Also a close call in Mexico:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/04/248737662...

The equipment to detect high levels of radiation is very cheap.

Likewise the equipment to detect lead... And hundreds of other deadly pollutants.

Part of owning a house should involve getting it tested, perhaps once per 10 years, for all these contaminants. They might have been put in during construction - or it might be arsenic in the wood of your bed... Or a mixing mistake while making the plastic for your toothbrush handle... Or that mercury lightbulb someone smashed 50 years ago is still soaking through the foundations...

A simple test of the dust your vacuum cleaner picks up would detect most of the most hazardous stuff.

However contamination got into your house, there should be a government scheme to test for it, and possibly to remediate it too (environmental contamination can be seriously expensive to fix, and the last thing you want to happen is someone to hide it from an inspector and sell the house on to someone else)

Are there testing services you’ve used before or would recommend to perform the testing? There does not seem to be a major brand or service provider offering this. Thank you!

Not a direct answer, but there are lead testing kits on Amazon. You mail a tap water sample to a lab. The “kit” is not much more than a vial and prepaid shipping label on a small box.

Yeah it sounds amazing in theory, but none of us have the time to figure that out. It's just way too complicated. It needs to be dumbed down so that you contact one single company, they send a guy over with a bunch of kits and translates it into an easily understandable how-fucked-are-you score, with upsells for improving your score.

Sounds like a business opportunity

This kind of thing exists and is rife with head office pushing iffy practices to boost the detection - e.g. sampling a bigger area than the official measurement equation requires etc.

Lots of problems with ‘meth detection’ companies that over-detect then sell you tens of thousands of dollars of remediation services.

Do not use lead testing kits. They’re a waste of money. The best thing to do would be to find an EPA-licensed lead profession to test your property with an XRF gun. You get a breakdown of every place in your house, inside and out.

As long as people understand what's a safe level of contamination. There was a problem in New Zealand a few years ago when somebody misread a document describing the level of meth residue that should remain after cleaning up a meth lab and as a result, a whole little meth testing industry popped up and people were selling their houses cheap because of very light contamination being detected. Even an elderly lady in a state house was kicked out because her grandson had smoked meth while visiting. Turned out, that threshold was much lower than the actual safe level for the initial contamination and all these people were screwed over.

I had a friend who was employed by one of the dodgy New Zealand testing companies.

Her facebook feed was full of lots of articles that deliberately confused the contamination from household meth labs with contamination from people who just used meth.

Most Americans would still choose not to do this because any knowledge of a positive lead test means that you need to report it when you sell your house which might effect resale value.

The large majority (>90%) of houses built before 1940 have lead paint in them somewhere and lead paint wasn't banned until 1970 in the US so many older houses still have lead paint somewhere

You could have just said "Most Americans are greedy"

Presumably if you care about testing for lead, you'd also care enough to have it dealt with while you are living there.

Is there any reason to care about interior lead paint if it’s under several more recent lead free layers and not chipping off?

Not particularly if it's dry and sealed in, however ..

In a rising damp, wall wicking water scenario the lead may be leached out from the paint and transported to, say, food being grown near house.

The US had long term issues from lead in the water (being ingested) so there's a similar danger here if the lead isn't stable on the wall behind sealing layers.

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For Flint, Michigan [1] (the recent times big news event) and other cities it was lead from pipes:

    Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.

ie. Lead leached by water from a lead source (be that paint, pipes, or gasoline particulate residue)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Nope, but some homeowners do not know the dangers of lead dust and can get home renovations done without taking the proper precautions.

Lead and asbestos are like the C programming language. In certain very controlled situations they can be perfectly fine. Only in the real world that rarely ever happens.

What we really need is a government scheme for realtime detection built into phones. There are plenty of research papers, hard to believe it's truly impossible to make a consumer grade Bluetooth mini LIBS or at least a scintillation counter in a phone, or a microscope that can look at dust in the air to find asbestos, etc.

I've even heard of work on realtime virus detection.

There are various Geiger counter apps that work by taping something over the camera such that it's blacked out, and then measuring excitement of the CMOS sensor by gamma rays.

These apps have been found to work but only for gamma, sensitivity isn't great, I have seen it described as an "am I already screwed?" detector app.

this seems to happen quite frequently according to a linked article about orphan sources.

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

Stuff like that is frightening to me because they're known incidents. I wonder if there's a way to estimate the number of unknown ones.

> The lumberjacks were scavenging the forest for firewood, when they came across two metal cylinders melting snow within a one meter radius laying in the road. They picked up these objects to use as personal heaters, sleeping with their backs to them.

Sure. Free heater! That doesn’t look ominous at all.

But I guess that’s hindsight speaking. Because who’d expect two major radioactive sources to just be lying next to the road :/

There is a video game about this event called The Lights of Svetlov. It was a great indie game, and I had no idea what it was about so the mystery unraveling in front of you was quite impactful.

For something close to home look here: https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/health... - radioactive gold jewellery because someone somewhere in upstate New York State got their hands on some radon seeds and mixed those in with the rest of the scrap gold.

There's documented incidents of radiation burns (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/33268...) and cancer (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1451360/).

Really interesting.

At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a "List of all Civilian Radiation accidents[0], which has at least 50 more cited situations since the 1950s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...