I worked in cosmic rays for a time and there is some overlap between the challenge of finding the capsule, and common astroparticle physics problems.
> The capsule, which contains a small amount of cesium-137, is dangerously radioactive, according to the authorities. An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said.
I'd think this should be enough information to calculate the size (which the authorities should know, but we probably don't), and from the size the total beta and gamma flux should be calculable. Once the fluxes are understood, I imagine that could tell you how fast/slow you could/should drive on the highway to have a good chance of detection (I imagine the penetrating gamma signal would give better odds), for any given detector, assuming some maximum distance of the capsule from the highway.
Interesting problem, I hope they pick it up before someone gets hurt.
We know the dimensions of the capsule, there's a video where someone 3D-printed a replica and it's about the dimensions of a medicine capsule, though slightly squatter. Think lego-head sized.
but if it fell on a ditch on the side of the highway, the attenuation by the asphalt would be quite significant, even if the original max distance assumption was quite exaggerated. Interesting problem indeed !
Here's a story about a lost capsule[0] that ended up being made into building material for the wall of an apartment if you think something small isn't worth being concerned about.
The equipment to detect high levels of radiation is very cheap.
Likewise the equipment to detect lead... And hundreds of other deadly pollutants.
Part of owning a house should involve getting it tested, perhaps once per 10 years, for all these contaminants. They might have been put in during construction - or it might be arsenic in the wood of your bed... Or a mixing mistake while making the plastic for your toothbrush handle... Or that mercury lightbulb someone smashed 50 years ago is still soaking through the foundations...
A simple test of the dust your vacuum cleaner picks up would detect most of the most hazardous stuff.
However contamination got into your house, there should be a government scheme to test for it, and possibly to remediate it too (environmental contamination can be seriously expensive to fix, and the last thing you want to happen is someone to hide it from an inspector and sell the house on to someone else)
Are there testing services you’ve used before or would recommend to perform the testing? There does not seem to be a major brand or service provider offering this. Thank you!
Not a direct answer, but there are lead testing kits on Amazon. You mail a tap water sample to a lab. The “kit” is not much more than a vial and prepaid shipping label on a small box.
Yeah it sounds amazing in theory, but none of us have the time to figure that out. It's just way too complicated. It needs to be dumbed down so that you contact one single company, they send a guy over with a bunch of kits and translates it into an easily understandable how-fucked-are-you score, with upsells for improving your score.
This kind of thing exists and is rife with head office pushing iffy practices to boost the detection - e.g. sampling a bigger area than the official measurement equation requires etc.
Lots of problems with ‘meth detection’ companies that over-detect then sell you tens of thousands of dollars of remediation services.
Do not use lead testing kits. They’re a waste of money. The best thing to do would be to find an EPA-licensed lead profession to test your property with an XRF gun. You get a breakdown of every place in your house, inside and out.
As long as people understand what's a safe level of contamination. There was a problem in New Zealand a few years ago when somebody misread a document describing the level of meth residue that should remain after cleaning up a meth lab and as a result, a whole little meth testing industry popped up and people were selling their houses cheap because of very light contamination being detected. Even an elderly lady in a state house was kicked out because her grandson had smoked meth while visiting. Turned out, that threshold was much lower than the actual safe level for the initial contamination and all these people were screwed over.
I had a friend who was employed by one of the dodgy New Zealand testing companies.
Her facebook feed was full of lots of articles that deliberately confused the contamination from household meth labs with contamination from people who just used meth.
Most Americans would still choose not to do this because any knowledge of a positive lead test means that you need to report it when you sell your house which might effect resale value.
The large majority (>90%) of houses built before 1940 have lead paint in them somewhere and lead paint wasn't banned until 1970 in the US so many older houses still have lead paint somewhere
Not particularly if it's dry and sealed in, however ..
In a rising damp, wall wicking water scenario the lead may be leached out from the paint and transported to, say, food being grown near house.
The US had long term issues from lead in the water (being ingested) so there's a similar danger here if the lead isn't stable on the wall behind sealing layers.
For Flint, Michigan [1] (the recent times big news event) and other cities it was lead from pipes:
Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
ie. Lead leached by water from a lead source (be that paint, pipes, or gasoline particulate residue)
Lead and asbestos are like the C programming language. In certain very controlled situations they can be perfectly fine. Only in the real world that rarely ever happens.
What we really need is a government scheme for realtime detection built into phones. There are plenty of research papers, hard to believe it's truly impossible to make a consumer grade Bluetooth mini LIBS or at least a scintillation counter in a phone, or a microscope that can look at dust in the air to find asbestos, etc.
I've even heard of work on realtime virus detection.
There are various Geiger counter apps that work by taping something over the camera such that it's blacked out, and then measuring excitement of the CMOS sensor by gamma rays.
