It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.
This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a military base if you value the well-being of any children you might have.
>we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.
The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases, taking soil samples might be more expensive than walking around with a Geiger counter but it's well within the budgets of even local municipalities. The problem is that they don't really care all that much. Even something as simple as "standing far away from the pit where you're burning plastic," a practice that even law-breaking rural trash burners can manage, was too much for them in Iraq, shows you something about their institutional culture.
> The military has no problems detecting the chemicals that get leaked around bases
Even they will be hard pressed to detect chemical polutants at the extremely low concentrations that radiation can be trivially detected. But also, they know what to look for. What about everybody else in the area who don't even know what they should be looking for in the first place? With radioactive leaks it's easy, but DOW's chemical catalogue is thicker than a phonebook; you've got to be looking for something in particular or looking for half a billion different things all at once.
I'm not sure what you're saying - people living in towns near military bases do not* walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals. Maybe they should start, but I mean, that's not a good normal.
There are a lot of geiger counters around operated by various organizations. Every time there is a radioactive leak just about anywhere in the world, it is promptly discovered even if that government wants to keep it a secret. In fact it is practical for you to own your own geiger counter if you live near a nuclear facility and are worried about it. The equipment needed for general analytical chemistry, which you'd need to detect a great deal of chemical pollution, is a lot less practical. For some specific chemical pollutants, there simple and cheap tests which are practical for laypeople. But there's no such thing as a simple hand-held meter that will detect any arbitrary chemical pollutant.
Hence, chemical pollution very often goes unnoticed for decades until somebody starts to wonder why half the babies in town are born without brains.
The radioactivity accidents that are picked up by environmental sensors tend to be very large-scale. The little, nasty ones, like the mining source that was lost in Australia, tend to disappear.
Minuscule tritium emissions are detected around nuclear power plants all the time, far below the level at which anybody should be concerned.
There was even a case where alarms were sounded when a power plant worker was found to be radioactive due to radon in his home, which triggered detectors at work. The general chemical industry doesn't operate with anything even remotely close to this degree of care.
That's a gas, making it the easiest possible case. I think a more plausible threat are the decaying temporary storage containers that a lot of low-grade waste is sitting in because nobody can find a permanent location for it. (Yes, that's largely due to political reasons, but political reasons are real!)
A gas is quite difficult to detect because it diffuses. This also makes them typically less dangerous because diffusion also means dilution. Levels do matter. Tritium is also pretty low in terms of radioactivity. The radiation cannot penetrate the skin except in very high levels (you can find keychains, watches, gun sights, etc with small bits of tritium and phosphorous to create long term glow objects). Ingestion and inhalation are more serious since your internal organs are more susceptible (see weighted dosage). The real cool thing is that we can measure radiation with high precision and in real time, so we can detect these dangers. Mostly because these devices are cheap.
In addition to the requirement of a more active approach needed to detect ground/water contaminants there are also a larger variety of pollutants that are harmful. Many of these need specific tests, which can consume your samples. Of course we can do pretty good guesstimates for what we should look for, but we do need to recognize that the process is both more fuzzy and more involved. We can grow these projects by making them cheaper, but that's a tall order (it is happening though).
Edit: I do want to note that most radiation detection devices do not distinguish between types of radiation. These differences do matter in danger levels. This can add complications the above but there is a decent signal that is still useful. But as with everything, some expertise and domain knowledge is quite important.
From what I understand, in the case of the radon-contaminated nuclear worker, what they actually detected were the "radon daughters", the decay products of radon. Radon itself doesn't stick around very long, but when it decays it produces an atomic dust of polonium, lead, etc. That dust is what tripped the alarms.
Anything like that radioactive source from Australia would set of tons of alarms in a nuclear power plant. You wouldn't get it out the door. Incidents like that missing radioactive source in Australia happen where there are far fewer safeguards than at a nuclear power plant. Those sources generally go missing from abandoned medical equipment, food irradiation facilities, and that sort of thing. You'd be hard pressed to smuggle (let alone accidentally convey) something like a spent nuclear fuel pellet out of a power plant.
> people living in towns near military bases do not walk up and down the local creeks with Geiger counters any more than they compare soil samples against lists of plausibly leaked toxic chemicals
Not quite true. There are pretty big and active citizen based radiation detection projects [0,1,2,3]. The reason for this is that radiation monitors are quite cheap now and the same people who build weather systems often connect a geiger counter. They're cheap and sensitive since the gov spent so much money trying to detect radiation from space, across borders, and even the smallest traces on people (to detect spies, scientists, etc) all from the Cold War. There are also citizen based communities monitoring water and soil, but this does require more work from the participant. They have to go out and collect samples. Processing can be both expensive and quite a bit of work. This isn't the same as hooking up a $100 device to your weather station, which is a leave and forget type system.
We should note that both these communities are far more active in regions where there are greater dangers (history of nuclear sites/projects, oil facilities, military bases, etc). I'd also like to thank both these communities and others like them. They're all doing important work.
The soldiers who got sick from the burn pits often knew it was bad for them, but had to follow orders. Personal apathy on the part of people who are giving the orders is institutional apathy.
It tends to be a lot harder to detect too. With radioactive waste, we're fortunate to have very cheap and extremely sensitive instruments that can detect the tiniest leaks. This allows the nuclear industry to be held to a much higher standard than most other industries.
This is also the reason we can say with a high degree of confidence that first-world militaries have actually been very good at handling nuclear waste for a while now. The Manhattan Project era and a few years after that were very messy, but they have demonstrably cleaned up their act and figured out how to do things safely. Meanwhile the non-radioactive chemical pollution continues largely unabated. Never live near a military base if you value the well-being of any children you might have.