"Thorium Park: Glow in the Dark" Cache
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This is a simple yet tricky cache to find and extract.
There is a little path to help you get down to it. It is close to the edge by the river, so during high tide you may get your hands a little wet!
Be careful, there are a lot of muggles around during the daytime, usually right after school lets out, so use your stealth!
This cache is well hidden due to the high flow of muggles, so please hide it well!
Congrats to Michaelcycle FTF!
It is located in the "University Ave Park" also called 'Thorium Park' to some locals as a joke because it is located next to the Thorium cleanup Superfund site.
There is also an urban legend claiming that the satellite pictures of Gloucester show that the city ......
glows in the dark!
And here's why...
At the turn of the of the 20th century, Camden and Gloucester City, NJ, were the center of incandescent gas mantle manufacturing in the United States. Long before electricity became the primary U.S. power source, it was estimated that Americans used 40 million mantles per year to light gas lamps in homes, offices, and streetlights.
To make gas lamps glow brighter, they utilized a thorium extract as a constituent to coat each cloth mantle, which burned in the flame of the gas lamps. Unfortunately, thorium is a radionuclide that emits alpha, beta, and gamma radiation during its radioactive decay, and has a half life of 14 billion years.
Production of these gas mantles lasted from the late 1890s to 1941, sometimes producing as many as 250,000 per day. These lamps left a legacy of soil contaminated by thorium and other radioactive materials.
To date, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has begun the first phase of the soil cleanup on 14 residential homes, a private swim club, and a County road.
EPA states that the town is perfectly safe and estimates the rest of the cleanup of the site will only take approximately five years to complete.
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