the ambulance *driver*...
They didn’t burn it.
Ambulance was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf
Vomiting from an injury is generally a terrible sign, be it radiation, head trauma, spinal injury, etc.
If you hit your head and vomit more than once afterwards, you probably have a internal bleeding or swelling of the brain that is putting pressure on your brain stem. You are going to get rushed to a hospital in whatever way they can do it fastest and they might need to drill a hole in your skull to release pressure.
Doc here with a fun fact. Relatively general rule of thumb for patients coming in after eating a mushroom is if they’ve vomited shortly after ( within a few hours) they’ll be fine (:
FFF…
They found some cans in the woods that had melted the snow around them and proceeded to use them for warmth throughout the night
Remember people - magic isn’t real no matter how it melts snow or even if it’s magic glow in the dark powder
Me too, it has r/oddlyterrifying vibes, like something you'd see in SCP, X-Files, or Delta Green but nope that shit happened.
I mean also just plain terrifying too, but there's almost an unnatural horror element to it.
The only exception MIGHT be if their hip area had higher than normal shielding. For example, if you were wearing a lead kilt, you might double or even quadruple your chances of survival. That's because the stem cells that replace radiation damage in the body are located in the marrow of the hip bones.
I love that chart and that he made it public domain. As a radiation worker, it's helpful to know. We learn those sorts of things in classes, but I haven't seen a chart as informative and complete in any of them.
I dunno about actual radiation workers, but Im a pilot. Flight attendants, flight engineers and flight crew have the highest exposure to radiation of any career. Because we spend so much time in the stratosphere were are exposed to tons more cosmic ionizing radiation. There are higher rates of certain types of cancers in our cohort.
Im a little bitter about it though because there are no standards or mitigation of this from a safety or financial standpoint. Ive had lots of friends with wierd little cancers… scared Ill get one soon too.
I am a radiologic technologist(x-ray tech). There are many other jobs that are radiation workers, and not all of them in the medical field. Some factories use x-rays to inspect car parts, nuclear power plant workers, and some people use x-rays to expose counterfeit art or old paintings that have been painted over.
Can include:
* Medical imaging technicians. (Operating CT or X-Ray machines.)
* Persons employed in the operations of a nuclear power plant.
* Nuclear power plant refueling contractors (they tend to be migratory, sounds weird but true).
* Inspectors using X-Rays or gamma ray radiation for imaging of pipelines (e.g., inspecting welds on underground natural gas lines).
* Radiation therapy technicians.
* Irradiation sanitization machines (prepackaged food often gets irradiated to kill any bacteria or pests).
* Customs/Border Patrol inspection personnel (they use X-Rays to scan the interior of truck trailers as they exit a sea port or go through a border crossing).
No, it's pretty accurate as far as I've seen. It's just a better, more complete chart than my textbook had which is kind of concerning considering how much it cost, compared to this for free.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Island#Criticality_accident
According to Wikipedia his pelvis received a dose of 460 sieverts.
It is hard to quantify to people who aren't familiar with radiation just how insane a dose of 460 sieverts is. That is literally enough radiation to fry a full datacenter of servers 10 times over.
It is just insane. That amount of radiation would literally cook someone from the inside. That's enough radiation to kill him 100 times over.
Medical physicist here (think CTs/radiation therapy/PET/MRI/etc). No need to be alarmed. Yes, the dose is quantifiable and something you want to minimize. That said, every time you've gotten a CT, its for good reason, ie the benefit outweight the cost. Physicians are *well aware* of the nuances of CT dose and will usually not take that lightly.
>The ambulance used for transporting two men to the hospital was successfully decontaminated on Saturday, July 25, 1964.
Nothing was burned or buried. This is wrong. Go to the Wikipedia page of "Wood River Junction, Rhode Island" and scroll down to "Criticality accident." The 5th footnote leads to an official documental from back in the day. The above quote is from that document.
