As with 99.9% of the stories about uranium and radiation, ignorance and fear were the common denominator.
By far, CNN(!) has had the best mass consumer coverage on the situation from a scientific point of view. None of the reporting I’ve seen, however, has any concrete numbers showing how serious the threat was.
This is what CNN has to say:
Anna Erickson, associate professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at Georgia Tech, said the uranium exposure at the museum is unlikely to have been hazardous to visitors.
"Uranium ore contains natural (unenriched) uranium which emits relatively low amounts of radiation," Erickson said. "Given the extremely low reading (zero above background) 5 feet away from the bucket, I'm skeptical there could be any health hazards associated with visiting the exhibit."
In other words, all you folks who are congratulating yourself for cancelling or foregoing vacations to the Grand Canyon and this museum in particular are congratulating yourself for avoiding a risk that simply doesn’t exist.
Elston Stephenson, the park’s safety, health, and wellness manager, is right to be concerned about chronic exposure to the uranium by park staff. Maybe. The lack of any numbers showing how much radiation was being emitted within that 5-foot circle makes it difficult to determine the chronic risk to workers who may have lingered for a long time within five feet of the buckets.
The Verge, however, is doing the public a lot better with their story, as is The Arizona Republic with a story of its own.
The Verge interviewed Kathryn Higley, head of the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University, who said in part:
Without knowing exactly how it was stored, looking at some of the measurements that were taken, the radiation readings certainly are above what you’d consider the normal background. But the likelihood of people receiving serious radiation exposures is extremely unlikely. People work around uranium in the process of manufacturing fuel, for example. But also I’m looking here on the radiation levels taken by some park personnel, and it says five feet from the bucket is basically a zero reading.
So you see the dose rate drops off really, really quickly as you move away from the source. It’s a combination of dose rate and the length of time that they would’ve been exposed to it. And they’re not going to be hugging this thing and lugging it around for extended periods of time. I’m not seeing a health risk. I’m seeing people being sloppy and did some things that they really shouldn’t have done. And they’re probably going to get a nasty note from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, like “Why do you have this in a closet? What are you doing with it?”
The Arizona Republic found other experts, who basically say the same thing. (Although the AR article contains a glaring error – noting that gamma radiation can be stopped by a person’s skin or a sheet of paper; that’s absolutely not true, and that gamma radiation is the principal radiation coming from the ore, but is rather properties of alpha radiation, which is principally what uranium ore emits.
Clearly, the authors of the AR article should have said the uranium is emitting alpha radiation, not gamma.
More damage done there by incorrect reporting than by the radioactive ore itself.
To me, the most frightening thing about this story is the continued ignorance of the real dangers of radiation, and the lack of hard numbers in reporting on incidents such as this.
Truth is, you’re sucking in all sorts of radioactivity all the time. Behold.
I’m not saying I’d want to camp out sitting on buckets of uranium ore – without moving – for 20 years. But the risk of getting cancer from these buckets of ore is unbelievably small.
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