whole thing was blown to smithereens.

From my reading of wiki that would give someone a fatal dose in about a week of exposure.

Radiation dosage drops exponentially with distance from a point source. Doubling the distance would reduce the exposure by 75%. In addition the article was merging both gamma and beta sources. Beta can be neutralized by street clothing or a sheet of aluminum foil. It is capable of giving a skin dose, and is only really dangerous if ingested.

So it could give a fatal dose, if you duct taped the object to someones chest for a week. But just walking by it when it's 15 feet away and buried on the beach you're unlikely to get much of anything above background.

Plus, you have to wonder what other detritus of that nature is out there. I am sure it didn't get contaminated in isolation from other stuff.

But they do it beyond 12 nautical miles of the shore, and they say that's OK.

There's also a cave somewhere, I think Appalachia, that if you enter it you will die. Simply because it's filled with a naturally occurring radioactive isotope.

I've seen pictures of a guy who put a test source for checking the integrity of pipes into his back pocket for a couple hours. He ended up with a very gnarly sunburn on his butt that they subsequently take pictures of and show to everyone about what not to do.

Wear those for 48 hours and get the maximum annual dose permitted US radiation workers.

Wear the plastic for 90 minutes and get the maximum.

if I were looking for objects with high radiation, that's where I'd go.

maybe beach walkers and clean-up people should wear rad badges.

In their readings, back in 2011. That substance has a 37 year half life - so two years is not very significant.

IIRC, radiation monitoring stations were shut down in California when it looked bad, and no one in the government wanted us to know about it.