Posted on 06/13/2014 9:28:20 AM PDT by opentalk
A device containing radioactive substances was stolen from a government research facility and authorities are working to track it down, Mexico's No. 2 official said.
"We have the report regarding the theft of this material and the alerts and protocol we follow in these cases have already been implemented," Government Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told reporters after speaking at a conference of state law enforcement chiefs and attorneys general.
Exposure to the cesium-37 and americium-beryllium inside the stolen piece of equipment is not likely to cause permanent injury, the central government said in an alert distributed to authorities in Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Guerrero, Michoacan, Guanajuato, Queretaro, Hidalgo, Oaxaca and Veracruz.
A group of armed men grabbed the device Sunday night during an assault on a National Construction Laboratory warehouse in Tultitlan, Mexico state.
(Excerpt) Read more at latino.foxnews.com ...
Ten bucks says that it was in Arizona with 6 hours of having been taken.
I wonder if Doc Brown has it for his flux capacitor.
Pack it on some Mexican kids and march them onto a military base.
Naturally no mention of quantities of material, and there is no cesium 37. AmBe is a neutron source.
Cesium 137........... Reporters don’t take science classes in jernalizm skool.................
Anybody check e-Bay?
Can’t believe they seized the Cesium.
That was June 8th and the news about the theft was finally released on June 12. It's a guess that the thieves might be more than a few miles away after four days.
On a truck heading over our border. Meanwhile, ICE is changing diapers and warming milk. Obama is a DISGRACE!
I’m familiar with it, I have a microcurie right now, using it to calibrate an HPGE detector.
It’s simple enough for a “journalist” to fact check things and research the story to the point where you can say “an industrial gauging source containing x microcuries of Cs137 and a 15 uCi neutron source containing AmBe was stolen last night < picture of device >. If unopened the gauge is not dangerous. Anyone seeing a device like this please call xxx-xxx-xxxx”.
Half of it will be gone in 30 years anyways.........................
Being semi science illiterate, I’m going to ask a dumb question:
Could the robbers be more interested in the “piece of equipment” asa whole rather than just the Cesium 137 inside it?
I know dumb question be I gotta ask....
lol
Isn’t this the second batch of radioactive material stolen in Mexico in the last year?
Did they recover the first batch?
I remember a story about finding a couple of contaminated bodies, but nothing else.
It’s a Troxler - a portable device used to measure the density of soil, asphalt, etc. You have probably driven by dozens or hundreds of them in use.
As long as someone doesn’t eat the radioactive source, there is little risk. The thieves grabbed it to sell it back. But that wouldn’t be dramatic enough for a “reporter.”
Last December, armed robbers stole a truck transporting cobalt-60 from a hospital in the northwestern border city of Tijuana to a radioactive waste storage center.
Mexican authorities located the truck and the radioactive material days later and arrested six people in connection with the heist
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