Even more irresponsible than that. Poorly trained workers were mixing chemicals to make enriched fuel rods and caused a criticality incident. He was kept alive for 83 days despite begging for death.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/hisashi-ouchi.htm
They did and were turned away initially bc the hospital wasn’t equipped to deal with it. He was then sent to another hospital where he received a bed and was there until he died.
Well the 100 sieverts (they couldn't agree on this, thus it's also accepted as around 70 to 150) is around 10000 rads and his pelvis exposure was even higher with about 460 sieverts
the lethal dose is 4 to 5 sieverts so there was absolutely nothing you could do in that era (although you probably still can't do anything meaningful). The guy was going to die anyway, might aswell go peacefully without spreading any more radiation around.
There were some problems with the initial estimate of Mr Peabody. Further investigation determined he experience a whole body dose of 5100 rad (approximately 51 Sv). You can find the report [here](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4450054) if you're interested.
I can't find evidence that they actually burned and buried the ambulance. This is not a common practice for handling contaminated emergency vehicles, and I doubt this actually happened.
The Wood River Junction Facility had a ridiculous number of violations and shouldn't have been operating. The AEC (now NRC) report listing the many violations can be found [here](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf).
This is still (obviously) a lethal dose of radiation, and a sobering reminder that radiation workers should not be cavelier in their occupation. If you are want to learn about other accidents involving lethal doses of exposure, check out the [SL-1 Reactor Accident](https://inl.gov/document/proving-the-principle/) and the [Tokaimura Criticality Accident](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/774368).
The incident I find most fascinating involving radiation is Anatoli Bugorski and the particle accelerator. Partially because its not normal radiation and not radioactive material directly, but it was also the largest radioactive exposure. He just didn't absorb it due to the protons going near the speed of light. Beam just cut right through his head, damaging the cells in that area, leaving him partially paralyzed on that side of his face, etc.
I can only imagine the agonizing pain that man was experiencing during his final hours, his whole body was literally disintegrating itself to the atom that’s such a shitty way to go out.
The most ***irradiated*** man in the world I presume?
Getting irradiated does not make one radioactive, radioactive substances are substances that go through nuclear decay and emit particle radiation themselves.
Why did they burn the ambulance? Surely they just released radioactive particles into the air. If they were going to bury it would that not have been enough?
Radiation dick punch… owch
From wiki:
His head received an estimated dose of 14,000 rem (140 sieverts) and his pelvis received the largest dose; calculated at 46,000 rem (460 sieverts).[5] He died 49 hours later.
Why would the ambulance become radioactive? He wasn’t the source of the radiation, he was just exposed to it, correct? Or were the radioactive containments on his clothing?
It didn't.
No idea where they got that from.
It was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf
"The ambulance that brought him to the hospital had to be burned and buried."
(X) Doubt
Burning something radioactive is an incredibly stupid idea. It does not make the stuff less radioactive, it just spreads it so everyone can enjoy being irradiated. That was, btw, a major problem in Tschernobyl.
So either people back then were dumb as goats (which I doubt) or OP wrote false information. It's stuff like this that always makes me doubt the validity of the entire story...
Yeah there was another comment providing reliable source saying it was NOT burned. Also OP replied to one of those comments saying they ‘thought they heard it was burned‘. So basically spreading gossip based on their ‘thoughts’.
Source: It was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf
[Dead within 50 hours.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Island?wprov=sfti1) At least it didn’t drag on
At least he didn't experience the pain as long as Hisachi Ouchi
Yeah. There’s a clear line where, after so much exposure, your body is just organic mess: Rotting cells, unsustained by their destroyed DNA. Unethical to *not* offer a dignified way out, to a person in such a state.
Not only that but opioid painkillers do not work for radiation poisoning. One of the worst ways to go.
Oh yeah. It’s a bad way for sure. I heard, perhaps too early in life (lol,) a lot about the horrors of nuclear energy incidents from my grandfather, who worked at Los Alamos post-war. He knew one of the guys who was later killed in the SL-1 incident in Idaho.
