Ramana - I did look at those numbers carefully. (BTW in my comment, I was talking about WSJ article) ... In any case my point is it's not just "wrong unit"
it makes NO sense. (at least to me, to be very helpful)
So for example:
Hospital sources = 200Units
Sources found 20R and 1000R.
Most likely the 1000R is rad waste imported incorrectly
The other 20R sources are most likely contaminated material.
Can't make anything useful info out of this.
FWIW: Here is some primer (I am just quoting from top of my head - numbers just rough estimates - check out references for accuracy) - may be helpful to others to fill in the gap--
The basic unit of any Co-60
source one buys is
Curie or Becquerel
Curie = appox 1 gm of radium = 3.7*10^10 Bq (Bq just means 1 disintegration per second)
1 gm of Pure Co-60 would be about 1000 times more than Ra, So this will be about 1000 Ci/gm
Typical sources you buy (without NRC permission) for physics lab contains about 1 micro curie (10^(-6) Ci)
Typical Medical/Industrial sources can vary a lot (Not familiar with typical use in India - perhaps some one can put a better number)
but irradiation typically has 0.5 gm of Co-60 ( about 500 Ci or more)
(For perspective a 3cmx2mm(diameter) cobalt pin would be around 0.8 gm. Of course, only a (tiny) fraction of that may consist of radioactive isotope)
Now it may make sense for irradiation (where you control how close the object comes to source) etc to give statement like '200R' source but that's when one knows the geometry - that is how far the object is from the source etc - to estimate the quantity/strength. -
Now,
0.8 gm of pure co-60 would give about 1000-2000 R/Hr at about 1 meter away .. (Again rough- order of magnitude calculation) but decrease the distance to 1cm, and you have 10,000 x (that is 10 million R/Hr) ...
So you see, 2000R/Hr is, to put it mildly,
useless unless one also tells how far the source was from the radiation meter. (Change the distance from 1 feet to 1 meter and you have 10X difference)
(That's why I was giving an example -
that telling that it is x cm long in photograph does not tell much about its dimension - unless there is some thing to compare..)
HTH... and someone asks and gives a better data.
**************
On the side note, I am quite pessimistic about those who got effected. Hope I am wrong (and pray that I am indeed wrong) in amount of radiation they absorbed etc, but survival for more than a few weeks for some one who has taken > 400/500 Rems (4-5 Sv) in a short time is pretty bleak.
(Many years ago, I spent summers in Argonne National Lab, their Library had a huge scientific records (with medical charts/amount of radiation absorbed/distance from point zero etc) on the victims of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and I got really obsessed with reading that material in my free time - I know medical facilities are much more different now, but still there weren't too many survivors who got more than 3-4Sv)