These apps have been found to work but only for gamma, sensitivity isn't great, I have seen it described as an "am I already screwed?" detector app.
> The lumberjacks were scavenging the forest for firewood, when they came across two metal cylinders melting snow within a one meter radius laying in the road. They picked up these objects to use as personal heaters, sleeping with their backs to them.
Sure. Free heater! That doesn’t look ominous at all.
But I guess that’s hindsight speaking. Because who’d expect two major radioactive sources to just be lying next to the road :/
There is a video game about this event called The Lights of Svetlov. It was a great indie game, and I had no idea what it was about so the mystery unraveling in front of you was quite impactful.
For something close to home look here: https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/health... - radioactive gold jewellery because someone somewhere in upstate New York sometime in the 1930's got their hands on some radon seeds and mixed those in with the rest of the scrap gold.
At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a "List of all Civilian Radiation accidents[0], which has at least 50 more cited situations since the 1950s.
Curious. I would expect something that seems so threatening, has such a tiny effect on the environment that it can't even be detected. Something not adding up.
How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect?
Further, asking questions is indeed the point of these discussions. Re-reading the standards I see no prohibition.
And reading that reference article, the loss it cites was 19Tb (19 trillion bequerels). This lost capsule in Australia contains less than 100. So around what? 10 billion times less dangerous?
Thanks for the reference material, now I'm more sure than ever that this article is some kind of clickbait about a fairly miniscule risk being trumpeted as a national incident.
I think it’s more about a failure of process than this particular piece of radioactive material. Being proportionally cavalier about it would invite lazier handling. The next piece of radioactive material could be more dangerous. The mining company will be sent the bill and police get to practice a real life scenario. And everyone knows don’t do that again.
> How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect?
First, it's important to keep in mind that there are different forms of radiation: ionizing[1] which is dangerous and non-ionizing which is not typically dangerous[2]. Furthermore, ionizing radiation consists of three types, alpha, beta and gamma which have different properties and thus dangerous in different ways and amounts.
The source in question contained cesium-137, which decays almost entirely (95%) by emitting beta particles. The beta particles are stopped by about 1 meter of air[3], but can do significant damage to living cells if nearby.
Thus, trying to detect it is a bit like trying to see a bright flashlight in a fog. Even though it's bright you won't see it until you're really close.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like.
I think he's referring to this. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I imagine that "you're only asking questions" is a reference to an usual technique of conspiracy theorists of pretending they're just asking questions to defend against being called out on baseless accusations. "Are they putting something in the water that's making the frogs gay? I'm just asking questions".
We don't know the intent here, but I agree with him that "something doesn't add up" could be an insinuation of conspiracy theory, and so against the guidelines.
I agree the two are different in some respects; at the same time I think the idea that baseless insinuations undermine the conversation works just as well towards news articles as towards HN users.
I'm amazed at the gymnastics possible with such an innocuous phrase. It is almost perverse. Imagine trying to parse this out starting from a position of good faith.
I'm just admiring the twists here, trying to understand and appreciate the gymnastic talent involved.
The triple handspring is when you insinuate that users of that phrase must be insinuating. Perfect 10 - 10 - 10 - 10 Olympic finish is when it is all done out of an abundance of paranoia.
I thought the conspiracy theorists were the paranoid and deranged ones, which is why we didn't want their unfounded and nutty comments? Apparently there is a conspiracy theorist lurking behind every tree, bush and use of, "I'm just asking questions".
Surely you have to concede with that logic there must be innumerable other phrases, trees and bushes that we haven't yet discovered?
I propose that we form a committee so that we may ensure the safety of our fragile establishment views from this menace.
Or maybe we could just skip it and engage with comments at face value, in good faith. Maybe he said just what he said? Don't know about you, but I'm a terrible psychoanalyst. Nor do I have time to go deep on every turn of phrase on the Internet.
This also happened in Ukraine. The capsule was lost in a gravel pit and ended up being built into the wall of an apartment and several people died as a result.
A gas leak will either blow you up or kills you quicker and can be identified and fixed quickly but radiation kills you slowly, making identification of the cause very tricky for authorities.
A few grand to dig it out of a wall? A few hundo to slap some lead shielding over it (it is an X-ray source after all)?
In any case the primary expense is going to be one of paying off all the people to get the right approvals. Crunching the numbers on how to safely rectify it and actually going through those actions will be dirt cheap compared to getting someone with the "right credentials" to tell the government, the insurers and whoever else that your obvious solution any highschooler can crunch the numbers on is in fact acceptable
You "just" need to wave that instrument over 1400km of highway, potentially with a 100m+ width if the capsule has been kicked some distance away by a truck tyre.
I’m trying to imagine the scale of this. I guess it depends on how close you have to be to pick up the signal. And how many false signals there might be.