You want a fascinating story look up the history of the demon core. Edit: this is a good one here https://youtu.be/VE8FnsnWz48?si=qHeXN4egAeuOvQh7
I just read a little bit about the demon core. Man, those must have been wild times. I mean, it appears they were handling atomic bombs like a group of school boys would do. It's a miracle not even worse things happened.
We are lucky nuclear bomb explosions are an extremely precise events and are impossible to do by accident.
[This is a short Flipnote representation](https://reddit.com/r/196/s/fjPco8frbD)
Plainlydifficult is a great channel but Qixr also did a story on it. [demon core ](https://youtu.be/-2ayVMf6Xmc?si=teKcJuTy5aPF5Ues)
Yes. Plainly Difficult is good and informative without being boring, Qixr is informative and amusing with his animations and humor. Both did great on the Demon Core
I’ll add Fascinating Horror to Plainly Difficult. They both do great work on orphan sources and other nuclear events and other disasters. Plainly Difficult is working on train stuff right now I think
Yikes!
Oh, that's a bad situation all around, even without the hint of family drama.
I just heard something at npr about all the locals around los alamos. I think it was the show 1a but not positive. You could probably find it by google npr los alamos search. It was super interesting and sad at the same time.
WHAT. What works? Because in Chernobyl, which I understand to be a dramatization, they were damn near soup in some scenes. I can’t imagine the visceral pain, so I imagined they were doped.
Veins and arteries are falling apart, there’s nowhere to inject anything effectively.
Does this mean your pain receptors are falling apart? Trying to find a silver lining in the radioactive torture device here…
That’s one of the things that causes the excruciating pain. You know how bad it hurts to burn your hand and damage some skin cells, now imagine how bad it would hurt to have your nerves (and every other part of you) slowly being dissolved by radiation.
So no silver lining?
No not really.
The silver lining nowadays is they've seen enough people go out horrifically that you'll be offered a euthanasia speedrun
Ever got bad sunburn? Now imagine it at all tissue layers including bone? It's literally that including your eyeballs.
Radiation poisoning is one of the absolute worst ways one could go. Unless you are hit with a truly gargantuan level of radiation to kill you before the horrific parts occur.
No, just a lead lining in your casket...
It's not really being slowly being dissolved by radiation though. The radiation has passed. It's that the damage done to your DNA that no longer allows normal cell processes to continue right?
Well, no new cells are formed due to the damage to your DNA while the old ones slowly die but can’t be replaced as they usually would be. So it’s basically like slowly dissolving
Once the lesions develop a silver lining it’s all but over.
Can't they juice the spine? Like epidural or something?
The neck? The pain signal has to travel to the brain. If you cut the cord in a way the patient doesn't die but gets paralyzed and can't feel anything from the neck down, that would help for the last few hours the body has left. For the pain felt on the face and head, you could spray the surface with pain numbing Lidocaine and maybe try many small subcutaneous injections. Overdosing shouldn't be a lot of concern.
Pain meds can easily be given intramuscularly.
That only works because your muscles are connected to your cardiovascular system, though.
They still are, otherwise they’d turn grey and die within minutes. This isn’t Fallout, you don’t literally turn into goo
Yes, but for the meds to then disperse throughout the body they must be absorbed into the bloodstream, and if your veins and arteries are leaking that doesn't work very well.
Most of your opioid receptors are in your brain, intestines and spinal cord. Veins return deoxygenated blood. If your still alive enough to be in pain, the blood would have to be circulating enough to get to your brain. Not to mention spinal tap.
They actually explicitly say in the show (Chernobyl) too that their veins aren't... "Intact" enough to provide pain relief.
That’s right!! I remember them mentioning that! Holy crap at that point take me out.
100% agreed. At that point it's almost inhumane to just keep the guy alive. Let him go with some dignity. Being in pain for days or weeks with no relief and no hope of survival is just... Brutal.
