Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand

Re:Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand by mikewarot on Monday March 20, 2023 @03:26PM (#35237238)

So they took a vessel with a reactive alkaline liquid in it and smelted it? The vaporized cloud could spread far and wide.

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Re:Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand by drjasonharrison on Monday March 20, 2023 @07:35PM (#35240417)

A solid piece of steel/iron with an inner container of cesium. Hopefully they didn't try to disassemble it.

Cesium (from wikipedia) "It is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature."

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Re:Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand by gus_massa on Monday March 20, 2023 @08:15PM (#35240779)

Metallic Cesium reacts too fast with Oxygen. They are using a salt with Cesium.

For obvious reasons it's easier to find videos with metallic Sodium instead of metallic Cesium. Both are chemically similar and react with Oxygen very fast and must be stored protected from Oxygen, and water, and many other things. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u20yy-CycGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmcfsEEogxs

It's very difficult to store metallic Sodium, but it's quite easy to store Sodium salts.

The relevant paragraph in Wikipedia is

> Also the higher specific activity caesium sources tend to be made from very soluble caesium chloride (CsCl), as a result if a radiography source was damaged it would increase the spread of the contamination. It is possible to make water insoluble caesium sources (with various ferrocyanide compounds such as Ni 2Fe(CN) 6, and ammonium ferric hexacyano ferrate (AFCF), Giese salt, ferric ammonium ferrocyanide) but their specific activity will be much lower.

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Re:Cesium-137 missing and found in junk yard in Thailand by gus_massa on Monday March 20, 2023 @08:02PM (#35240682)

It was a vessel with a Cesium salt, not a liquid. Cesium is very heavy, so my guess is that it doesn't evaporate too much.

Even if it was disolved in water, imagine boiling water with table salt. The water goes away, but the salt is left at the bottom.

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