On July 16 1945, The US Government made the first nuclear bomb test at a place in New Mexico desert.
This place is named as Trinity Site. It was a top secret mission even the then Governor of New Mexico was not known about this mission.
But, Kodak a film company located in New York which is far away from this site found out this top secret mission. How?
Kodak found out that their X-ray films had been exposed to radiation even before taking out from its packaging.
This led them curious and they started to find the cause for this. Initially they concluded that the exposure was due to the presence of naturally occurring radioactive substances present in the packaging material.
So from then, they strictly monitored the manufacturing of packaging materials and the problem never occurred until a batch manufactured in 6th August 1945. The films were already exposed to radiation before using them.
Again the company went on to solve this problem but this time they found out the truth.
After several tests they found out the presence of other radio active materials like cerium which can occur only from a nuclear fission reactions.
So, how did cerium end up in the packaging material ? When the nuclear fission reaction occurs in the core of the bomb, the core splits up into number of radio active isotopes.
These radio active substances are carried away by the wind to the atmosphere and they fall back to earth along with the rain. This is called “Radio active fallout”.
In this way the radio active materials end up in river waters and soils. When this contaminated water is used in manufacturing process it also contaminates the products.
And this is how the Kodak films got exposed prior to using them.