It seems the pinto narrative was framed in way to make it look worse but compared to other cars of similar type it wasn’t all that bad[1]. This exaggerated narrative despite vindicating data is perpetuated in biz ethics.
Yup. The lesson to be learned once you dig into it is "if you're doing some industry standard thing that someone could ever potentially portray as seedy definitely don't document it".
This is the nature of highly radioactive materials. Walk past it? No problem. Walk on the crushed capsule, brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe, eat a sandwich? Die horribly.
"An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said."
Ingesting is of course a completely different story and will indeed kill you horribly.
“Walk on the crushed capsule [and then] brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe [and then] eat a sandwich? Die horribly.” is the intended reading.
The point is that the danger depends on how people interact with it. That's why they're doing this PSA (and trying to recover it). It would be very easy for that little canister to get ruptured, and loose radioactive material is a very different game from nicely-packaged-in-a-capsule material.
Because it’s enormously dangerous to stand a meter from, and people near it won’t even know (eg it could have been picked up in a tyre tread so someone is carrying it around), but radiation and therefore ability detect drops according to the inverse square law so it will be hard to find from much further away. And Australia is big.
People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. An x-ray is a fraction of a year's natural exposure from the sun. Airline pilots experience this radiation in a few months at work.
The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to health care.
It's all sort-of fine until someone brings it home and sticks it on a shelf and thereby kills their entire family. Walking around with this in your pocket will kill you eventually.
This sort of thing has happened before with loose radioactive sources.
To back up your point: If "X-ray" is a chest x-ray, then per https://xkcd.com/radiation/ this would be equivalent to one-tenth of a head CT scan, which are routinely done without consideration to any increased risk of cancer.
If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.
You're bad at arithmetic, that's 100 boxes on the XKCD chart, so it's one-hundredth of a head CT scan, and the medics might not tell you they considered increased risk, but if they actually didn't consider it they're incompetent, that's a non-trivial effect.
Cs-137 is dangerous to animals (including humans) in close proximity, precisely because of the gamma radiation it emits. But, like any radiative emission, the power density drops off with the inverse square of distance from the source, which makes it detectable well beyond any range at which it poses a hazard. Think of stadium lights: if you stand five feet in front of one, it will blind you, while from a mile away, it's harmless but you still can see it. With gamma radiation you need a detector (ie a Geiger counter), and with an at the moment presumably unshielded Cs-137 source, a reasonably sensitive detector will indeed pick it up at some distance. So, at worst, if you put enough people in trucks with Geiger counters along the same route the original truck followed, sooner or later you will find the lost source.
That said, this method while effective may take some time, and the major concern here may not be so much the direct radiation emission from the intact source, as the possibility of damage leading to dispersal of its contents. In the Goiânia incident of 1987 [1], scrappers removed a Cs-137 source from an improperly decommissioned radiotherapy machine and broke it open, dispersing the loose isotope material it contained in ignorance of the danger it posed. Several people died, others were badly injured, and at least one house and a lot of soil had to be removed for disposal. If this lost Australian source is similar in design to that one, warning people about it while looking for it is an eminently sensible public safety measure.
If you dropped a Cs-137 source of this scale way out in the middle of nowhere, far away from any road or crops, it might not be a big deal. The half life is only 30 years, and it could get buried under soil or in silt. However, losing it near civilization isn't good. (Even sparsely settled areas.) It's a shiny metal object, and if it's in a gas station, hotel, or restaurant parking lot, some kid could easily find it. Plus, gamma sources are relatively easy to detect, which should help the search.
If the military lost a hand grenade on a similar road trip, I'm sure people would want to find it, and this source is at least as dangerous.
Dang it, I wish I didn't have real architecture design work to do today, because this seems like it'd be a lot of fun to research.
Pure horizontal scaling would be trucks with survey counters. Pure vertical would be getting the US to retask one of those radiation-sensing satellites they use to characterize stuff like the Urals trace. (Not that that'd be likely to happen - national security, etc. But have the embassy in DC call NASA anyway, just in case they do have something.) Both would be GA aircraft doing a broad survey while trucks retrace the route. In any case the logistics would be critical, and speed as ever would be costly - good thing we have government-scale resources to work with.
And, yes, the system in this case would be implemented on a human substrate, not a silicon one. This isn't Chernobyl; we don't need robots to do this job, the problem is of limited enough scope to be safely handled by properly trained and equipped humans - finding whom would be an early logistical concern. (The surveyors would be safe enough barring a forced landing or breakdown very near the source, which is unlikely but we still want to get rescue services on standby, or hire a couple of civil helicopters from the oil industry or similar, for fast recovery just in case.) And for a one-off job like this that needs to be done as fast as possible, there isn't time to design, build, and debug robots that can do it.
Not as such, no. On further research, it looks like the understanding that led me to surmise the existence of such a survey capability was significantly incomplete.
