Researchers Race To Recover Radioactive Rabbits 145
Ponca City writes "The Tri-City Herald reports that radioactive rabbit droppings were recently found near the old Hanford Nuclear Site in southeast Washington that produced nuclear materials for 40 years and is now being decontaminated. The Department of Health looks for contamination off-site to make sure there is no public hazard and a rabbit trapped at the 300 Area caught their attention because it was close enough to the site's boundaries to potentially come in contact with the public. Joe Franco, an assistant manager for the Department of Energy, said workers erected fences, removed potential food sources and even sprayed the scent of a predator around the perimeter to prevent any other rabbit contamination and the Department of Energy said only one of 18 rabbits surveyed were deemed contaminated. Researchers narrowed the area of possible contamination to the 327 Building used during the Cold War for testing highly radioactive materials, particularly fuel elements and cladding that were irradiated at Hanford reactors as part of plutonium production for the nation's nuclear weapons program. Because the number of contaminated droppings being discovered on-site has decreased, officials now believe it's possible that just one rabbit might have been contaminated and they now are finding old droppings from it."
Science (Score:5, Informative)
Despite the common belief and what bad scifi would tell you, rabbits (and other things) don't become radioactive when exposed to radiation.
In this case, the rabbit likely consumed radioactive materials, meaning that it is contaminated with radioactive materials. The rabbit itself though, is not radioactive.
The radioactivity is not contagious and the fear is not that someone will pet the radioactive rabbit and become radioactive themself. The problem would be if a hunter caught the rabbit and ate it. Then he/she would ingest both the rabbit and the radioactive materials, putting him/her at higher risk for certain diseases (most notably cancer). However, he/she would not be radioactive either.
Re:Science (Score:5, Informative)
Just to elaborate, if this rabbit mates, it's children will not be radioactive nor will they receive radioactive materials. The problem is only with this generation.
Recommended Reading ... (Score:3, Informative)
"The Plague Dogs" is the third novel by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, about two dogs who escape an animal testing facility and are subsequently pursued by both the government and the media.
There is also an 1982 animated film based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Richard Adams. The film was written-for-screen, directed and produced by Martin Rosen, who also directed Watership Down
Rowf (a Labrador-mix) and Snitter (a smooth fox terrier) are two of many dogs used for experimental purposes at an animal research facility in the Lake District of north-western England. They manage to escape, but initially relieved and eager to experience their new freedom, the dogs are soon faced not only with the realities of life in the wild but with another more terrifying realization--they are being hunted by their former captors. As they wander about aimlessly, the army and the media are roped into the pursuit, driven by rumors of the pair carrying bubonic plague and murdering sheep and even humans.
Re:fucking like bunnies (Score:3, Informative)
Suppose they were fucking like bunnies and their growth follows the fibonacci sequence. Then what? Radioactive bunnies bunnies taking over the world?
Well, there has been something similar. [imdb.com]
Re:Nuclear Paranoia (Score:3, Informative)
While beta radiation out side the skin is not that bad, a beta or even alpha source inside the body is very very bad. This is how Alexander Litvinenko was killed. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium [wikipedia.org]
Re:Nuclear Paranoia (Score:1, Informative)
In addition, radioactive materials are less dangerous to animals for a simple reason- the don't live as long as us so they are less likely to develop and die from cancer caused by radioactivity. Also, they are usually able to breed within a couple of years, so they can still reproduce even if they are severely irradiated and do eventually die of cancer. Humans take ~20 years to reach normal childbearing age, plenty of time to die from cancer.
However, its also about length of exposure. If you handled an extremely radioactive rabbit dropping, your chance of developing cancer might increase 2% over your lifetime, probably similar to getting a few dental x-rays. But if you lived next to Chernobyl, your chances would obviously be much higher.
Re:Now that's cool (Score:1, Informative)
From the wabbit's perspective, much of the nasty stuff is pooped right back out again.
The point - as everyone on this thread has seemed to miss - isn't that the wabbits are wadioactive. It's not that Elmer might finally catch one and increase his lifetime w(OK, I'll stop, honest!)risk of cancer by a miniscule percentage when he eats it.
The point is that if there's enough to make even one rabbit's poop hot, then there must be some unknown hotter source on the site. Tricky part is finding it.
Could be a long-lost barrel of goo that finally leaked, and a rabbit walked through the goo and licked its paws. (But that would probably have been found by now.)
More likely, it's a long-lost barrel of goo buried beneath a few tons of dirt - with a few pounds of rabbit food growing in it - is the source. (That's important to find. It's also a minor hazard to the cleanup crew.)
Problem is, it could also be a long-lost pile of barrels of goo that are all leaking, and there could be hundreds of tons of dirt that need to be excavated sooner, rather than later, before the goo hits the water table. (That's really important to find. It's not just a serious hazard to the cleanup guys, it's a hazard to everyone who uses that aquifer for drinking water.)
Lost in all the fearmongering is the fact that this is the first place on the planet where anyone tried to work with this stuff, and at the time, they really didn't know any better. We've learned a lot about health physics since then (unfortunately, we learned a lot of it it the hard way), and we've gotten a lot more diligent at not letting the crap leak in the first place. We're also really good at detecting it than we were back then, so we're actually capable of finding it and cleaning it up before it does any more harm.
Anyways, the reason they're hunting wabbits isn't because the bunnies are scary. It's because they need to know where the wadioactive susbstances got into the wabbits in the first place.
(If you played Fallout 3, think back to Vault 87? The goo in the room was an indicator of just how hot things were at the surface. The levels in the real world are lower by a factor of billions, but that's essentially what's going on here.)
Nuclear Paranoia (Not) (Score:4, Informative)
Cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than as a radioactive source and the level of Cessium was insufficient to kill the rabbit via toxicity, because it's still only as toxic as common salt. When Cesium decays it emits Beta radiation which doesn't penetrate heavy clothing and barely penetrates the skin. The level of Radioactivity was insufficient to kill the rabbit but they still go to all that trouble to track it down. All the hallmarks of Nuclear Paranoia.
Any sample of Cesium-137 also emits strong gamma rays - 662 keV - due to its decay product Ba-137m with a half life of 2.55 minutes. So yes, handling anything containing Cs-137 is irradiating your internal organs at the same time. It has been used for radiography in medicine for decades. Check out the Goiania Brazil disaster where hundreds were significantly exposed to an old Cs-137 source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident). I have no idea where you are getting this "cesium is more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal" nonsense.
The problem is that the rabbits on the reservation are distributing lumps of long-lived radiation (Cs-137 and Sr-90 are both commonly found) that considerably exceed safety standards (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/science/earth/15rabbit.html ). This means they have a legal responsibility to control this exposure. Note also that low-level exposure to radiation causes a cumulative increase in cancer risk, so the fact that no one will show symptoms from handling radioactive rabbit poop does not mean it is "safe".