The (very mildly)
radioactive shrimp and cloves from Indonesia have me wondering what kind of lost source incident must have happened before a little bit of that radioactive contamination found its way into a lab a continent away.
I guess the main concern / the reason for recalls is that nobody knows how it ended up in there and how much more radioactive some earlier shipment could have been (to contaminate the machinery enough to result in the detected shipment).
edit: also they don't mention any other fission products to go with it, so it really sounds like there was some sort of very nasty lost source accident that we are only seeing very dilute consequences of. Perhaps a scrapyard melted a radiotherapy device and a little bit of it ended up in the food processing plant.
edit:
Let's suppose someone smelted a radiotherapy source at a scrapyard. It gets spread over a number of square kilometers, most of it gets washed off into the drains etc. Suppose that only one billionth of the original source actually ends up mixed into the food at a food processing plant a few km away. Contaminating 1 ton of food to 70 Bq/kg . That gets us 70 TBq in the original source. No coincidence since I picked the numbers to try to see if it can be as big as Goiânia accident.
How-ever I think about it, unless they took some tiny tiny source and mixed it directly with shrimp and cloves, it got to have been originally something quite serious to end up contaminating the plant enough.