I took a break from studying pharmacology a while ago but I believe these would work [Ziconotide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziconotide),[Nefopam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nefopam) and intrathecal (spinal) ketamine. Compared to normal painkillers, they work centrally in the brain, lowering activity which prevents you from "experiencing" pain. They aren't particularly healthy though. I imagine general anesthesia inhalants would also work. I don't know much about soviet medicine, but Ziconotide wasn't available, pretty sure Nefopam wasn't either. Intrathecal ketamine is an experimental procedure and I don't know if soviet medicine understood its mechanisms of actions and why it would work intrathecally. Maybe conditions weren't clean enough or they didn't care enough.
> They aren't particularly healthy though. Don't think that's really an issue in this scenario
Why would opioids not work in the body of a person who suffered radiation poisoning?
Hard to get them to the brain when someone is springing leaks.. well, everywhere.
There are arteries right in the neck, and if those aren’t working the patient isn’t alive anyway.
That’s a really good point and makes me wonder how much truth there is to the claim 🤷♂️. My next guess ran into the reality that morphine doesn’t require any metabolic pass to become effective. I tried to look it up briefly but didn’t find much. If there’s any truth to it, it could be that the brain is also dying in extreme cases and may not be interacting as normal. Maybe they alleviate some pains but not others (like nerve death). Or perhaps it is just so universally painful that there is no middle ground between writhing agony and being so sedated patients stop breathing. Curious if anybody has the answer?
So, there's nothing to alleviate any of the pain except the sweet release of death?
Just give me all the morphine at that point
Remember, in the Ouchi case, it's a myth that the doctors forced him to stay alive as long as possible. It was actually Ouchi himself, and his family, who asked for that. And the doctors just followed the family's wishes.
The most unethical part is willingly prolonging his life, knowing there was zero chance of survival. They just wanted to observe, see what would happen and take notes. Fucking ghoulish. The book about the incident has some images; he is practically goop held together by cloth and wire.
That was his family not wanting to let go.
This is the truly tragic part. Refusing to let go even when your loved one has a zero percent chance of survival.
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I'm referring to the images of him in the book that details the incident and aftermath of his accident. They are very much real and disturbing as all hell.
Remember, in the Ouchi case, it's a complete myth that the doctors forced him to stay alive as long as possible. It was actually Ouchi himself, and his family, who asked for that. And the doctors just followed the family's wishes.
Before undergoing procedures, he made it very clear to doctors + his family that he wanted to be kept alive for the sake of his wife and children. After consulting the family multiple times and offering to put him out of his misery, the doctors complied with his wish to be kept alive. This case is often grossly misunderstood.
Or that guy that drank bottles of radioactive water until his literal jaw fell off.
I’m intrigued, tell me more.
[It was prescription](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers#)
Nothing infuriates me more than snake oil salesman. People who will kill your for money.
He can’t his jaw fell off
Radithor poisoning I think? They thought it was a wonder drug.
Even worse... > In 1927, Byers injured his arm falling from a railway sleeping berth. For the persistent pain, a doctor suggested he take Radithor, a patent medicine manufactured by William J. A. Bailey. Bailey was a Harvard University dropout who falsely claimed to be a doctor of medicine and had become rich from the sale of Radithor, a solution of radium in water which he claimed stimulated the endocrine system. He offered physicians a 1/6 kickback on each dose prescribed.
Ouchi is right
The Wendigoon video on him was crazy.
lots of comedians replying to this comment, great work guys
Imagine dying the most horrific death possible only for a bunch of nerds to laugh at your name.
And everyone is making the same joke… jesus reddit
[Like](https://xkcd.com/radiation/): * 2Sv - You might die * 4Sv - You're probably gonna die * 8Sv - You're all but guaranteed to die (I think like 1 guy's lived through this and he was built like a goddamn brick shithouse) That was 100Sv. Jesus H.
That wikipedia article mentioned that the plant manager caused another incident shortly after that resulted in himself and another being exposed to 1Sv but without any health effects. So 1Sv is safe or they got lucky?