> The surveyors would be safe enough barring a forced landing or breakdown very near the source
Weird assumption. Forced landings anywhere are unsafe. They are also very rare, because aircraft are quite reliable. The chances of the surveyors having a forced landing near the capsule must be minuscule (tiny danger zone compared to the extent of full search area, small probability of an aircraft having a forced landing at all).
If you are counting such minuscule dangers then you are ignoring much bigger (but still relatively small) dangers to the surveyors: they might trip during the survey, they might get into a traffic accident as they search or their aircraft might crash injuring them (irrespective of distance from the source). They might have a wildlife encounter as they are verifying a signal (false or true positive). They might suffer from heat stroke, or get sunburnt.
My intuition says that if you send out teams of people scurrying around the countryside these listed dangers are all more likely than having a forced landing right on top of the source. I also assume that you ignored them because they are all “everyday risks”, and you had tunnel vision concentrating on the radiation hazard.
Great catch, and you're right: lots of things can go wrong in a desert whether there's radiation involved or not, so we'd have needed those helicopters either way. This is why we work in teams - don't be shy about anything else you see me missing.
> don't be shy about anything else you see me missing
I would think we need to clarify the theoretical and practical limits of the detectors.
Depending on how the sensors work the search might look very different.
If you can get some expensive lab gear and distinguish the radiation of this source from the background from hundreds of kilometers then you only need to measure at a few strategic locations to triangulate it.
If you need to get a sensor within ten meters from the source before it can be detected then you need to lug the sensor around on the ground. That would be too low for a manned aircraft to fly at.
How fast does the sensor detect? If the sensor can detect up to 100 meters but need 5 second to measure that will make the search much different than if it can measure with 500hz for the same distance.
Do we think we can sense only the source or also the places the source has been at? Does it leave a detectable trace?
What of these is hard limit by physics (nobody, for no amount of money can build a better detector) vs limit of resources (it would be very expensive to do x)? If it is a limit of resources how does detector quality scales with resources spent?
Without having solid answers to these it would be foolish to jump at designing a search method.
Certainly there would be significant engineering problems involved if we had to develop the survey technology and methodology from scratch, and more problems still if we first needed to confirm that such engineering is even achievable.
Fortunately for us in this case, aerial radiological surveying has long since been reduced to practice. [1] [2] The detection equipment described in those references is on the order of tens of thousand times more sensitive than consumer-grade G-M counters, and is commercially available. [3]
Part of this seems to be (sometimes?) to find radioactive sources: "The goal of this part of the exercise was to find two radioactive sources which, for training purposes, had been placed somewhere in an area of about 2,500 km2"
I'm kind of surprised that something this radioactive isn't pretty easy to hone in on with a good Geiger counter. Someone with better physics want to enlighten me about ranges and sensitivity?
You wouldn't use a Geiger counter, you'd want to use a gamma ray spectrometer. For example, a sodium iodide crystal doped with thallium (acting as a scintillator, connected to a photon detector) or semiconductor detector (large crystal of Si, Ge, or other materials, preferably of high atomic number.)
The Geiger counter is filled with gas and will not effectively interact with gamma ray photons; the solid state detectors interact much more strongly with them, and (particularly the semiconductor detectors) have very good energy resolution, to spot the particular energy of photons from this particular radioisotope.
I guess it's one of those things where the intensity of the radiation is proportional to 1/d^2.
If you're holding it in your hand it emits enough radiation to be very unhealthy, but as soon as you put some distance between you and it then it becomes very hard to detect.
That's why it's still lost. Cs-137 has a clear gamma emmision spectrum (which is to say it glows a unique color of high-energy photons), so you can scan and pick it up with a scintillation detector.
Unfortunately, Cs-137 is one of the bits of waste generated as fallout from nuclear testing, and its half-life is 30 years, so ambient levels are generally not identically zero.
And South Australia (pretty close to the bidder is Western Australia) has seen nuclear testing at woomera missile range so it's pretty likely to have some contamination indeed.
Now find a road that's about 1400KM (870mi) long and pick some random point on there to drop it.
Wait a week for other passing traffic to disturb it, maybe get caught in a tire and sent even further astray.
Now go find it, remembering that even with sensitive equipment, you might need to be a few tens of meters away to pick it up out of the background radiation.
The northern wind brings snow and ice
Humans starve and freeze
The Fimbul winter has arrived
And soon the world will cease to be
Brother will be brother′s bane
No one shall be spared
All will die, none remain
That is mankind's share
The southern sphere is set ablaze
Muspel′s fire is set free
The sun is on its final chase
And soon the world will cease to be
Across the western sky he runs
A wolf so grim and mean
Devours the eternal sun
And soon the world will cease to be
Nah they've shot and trapped most dingos over that side. They don't recognise them as native animals so they allow eradication. its sad af :( they rare as over west.
