Your Russian story is a little off. It was strontium-90 isotope from the rtg and of the three guys who found it, only one of them died, after like 3 years of pain, suffering, and surgeries. One of the others took surgeries and like a year to recover. It’s known as the Lia incident. The poor guys were out in the winter snow way up in some woods and snow and found the two containers of strontium after seeing steam rolling off of them and no snow anywhere around them. Then decided these magical lil containers that looked old as hell and were still literally too hot to hold would be great to carry around and camp up against to keep nice and warm. It happened around 2001, but I’m sure a lot of people around the globe wouldn’t put two and two together about not messing with mystery hot boxes found in bfe.
Your Russian story is a little off. It was strontium-90 isotope from the rtg and of the three guys who found it, only one of them died, after like 3 years of pain, suffering, and surgeries. One of the others took surgeries and like a year to recover. It’s known as the Lia incident. The poor guys were out in the winter snow way up in some woods and snow and found the two containers of strontium after seeing steam rolling off of them and no snow anywhere around them. Then decided these magical lil containers that looked old as hell and were still literally too hot to hold would be great to carry around and camp up against to keep nice and warm. It happened around 2001, but I’m sure a lot of people around the globe wouldn’t put two and two together about not messing with mystery hot boxes found in bfe.
-Used to be an emergency haz mat tech.