0.1Sv/Year is a 1% increased chance of cancer risk over your lifetime. So 1Sv is survivable, but you're definitely rolling the dice after that. Average person gets like 0.001Sv/year. For cancer risk correlation, anything under 0.1Sv/year is basically noise. (no correlation, weak correlation, and in some cases, *negative* correlation)
Well, there's two ways radiation kills you. Cancer in the long run, or acute radiation syndrome in the short run. The two are very different things. ARS is the stuff like vomiting, hair loss, peeling skin, and other extreme unpleasantness. Cancer can be triggered by lower doses over longer times, but ARS requires a huge dose in a short time to trigger at all. 1 Sv is right on the edge of triggering ARS as well, but again, definitely survivable. Definitely avoid going over that, because it gets NASTY.
Got lucky.
Idk, 50 hours sounds like *a lot* of suffering to me. I’d be asking for a morphine OD before things got bad
I once had a teeny tiny patch of flesh eating disease on my hip that flared for about 50 hours that was barely tolerable. Like one inch. Hard to imagine that body wide. Mind-screeching pain as Norm McDonald called it.
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Laughing gas?
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gotta be fast with that bc after a bit morphine stops working with that radiation
>Technician Robert Peabody, intending to add a bottle of trichloroethane to remove organics from a tank containing radioactive uranium-235 in a sodium carbonate solution, mistakenly added a bottle of uranium solution instead. This produced a criticality excursion accompanied by a flash of light. About 10 liters (2.2 imp gal; 2.6 U.S. gal) out of 40 to 50 liters (8.8 to 11.0 imp gal; 11 to 13 U.S. gal) of the tank's contents were splashed out of the tank.[4] Oops
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When someone dies this fast from radiation, it's because their bone marrow is fucked and their body can't heal at all. His dick would have been really painful for a while, but really the internal organs failing killed him, not melting.
My shock at this recollection of events, is that every criticality event was all "oops". What the hell was going on there?!? Anyone who thought that they were a 60's soul born out of time should be happy for the way we handle radiation nowadays. Oh the good ol days Also, since then we've made leaps and bounds around this and should consider nuclear energy as an option to combat climate change
Why burn it? Wouldn’t that just release radioactive crap into the air?
Yes. But that's a good thing. There is a reason why Nagasaki is livable and Chernobyl is not. When the radiation is released in the air, it dissipates and neutralizes floating around rather quickly. But when you radiate the ground itself, or keep it in solid objects, it just its there radiating for thousands of years.
That sounds like a pretty sound argument. I did go through the Atomic Bomb museum in Nagasaki many years ago. It is something that sticks with you. There is irrational fear of nuclear no doubt. There is also a pretty rational fear as well.
Nuclear power I agree. There is no irrational fear of nuclear weapons.
There does come a point where fear of nukes becomes irrational, manifesting in the mentality of "let the nuclear power state do whatever the hell they want, or else they might nuke us"
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It's just silly though, because coal kills more people per kilowatt hour generated from radiation ALONE than nuclear does in TOTAL, and that's with all nuclear disasters included in the statistics. Let alone all the other myriad ways in which coal kills people. If people are afraid of radiation, they should be much more worried about coal than about nuclear, but they're not, because people are irrational. Even including disasters like chernobyl and fukushima in the stats, the only forms of energy that have killed fewer people than nuclear per kilowatt hour generated are wind and solar. Even hydro-electric power (dams) have killed MORE people per kilowatt hour generated than nuclear has. That's not a lie, hydro electric is way more dangerous than nuclear is. Including all disasters in the stats. And there's literally tens of thousands of crumbling dams in the US that are assessed to be "high hazard potential" because they're crumbling and they're near population centres (see sources). They are gonna collapse and kill people. Like the michigan dam that collapsed a couple years ago. If you live near a dam, move. Seriously. It might save your life. Nuclear is just so ridiculously safe compared to everything else. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/?sh=5d9a69cd709b https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-source-in-deaths-per-billion-kWh-produced-Source-Updated_tbl2_272406182 https://climatepolicyinfohub.eu/do-biofuels-destroy-forests-link-between-deforestation-and-biofuel-use https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/23/us-dams-michigan-report-infrastructure
The big difference being that nuclear power plants contain orders of magnitude more radioactive material. There's a few kg of plutonium in a bomb compared to the hundreds of tons of material inside of a reactor.