No moose, bears, wolves, cougars, or other alpha predators in Australia though. About the worst are wild dogs / dingos, though they typically won't be a problem unless they're in a pack.
I'll take Australian dangers over North American every day of the week.
Salties are absolutely alpha predators in their distribution
Arguably the most dangerous animal on the planet for a human (I think Nile crocodiles and Hippos kill more but that's more to do with them inhabiting areas with humans in them)
I agree, but the links ratings are a little funky,
I can't fully agree with their ratings, as someone who has lived in the bush in queensland, I'll re-rank these how I imagine someone native to the area has sees it.
Irukandji (rarer but more painful) is MUCH nastier than the box jellyfish (painful but more common), I wanted to kill myself with a very mild Irukandji sting.
The paralysis tick is much worse than a bull ant, which just hurts quite a bit, but the symptoms/fatality of the tick is worse (which doesn't really hurt, just ends up killing you slowly)
The gympie gympie stinging tree(common, but not listed) is much more painful than the bull ant, and people with grass allergies get even more pain from it.
Oh and stonefish, fuck stonefish. I've seen a tough bastard get stung and bastard was weeping like a baby for hours even after the anti venom. I think the guy almost died from the shock alone.
When you're in the city, a lot of this risk isnt anywhere near you, when you are working on the farm in the country near either the desert or the rainforest , native flora and fauna risks are very real.
There, being Australia? I'm Aussie, spent a decade working in remote area exploration. Grew up on/in the bush. I know my way around.
There being North America? Been a handful of times. Enjoy snowboarding and hiking. Thankfully I've never run into anything on the trail.
The guy below me posted about the Gympie Gympie tree. Been stung by one, twice. First time from a dead leaf. Second time from a very much alive and still on the tree leaf. That tree is rather painful. Both times treated with a cold wax strip. Had to ring around to find one on the second occasion as it was at night.
Crocodiles are the only major danger, and they're isolated to the far north of the country.
But they are truly terrifying, in that they are silent and invisible in the water, intelligent, and capable of watching a human for days to learn their routine and plan an ambush.
I was in Cairns & a little north of there for a bit. Certainly never went all the way to Cape York.
Although I did go on a kayaking expedition to Dunk Island, where there were only four 2-person kayaks, unusually high waves, and my boat-mate asked, "Are we going to sink?" Obviously we didn't.
Of course this is all for laughs, but some HN'ers are incapable of that.
I grew up in far north Queensland, the risk of crocodials are always one of those real but manageable risks in your life, I was very young and remember a family friend being taken by a large one (Search for Beryl Wruck in Daintree), I am very familiar with the risks, but risks are part of life in that area.
I regularly spend time there and was canooing one of the fresh water creeks which lead into the river to the sea. I had done a few different creeks a few times to the mouth of the daintree river, this time my wife wanted to join, she wasnt keen to paddle.
She took the first half (~18km) of the trip easy, barely paddling, we got to the main river where the water turned from fresh to brackish a smallish (3m) croc was sunning himself in the winter sun (crocs are more active in hotter months, so he was just chilling). Within seconds of pointing it out I no longer had to paddle, "mrs trash" was inspired to help with her part of the paddling.
I know that many people here would be mad about taking risks, but its just part of life living in the country.
Same. Also if some small critter bit you in Australia you don't have to worry about rabies though there is a similar virus can be carried by bats. I have a shed full of hundreds of potentially lethal spiders and there are several highly venomous snakes endemic to the area and I don't care. The actual risk is close to nil. Living in inland southern Australia the only place that scares me in the ocean where there are sharks, rips, blue rings and jellyfish. The most dangerous thing here is motor vehicles and the idiots that drive them same as everywhere else.
Australian who has lived in US here. I met a wild mountain lion once, and it was quite scary, less than 3m away, and fortunately as scared of me as I was of it.
Conversely, I've been bitten by red-back spiders, by a bat, many large lizards and goannas, a 4m python, by a wobbygong shark and by a red-bellied black snake. I encounter many more dangerous critters here in Oz than I did in California. I do kind of bring it on myself though, 'cos of my penchant for picking up snakes and spiders.
And don't forget the Cassowary, a confirmed vegan bird that if startled can disembowel you in one strike. Not only apex predators can kill humans. I wasn't aware moose was an apex predator by the way, although they are plainly dangerous.
Fortunately, over 85% of us live in the cities, due to much of the rest of the country where most of the dangerous shit is being mostly uninhabitable anyway.
The further south you live the safer you are generally speaking. Where I live (far south) the most dangerous creature you're going to run into in the city is probably a redback spider, which is related to a black widow, and there hasn't been a confirmed death from one of those in over 40 years. Or a brown snake, but I don't think I've even seen one in the wild, although I know an area close by where they are reported to live.
