I’ve spent 30 yrs doing radioactive waste management. I’ve shipped Cat1 sources, been part of the cleanup of broken 50,000Ci Cs-137* sources at a sterilizer, cleaned up many DoD ranges and sites, and shipped thousands of tons of contaminated soils. Trust me when I say if that were real the entire industry would be buzzing, and the person holding it would be dead.
Like the article someone linked above, this would be a story. There have been some sources that got loose in the wild, usually iridium from radiographers, not stuff from the actual nuclear community. When they do we all get lessons learned notifications.
Anything that big would have been bigger than Covid in my industry.
*if they were un-shielded those would make you a dead man walking if you just walked by one. I used to have pictures of the blue glow taken while I was standing on the grates above the pool with 1.27M curies of cobalt-60 from a similar facility.