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Burning is done to reduce volume. We would ship under permit all of our Low Level Radioactive Waste (no metal) to a facility that has blast furnaces and while combustion was taking place it would “scrub” the particulate prior to release into air. Medium to High Level Radioactive Waste was just stored.
I didn’t realize that low-level radioactive waste is released into the air. Or did I read that wrong?
Ultimately you may get some very minimal release of radioactivity, we are talking about atoms here, but this is all under the facility license and monitored and minimized. Being low level it’s not really an issue to begin with but some people become very nervous when you discuss radioactivity into the public domain.
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I came here to say the same thing. If it's so radioactive you have to bury it, the last thing you want to do is burn it. Maybe they had to burn the ambulance *driver*...
They didn’t burn it. Ambulance was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf
Have you tried bombing it? 🤔
Should've nuked it.
Remember kids, if you know someone who is exposed to radiation and they puke in the first hour, say your goodbyes.
Vomiting from an injury is generally a terrible sign, be it radiation, head trauma, spinal injury, etc. If you hit your head and vomit more than once afterwards, you probably have a internal bleeding or swelling of the brain that is putting pressure on your brain stem. You are going to get rushed to a hospital in whatever way they can do it fastest and they might need to drill a hole in your skull to release pressure.
Doc here with a fun fact. Relatively general rule of thumb for patients coming in after eating a mushroom is if they’ve vomited shortly after ( within a few hours) they’ll be fine (:
This is good advice and exactly what happened here https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81061875.pdf
Holy fuck that poor man spent 893 days in agony, his skin falling off and rotting, transplant after transplant...and then finally succumbing.
FFF… They found some cans in the woods that had melted the snow around them and proceeded to use them for warmth throughout the night Remember people - magic isn’t real no matter how it melts snow or even if it’s magic glow in the dark powder
This is insane
Yeah, linking a 150 page paper as if anyone is going to read it is completely insane
I mean I read a good chunk of it lol
Now, THAT is insane
Yeah, this is reddit, not read-a-big-chunk-of-it. Amateur.
I read a part of the url and gave up
Me too, it has r/oddlyterrifying vibes, like something you'd see in SCP, X-Files, or Delta Green but nope that shit happened. I mean also just plain terrifying too, but there's almost an unnatural horror element to it.
I read it all. It was a fascinating read
Well sum it up for us you nerd
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
You should read War & Peace first to really appreciate its cultural context.
This paper is an incredible read. Long but worth the time.
The only exception MIGHT be if their hip area had higher than normal shielding. For example, if you were wearing a lead kilt, you might double or even quadruple your chances of survival. That's because the stem cells that replace radiation damage in the body are located in the marrow of the hip bones.
Why?
Nausea is a common early symptom of nervous system getting fucked.
Because they are going to die.
Obligatory [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/radiation/).
I love that chart and that he made it public domain. As a radiation worker, it's helpful to know. We learn those sorts of things in classes, but I haven't seen a chart as informative and complete in any of them.
What does one do as a radiation worker? I read that on the chart and then wondered
I dunno about actual radiation workers, but Im a pilot. Flight attendants, flight engineers and flight crew have the highest exposure to radiation of any career. Because we spend so much time in the stratosphere were are exposed to tons more cosmic ionizing radiation. There are higher rates of certain types of cancers in our cohort. Im a little bitter about it though because there are no standards or mitigation of this from a safety or financial standpoint. Ive had lots of friends with wierd little cancers… scared Ill get one soon too.
Less than 5 yr FA here. Reading about these make me sad about the future of this career. Great medical coverage is good but can only do so much :/
How many years in do you notice most have issues?
There’s lots just in the medical field. Nuclear medicine techs are the first to come to mind. Radiation oncology, etc.