This capsule has been lost in one of the most remote, uninhabitated parts of the country.
The dangers of living in Australia are vastly overblown ...
Yeah we have a large park with a lake not far away, my daughter and I went tree planting there together for girl guides once. Signs everywhere warning about them, but I've never seen one there. My experience with snakes in the bush has basically been that they are more scared of us than we are of them, and can generally sense us moving from quite a distance.
> This capsule has been lost in one of the most remote, uninhabitated parts of the country.
And we wonder why Western Australian Aboriginal poet and playwright Jack Davis, OBE, OA referred to kartiya as fringedwellers (clinging in fear to the edges of the continent).
A quip second only to Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.
It was a lure to encourage the curious to look it up alright :-)
Fun questions that might have prompted include: Given the number of lanuages [1] why would a Noongar person [2] from the South West of Western Australia use a word from the Western Desert Group?
To be honest it's something he said in both English (in his work) and Noongar in response to the play | movie The Fringe Dwellers [3] and common usage of the phrase.
Trouble is, like most oral language words, there's no consistent spelling with an internet search hit for the word he did use, however it's similar enough to what I used .. with a harder intial 'G' sound and more of a running hard "ddd" sound in the middle.
My apologies for dragging you down a rabbit hole, I hope you enjoyed the adventure.
Please don't apologize, I will read when I have some free time. I'm not particularly learned about literature or plays, even less so regarding those of Australian origin, and less so again when the playright in question is of a native background. But I do like to absorb information about the history of the country I live in, so thank you for the links.
Oh, reminds me a of a time some students lost a Polonium source in the physics lab while I was a Masters student. The HoD had them crawling around the building for days with a Geiger counter, but they never found it.
Luckily it was a small source and Polonium has a relatively short half-life, but the department had to go through a whole song and dance of declaring an incident.
According to Wikipedia, Polonium is 5000 times more radioactive than Radium (just 0.001g of Po emits the same number of particles as 5g of Ra).
It has a half life of just 138 days so in only 4.6 years the missing Polonium will be equivalent in radioactivity to Radium, which is known to cause cancer. This doesn't sound like something that should be treated lightly.
Sure but all that means is that 1g of radium will have the same activity as 0.2mg of polonium. Of course they will also have different decay spectra etc. We don't know how big the source was that the students lost, but I'm guessing that if they just gave up after a few days, it probably wasn't a very high activity. This means either very low mass, or a higher mass but just older so that it's decayed away.
I found a polonium-loaded anti-static brush for photography in a box from my parents’ attic. Scared the shit out of me at first. Called the hazardous waste folks and had a fun chat with a perplexed employee. We finally decided that, as it was from the 70’s, it had long since decayed into harmlessness and was fine to throw away.
Uhhh be careful with that reasoning. Some radioactive isotopes don't decay into stable isotopes but into other radioactive, sometimes more dangerous ones. It can be a whole chain until it reaches a stable element.
Not sure about this particular polonium isotope. But don't expect something to be harmless after 10x the half-life per se.
This is a good point and a fair concern. The brushes contain polonium-210, which we confirmed decays to lead-206. So not very good to eat, but not especially scary.
The important question is how much of a sample was lost. Ultimately, AIUI, the health risk depends upon the exposure in a ~ linear fashion. At least, in radiological protection that's used. The LNT model errs on the side of caution; assume that any exposure is harmful, linearly extrapolating from the high dosages seen in Hiroshima, etc, where we have data of the impact of exposure on the body. In reality, we expect a threshold effect as the body is able to repair some damage.
The dose of radiation has different meanings; absorbed, equivalent, effective. These are just different calculations, starting from how much energy the body received (absorbed), to taking into account the different kinds of radiation whose effects differ (equivalent), to where in the body the dose as received (different organs at different risk, effective).
The half-life of 210Po is 138 days, so it's ~10x less active than 223Ra. That's meaningless with respect to the health risk, though; the activity of the sample is ultimately selected by its intended use. Most samples are sized according to the dose requirements. At least, that's my understanding (physics, not medical). In general we don't want to over-size a source as there are greater regulations. Similarly, we don't want sources to become useless too quickly.
In any case, this is definitely bad — 5000x less activity is not good if it's greater than the lethal dose. Because radioactive sources are so small, the risk is not likely to be distributed; you get the whole dose, or nothing.*
"Small" is likely meant relative to the material. So a "small" Polonium source and a "small" Radium source would typically refer to a Polonium source having orders of magnitude less material, but a similar radiation level.
It's an alpha emitter (and if being used in a university classroom, probably a sealed one). Unless you eat it, the danger is not comparable.
Radium, in contrast, emits gamma radiation, which presents more of a threat to casual bystanders. All of which is to say: you can't just compare "radioactivity" levels and extrapolate to "danger".
