The scientists responded with another ingenious yet thrifty solution, using rags produced as waste in the textile industry to make large mats, soaked in a cheap water-soluble glue and lowered onto the rooftops, where they stuck to the pieces of wreckage. When the glue dried, these “blotters” could be lifted away, bringing the radioactive debris with them, and then removed to be buried. The scientists’ early tests proved successful: with a single square meter of blotter, they could retrieve two hundred kilos of wreckage from a height of seventy meters.