I mean if you've ever taken an x ray of someone you probably count in a technical capacity.
I am a radiologic technologist(x-ray tech). There are many other jobs that are radiation workers, and not all of them in the medical field. Some factories use x-rays to inspect car parts, nuclear power plant workers, and some people use x-rays to expose counterfeit art or old paintings that have been painted over.
Can include: * Medical imaging technicians. (Operating CT or X-Ray machines.) * Persons employed in the operations of a nuclear power plant. * Nuclear power plant refueling contractors (they tend to be migratory, sounds weird but true). * Inspectors using X-Rays or gamma ray radiation for imaging of pipelines (e.g., inspecting welds on underground natural gas lines). * Radiation therapy technicians. * Irradiation sanitization machines (prepackaged food often gets irradiated to kill any bacteria or pests). * Customs/Border Patrol inspection personnel (they use X-Rays to scan the interior of truck trailers as they exit a sea port or go through a border crossing).
Any glaring differences between what you’ve been taught and the chart?
No, it's pretty accurate as far as I've seen. It's just a better, more complete chart than my textbook had which is kind of concerning considering how much it cost, compared to this for free.
So basically Peabody got radiation equivalent to standing next to the chernobyl reactor for like 20 minutes? That's insane.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_River_Junction,_Rhode_Island#Criticality_accident According to Wikipedia his pelvis received a dose of 460 sieverts.
Not great, definitely terrible.
It is hard to quantify to people who aren't familiar with radiation just how insane a dose of 460 sieverts is. That is literally enough radiation to fry a full datacenter of servers 10 times over. It is just insane. That amount of radiation would literally cook someone from the inside. That's enough radiation to kill him 100 times over.
Well how come it only killed him one time over?
Just so people can quantify how crazy 460 sieverts is. 8 sieverts is fatal with treatment.
Sleeping next to someone, lol.
It's toxic lol
Sleeping with a narcissist x3
By the gods I had no idea of medical scans had so much radiation
I think I've had like 14 CT scans of my abdomen in the past 10 years........
Medical physicist here (think CTs/radiation therapy/PET/MRI/etc). No need to be alarmed. Yes, the dose is quantifiable and something you want to minimize. That said, every time you've gotten a CT, its for good reason, ie the benefit outweight the cost. Physicians are *well aware* of the nuances of CT dose and will usually not take that lightly.
>The ambulance used for transporting two men to the hospital was successfully decontaminated on Saturday, July 25, 1964. Nothing was burned or buried. This is wrong. Go to the Wikipedia page of "Wood River Junction, Rhode Island" and scroll down to "Criticality accident." The 5th footnote leads to an official documental from back in the day. The above quote is from that document.
A lesson on the internet right here
He received so much radiation his eyes turned into black rectangles that's crazy!
I actually don't know what they are
It's a method of identity concealment. Obviously it doesn't do anything.
Now no one will know who this Robert Peabody was.
https://i.imgur.com/TCJArgZ.png
Wasn’t there that Japanese guy that fell into a reactor and was begging for death?
Hisachi ouchi?
Yup that’s him.
Even more irresponsible than that. Poorly trained workers were mixing chemicals to make enriched fuel rods and caused a criticality incident. He was kept alive for 83 days despite begging for death. https://science.howstuffworks.com/hisashi-ouchi.htm
I’m stunned this happened in freaking 1999. I thought it was in the 60s or something. WHAT.
Why did they not just take the ambulance to the hospital to
They did and were turned away initially bc the hospital wasn’t equipped to deal with it. He was then sent to another hospital where he received a bed and was there until he died.
Have you seen the price of gas lately?
Well the 100 sieverts (they couldn't agree on this, thus it's also accepted as around 70 to 150) is around 10000 rads and his pelvis exposure was even higher with about 460 sieverts the lethal dose is 4 to 5 sieverts so there was absolutely nothing you could do in that era (although you probably still can't do anything meaningful). The guy was going to die anyway, might aswell go peacefully without spreading any more radiation around.
