Story out of Salzburg, Austria:
A radioactive rock sat as part of a classroom display without anyone noticing for dozens of science lessons.
Nobody had realised that it was a lump of uranium, the metallic element which is used in nuclear reactors and even to produce atomic bombs.
It was giving off thousands of millisiverts of radiation into the school, a far higher amount than occurs naturally, but teachers only found out when an anti-nuclear campaigner Thomas Neff came into the science lab at Missionaries of the Sacred Heart School in Salzburg, Austria, to give a talk.
To help in his lecture, he brought a watch with him from the Sixties, which contained small amounts of radium so that its dial would light up in the dark. They were popular several decades ago, when people did not know as much about the dangers of radiation.
Even though the watch was carefully sealed, the Geiger counter still showed 1,200 counts per minute, which is 20 times the normal value.
When he took the counter around the room to measure the low levels of radiation which occur naturally, the counter started to go nuts when he walked past a group of display rocks, minerals and fossils.
Realising something was wrong, he stopped the lecture and alerted the school.
The discovery led to an alert around more schools in Salzberg, which unearthed 38 more lumps of uranium on display in school geology collections at 11 different schools. Cont.
Story from - Metro
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