What is going on with all this radioactive shrimp?(www.consumerreports.org)
129 pointsby riffraff4 months ago13 comments
  • perihelions4 months ago
    What was the local impact of this pollution incident?

    > "Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed. Investigators think that radioactive dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap metal containing cesium-137. “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind,”..."

    • sampo4 months ago
      > Radiation scans revealed at least 22 plants in the industrial zone were contaminated. The Indonesian taskforce did not name the 21 other production facilities, but said they would immediately undergo decontamination procedures conducted by Indonesia’s nuclear agency.

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/09/radioactive-sh...

  • comrade12344 months ago
    > “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack
    • pixl974 months ago
      Which is highly concerning in itself. A ban on any steel imports from that country should happen immediately and strict requirements on preprocess detection and post process radiation levels should be put in place.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

      Is the classic example of what happens when you don't do rad checking at the foundry. You can end up with a highly radiated piece that ends up right beside someone for half their life giving them cancer the entire time.

      • potato37328424 months ago
        What kind of hyperbolic alarmism is this? You don't need to ban anything. Just scan it for radioactivity. Radiation is a lot easier to detect than any other contamination because it pretty much announces itself.

        The radiation levels we're talking about here are so low that you could make a bed frame out of it and it'd be fine.

      • amy_petrik4 months ago
        [flagged]
  • ggm4 months ago
    Half life tracking presumably would give a "birthday" for the cesium-137 source. Given they suspect scrap contamination in a recycling smelter, its at best informing to root cause. That, and the length of the tail yet to come as it passes down the ladder.
    • addaon4 months ago
      “Half life tracking” isn’t really a thing — decay is a memory-less process (by definition), so there’s no distinction in decay rate between a lot of old Cesium 137, and a bit of young Cesium 137. The way to put an age on the contamination is by looking at the ratio of Cesium 137 and Barium 137, which presumedly someone has done…
      • perihelions4 months ago
        > "by looking at the ratio of Cesium 137 and Barium 137, which presumedly someone has done…"

        That's impractical; the decay product Ba-137 is stable and already present in much larger amounts, compared against which the Cs-137 decay products are undetectable.

      • ggm4 months ago
        Thank you for clarifying. My intent was where you get to, badly understood and expressed.
      • klodolph4 months ago
        (Decay isn’t memory-less by definition, but we’ve empirically observed that it’s memory-less, and our current theories model it as memory-less. This is the opposite of “by definition”—“by observation” or “empirically”.)
      • jgalt2124 months ago
        For similar reasons, Carbon Dating is relatively low precision.
        • nisegami4 months ago
          I don't think it's the same situation, since there's a rough baseline rate of carbon-14 in nature (relative to carbon-12) which is continually replenished while alive. When it dies, there's no more carbon-14 added to the system, so we can determine how much is "left" from the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12. But there was no fixed % of ceaseium-137 to start with here, so we can't use the current % to determine age.
  • burnt-resistor4 months ago
    Protectionist regimes and opaque supply chains that aim to maximize profits above all else aren't motivated to provide honest answers, only a least-damaging public relations narrative.
  • sampo4 months ago
    Wikipedia page doesn't have any estimates on when the contamination event might have started (so products processed before that would be safe). It only tells that the food recall in the US started 2 months ago.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_radioactive_shrimp_recall

  • zarzavat4 months ago
    See also: Prachin Buri radiation incident. It's unclear what, if any, link there is between the two incidents.

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

    https://qz.com/thailand-radioactive-cylinder-found-foundry-1...

  • 4 months ago
    undefined
  • JoelMcCracken4 months ago
    So, as an aside, I think consumer reports could do so much to embrace the digital era and access new generations of consumers.

    My parents read it regularly, and I subscribed for a year or two about a decade ago and felt so strongly how it hadn’t seemed to change since I was a kid in 1990s. And as I’m deep in tech, I feel the lack of content and communication.

  • 8ig84 months ago
    Fun, short podcast covering the topic last time it was in the news...

    https://www.riskyornot.co/episodes/815-radioactive-shrimp

    > Risky or Not? Radioactive Shrimp

    > Dr. Don and Professor Ben talk about the risks of eating shrimp impacted by the recent recall.

  • nobodyandproud4 months ago
    Great, transparent investigation by the Indonesian authorities.
  • metalman4 months ago
    [flagged]
    • pixl974 months ago
      Also very worrying they don't have detection at the recycling input stream. You'd think everyone would have learned from the Mexico event.
      • inferiorhuman4 months ago
        Indonesia accepts a ton of plastic waste for "recycling" in spite of actually banning the importation of plastic waste. The plastic waste (much of it from the west) is recycled by burning it in e.g. tofu factories.

        If they can't manage to not burn toxic plastic to cook food I doubt process around handling radioactive material is high up on the list of priorities.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV9v0RIE-iI

      • yard20104 months ago
        > Vicente Sotelo Alardín, then an employee of the medical center, dismantled the unit on December 6, 1983, to sell it as scrap metal at the Fénix junkyard at the request of the hospital's maintenance manager. Sotelo had disassembled the head of the radioactive unit and extracted a cylinder containing the cobalt-60 source. He then loaded the material into his truck, where he drilled into the cylinder, causing some cobalt-60 granules to spill into the bed of the vehicle. The truck, now contaminated by the cobalt-60, subsequently suffered a mechanical failure upon Sotelo's return from the junkyard and remained immobile near his home in Ciudad Juárez for 40 days.

        Oh my god, what an idiot.

        • oneshtein4 months ago
          > at the request of the hospital's maintenance manager

          This one?

      • voidUpdate4 months ago
        Or any one of the many orphan source -> scrap metal events, which happens scarily often
      • CGMthrowaway4 months ago
        Or the Brazil one, with children
    • akdor11544 months ago
      Umm as per the article, it's not from Thailand at all? It's from Java/Indonesia?
  • bigbrained1244 months ago
    [flagged]
  • sierra10114 months ago
    This is a dupe from like, last week.
    • bell-cot4 months ago
      Actually, it's from HN's Second Chance Pool:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

      https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

      Vs. you can click on the "(consumerreports.org)" link in the title, to quickly see if something is an actual duplicate submission.

      Also notice how the "X [hours|days] ago" text changes, depending on context. Vs. the mouseover timestamp for that is always the original submission time.

      • sierra10114 months ago
        Hah, thanks for sharing this, TIL.

        I just remembered the headline from a few days ago and (on mobile) could not find it again, coming to the incorrect conclusion. Mea culpa.