I'm more scared of alpha than gamma. If the alpha source gets tampered with and becomes a dust somehow, it could stay in someone's lungs, and kill someone without being easily detectable.
Cheap eBay Geiger counters will probably tell you if gamma rays are an immediate danger, and if you're close enough to have problems, your probably also close enough to detect it.
> I'm more scared of alpha than gamma. If the alpha source gets tampered with and becomes a dust somehow, it could stay in someone's lungs, and kill someone without being easily detectable.
It's not an either/or sort of thing. Gamma decay occurs after alpha or beta decay, so a gamma source will also emit alpha or beta radiation. In the case of Cs-137, it emits a lot of beta radiation. Normally this is shielded, but normally it doesn't fall off a truck..
Someones going to come back from vacation and go like; -Yeah I took that out to prevent it from falling off during transport. Taped to the underside of bosses chair so we wont lose it.
The best part is how the person responsible for the problem (the director of Ipasgo) could redirect the blame to the owners who tried to prevent the catastrophy doing everything they could - he stopped them to do the right things with the help of cops:
> Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the radioactive material that had been left behind.[7] Figueiredo then warned the president of Ipasgo, Lício Teixeira Borges, that he should take responsibility "for what would happen with the caesium bomb".[7] The Court of Goiás posted a security guard to protect the site.[8] Meanwhile, the owners of IGR wrote several letters to the National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), warning them about the danger of keeping a teletherapy unit at an abandoned site, but they could not remove the equipment by themselves once a court order prevented them from doing so.[7][8]
> In light of the deaths caused, the three doctors who had owned and operated IGR were charged with criminal negligence. Because the accidents occurred before the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988 and because the substance was acquired by the clinic and not by the individual owners, the court could not declare the owners of IGR liable. One of IGR's owners and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building. The two thieves were not included as defendants in the public civil suit.
> An estimated 300 curies of radioactive cobalt found their way to the two Mexican foundries, one of which manufactured metal table legs for shipment to the largest distributor of restaurant tables in the U.S., while the other produced steel rods used in the reinforcement of concrete building projects. About 600 tons of the contaminated steel were shipped to the U.S. from December 1983 to January 1984."
300 Ci is 11 TBq (terabecquerel), or 11·10^12 decays per second. Co-60 has a half life of 166 million seconds, so it was 11·166·10^18/ln 2 atoms=2.6·10^21 atoms, which is 0.004 moles (a mole is 6.02·10^23 atoms).
A mole of cobalt 60 weighs 60 g, so it was a quarter of a gram if I did the calculations right.
The ln 2 factor is because the probability of a decay happening in a second is ln 2 divided by the half life.
Yeah but becquerels are #decays per second, so I need the probability of a decay happening in a second, not in a year. :) Sooner or later the dreaded multiply by 86400*365 will happen.
And in the australian outback, there are plenty of other small poisenous things avaiable to kill you, if you are unlucky, so rather bring tall boots and not a geiger counter if you happen to visit and are concerned for your safety.
If the capsule is on or very near the road, a single trip from start to finish with a NaI(Tl) or CsI scintillation counter will find it. Every CBRN team in the world has these, so they have obviously completed the first run at this without finding it. The capsule is not on or near the road.
Australia is famous for road trains on the Great Northen Highway. They travel fast and heavy on the paved road that runs through the outback. If the tires of one of those hit the capsule, they could fling it a fair distance into the desert. There's nothing between the road and the sandy desert to stop it.
If the capsule is a fair distance off the road, the inverse square law is going to reduce gamma detections closer to background. There won't be a clear peak in the data. If the vehicle with the detector moves slowly, there will be a wide peak in the time dimension that may just look like a natural variation in the background. If the vehicle moves fast, it may miss the source completely.
It will be a matter of looking at the data to try to find a pattern that indicates where the capsule may be. This will be made more difficult becuase they don't likely have a pre-capsule-loss run that would allow them to subtract normal variations of the background.
Adding to the problem is the stochastic nature of radiation. It is entirely possible to have a significant peak in the count rates that is not a strong point source; just a random variation in the background. Lower peaks from random confluence of background sources are likely; higher peaks are less likely, but not impossible. It may require a large number of runs to eliminate random events.
Real vehicles on real roads experience a lot of variations in speed, plus random starts and stops because the driver had to pee, or eat, or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something. A fair bit of work will need to be done to standardize multiple runs.
This can be partly solved by using multiple detectors on the same vehicle, with the idea being that peaks that are the result of natural variations in the background should only affect one detector at a time--so they can be subtracted out. But, again, CBRN teams have enough resources that they have already done this and they haven't found it.
So it is reasonable to conclude that the capsule is either quite far off the road, or has been picked up by a passing vehicle.