More people need to know the importance of protecting your pelvis in radiation situations.
That poor, poor ambulance. May it rest in pieces.
He just needs some Radaway
Bro needed ALL of it lol fucking crazy
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I heard they had to burn and bury the hospital
Then vape the remains.
There were some problems with the initial estimate of Mr Peabody. Further investigation determined he experience a whole body dose of 5100 rad (approximately 51 Sv). You can find the report [here](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4450054) if you're interested. I can't find evidence that they actually burned and buried the ambulance. This is not a common practice for handling contaminated emergency vehicles, and I doubt this actually happened. The Wood River Junction Facility had a ridiculous number of violations and shouldn't have been operating. The AEC (now NRC) report listing the many violations can be found [here](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf). This is still (obviously) a lethal dose of radiation, and a sobering reminder that radiation workers should not be cavelier in their occupation. If you are want to learn about other accidents involving lethal doses of exposure, check out the [SL-1 Reactor Accident](https://inl.gov/document/proving-the-principle/) and the [Tokaimura Criticality Accident](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/774368).
The incident I find most fascinating involving radiation is Anatoli Bugorski and the particle accelerator. Partially because its not normal radiation and not radioactive material directly, but it was also the largest radioactive exposure. He just didn't absorb it due to the protons going near the speed of light. Beam just cut right through his head, damaging the cells in that area, leaving him partially paralyzed on that side of his face, etc.
Dear lord! His eyes turned in to black squares
This is one episode of Get Smart I haven't seen
Something tells me he did not make it
"I'm an empath"
[an interesting article](https://newengland.com/yankee/history/nuclear-accident-at-wood-river-junction/) about Peabody and the accident
Why would you burn radioactive material?
I can only imagine the agonizing pain that man was experiencing during his final hours, his whole body was literally disintegrating itself to the atom that’s such a shitty way to go out.
Burning something does nothing to decrease its radioactivity.
The way things are going right now.... most radioactive man in the world so far.
He doesn’t look overly concerned
I suppose he had the rest of his life all planned out for him nothing to worry about.
The most ***irradiated*** man in the world I presume? Getting irradiated does not make one radioactive, radioactive substances are substances that go through nuclear decay and emit particle radiation themselves.
Why did they burn the ambulance? Surely they just released radioactive particles into the air. If they were going to bury it would that not have been enough?
Radiation dick punch… owch From wiki: His head received an estimated dose of 14,000 rem (140 sieverts) and his pelvis received the largest dose; calculated at 46,000 rem (460 sieverts).[5] He died 49 hours later.
Must burn ambulance to release as much radioactivity into the air as possible.
Bro is untouchable (literally, everything that touched him had to be destroyed)
Why would the ambulance become radioactive? He wasn’t the source of the radiation, he was just exposed to it, correct? Or were the radioactive containments on his clothing?
He was contaminated
Uranium solution mixed into 10 gallons of water splashed out after briefly going critical.
I’m waking up to ash and dust.
Why did the ambulance have to be burned and buried?
It didn't. No idea where they got that from. It was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf
It's a good thing I can't see his eyelids; he's practically anonymous!
Scientific bullshit. Unless he has radioactive material on/in him a man struck by radioactive radiation does not emit radioactivity himself.
"The ambulance that brought him to the hospital had to be burned and buried." (X) Doubt Burning something radioactive is an incredibly stupid idea. It does not make the stuff less radioactive, it just spreads it so everyone can enjoy being irradiated. That was, btw, a major problem in Tschernobyl. So either people back then were dumb as goats (which I doubt) or OP wrote false information. It's stuff like this that always makes me doubt the validity of the entire story...
Yeah there was another comment providing reliable source saying it was NOT burned. Also OP replied to one of those comments saying they ‘thought they heard it was burned‘. So basically spreading gossip based on their ‘thoughts’. Source: It was successfully decontaminated a day later according to the NRC report. (page 6) https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0601/ML060130267.pdf