this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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I remember my senior advisor student tellimg me a story how she went to industrial lab internship in a hospital with these things.
They had their own little collider there. They made synthetic radioactive cocaine to study something in the brain.
They didn't measure the drug dosage, they just filled the syringe and waited holding it near a radiation counter for radiation to drop to desired level.
Once she spilled something and dipped her hand in it. She was told to hold a hand away rfom the body for a day - on a train ride home, in shower, in sleep - to protect internal organs. Next day, radiation was gone, down to natural level.
These things are amazing.
That liquid must have had a hell of an ability to be absorbed into skin if she wasn't able to remove the contamination by just washing her hand.
The fact that they let her leave the controlled area makes me think the activity was low enough that holding her hand away from her was probably overkill. If you're contaminated enough that it's a risk to your organs, most radiation safety officers aren't going to let you leave the controlled area lol
At the radiopharm manufactory I used to work at, we had a guy accidentally inject his finger with the QC sample. Fortunately it was low enough activity that he was able to leave by the end of his shift. It was really stupid that the QC sample syringe was capped with a needle instead of a blunt syringe cap, but changing the manufacturing protocol to allow capping with a new type of device would have required FDA oversight.
The first thing I always did during my QC testing was remove the needle and yeet it directly in the rad sharps waste container, cuz fuuuuck that.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my story was happening in Moscow. Radiation safety rules there are... unusual. You get slapped for handling a thorium chunk in an explicitly hot environmental lab outside of fume hood, then dump ion exchange resin flush down the drain. You get strict access control in Kurchatov institute with weeks prior to entry to submit documents just to get to a meeting room, but then the same area has radioactive waste dumped between the trees in forested area (yes, it's in center of the city with many times more people than my whole country).
And then it's regular ALARA. For that girl, that is, screw them those bystanders on the train. Clearly the fancy hospital with all that gear was one of those damned places where government and oligarchs get patched up and regular people are only experimental test samples, and they made no secret out of that.
this explains a lot, lol. especially the "your hand is hot enough to worry about but sure go ahead get on a crowded train"
As Long As Radiation AintNearMe lol
drains always bothered the hell out of me because we were told to wash our hands in the regular sink if we got them contaminated. granted, 99% of our shit had a 2 hour half life, but still... I asked our RSO if we had a portal monitor around the building's sewer outtake and he was like "lol no. also don't do anything where we'd need one."