Another possibility is that the idea that it "fell off a truck" is wrong and that some human grabbed it by dissasembling the apparatus. This could be out of curiosity, or ignorance, or a misguided attempt to steal the source or use it for nefarious purposes.
If that is the case, the capsule is going to be nearly impossible to find unless it happens to pass a fixed gamma detector somewhere, such as a port.
The incident is a good argument for building scintillation crystals into all cellphones. This would be cheap and easy. Small scintillators are not very sensitive, and they are not great for spectroscopy, but they are extremely cool, very small, don't interfere with the workings of the phone, and use extremely little power.
A network of scintillators in every phone would be amazing for finding stuff like this.
You comment is fantastic because it demonstrates we are beyond finding it with a rolling road block and sensors on trucks. This is a recovery operation where you're going to want surveillance for when someone shows up somewhere (medical care provider) with radiation sickness and to start contact tracing. If a human has it in their possession, exposure is ongoing. If it's sitting in a ditch somewhere, maybe it's years before it's found, maybe it's never found (and perhaps buried if and when a torrential rain passes through the area, typically in the upcoming winter months).
No. MEMS means electromechanical, and scintillation needs solid state: a crystal and a photon detector of some kind. The crystal can't be miniaturized because there's a minimum thickness you need to capture the photon and Compton electrons*.
Although some weird Japanese phone makers did have smartphones with radiation detector built-in (SHARP 107sh and 205sh), I don't think it would be a popular feature.
There isn't so many cases in daily life that one can encounter a radioactive source. Even if you are actively looking for one (don't do it), you will have a hard time if you don't work with radioactive sources occupationally.
Also, it's not physically possible to create a small and yet sensitive radiation detector.
>If the capsule is on or very near the road, a single trip from start to finish with a NaI(Tl) or CsI scintillation counter will find it. Every CBRN team in the world has these, so they have obviously completed the first run at this without finding it. The capsule is not on or near the road.
It was reported in the national news within 12 hours of being found lost, so I don't think they had done that yet, especially given the distance.
> or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something
There's few situations where someone might stop for a dead kangaroo, or really any other wildlife. Either because they see it's still alive, or because they're checking to see if it might be a female with live young.
If it's clear that it's dead, nobody is going to stop. On a road, in WA, in summer -- yeah you're going to smell that for a long ways. Scavangers will deal with it pretty quickly, anyway.
Some Aboriginal communities will hunt and eat Kangaroo.
Hunting Kangaroo for sport/'population control' is a thing in some areas. But the meat is usually either wasted or fed to animals. I understand that with wild Kangaroo you have to worry about parisites.
You can get Kangaroo meat at the supermarket though.
I had the same thought briefly, but then thought more about it. These are high energy particles. You might remember the article about cosmic rays that sometimes cause a single bit flip in a videogame, and that there is no easy way to shield against it. That makes satellite imaging difficult, because how do you focus some sort of lens, if the particles go right thru everything? You might detect that a cosmic ray or ionizing particle hit the satellite, but not where it came from. The sun? Australia? Space? Plus, think about particle accelerator images and cloud chambers. They are individual streaks. They aren't gradients the way normal light would create an image. So, the farther away you are, the less likely these particles will hit you. If you attached a geiger counter to a hot air balloon, starting from this radioactive capsule, you'd hear rapid clicks, then infrequent clicks, then no clicks, then the clicks would increase due to cosmic rays. If directional geiger counters existed, I feel like people would have been using those instead of what they currently use. So, I doubt satellite nuclear radiation imaging exists.
I looked up Fukushima satellite maps, and they all say they are fluid simulations based on ground sensor data.
There are gamma-ray detectors that can determine direction:
> The LAT detects gamma rays by using Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation in a technique known as pair production. When a gamma ray, which is pure energy, slams into a layer of tungsten in the detector, it can create a pair of subatomic particles (an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron). The direction of the incoming gamma ray is determined by projecting the direction of these particles back to their source using several layers of high-precision silicon tracking detectors.
That technique doesn't work on Earth; the atmosphere's too thick to pass gamma rays (in either direction). An atmospheric column has the mass of a ~10 meter column of water.
It's pretty effective on other planetoids, though:
In some multiverse timeline, Apple launched an iPhone with a geiger counter built in for this very reason. Instead of crowdsourced Aigtag triangulation, it triangulates these capsules.
The article didn't really explain the original purpose of the now-missing capsule, other than it was part of a sensor used in a mine. Can anyone explain a bit more what the original purpose of the sensor it was part of was? What did the mine need a bit of radiation to measure?
Not sure if the mine in question does this, but there are X-Ray sensors that can go on the excavator buckets to measure ore content on each scoop. I'm sure there are other methods eg on conveyors as well.
We used radiation sources and detectors at the steelworks for thickness gauge - you set them on either side of the plate and measure the lost and from that calculate the steel thickness very accurately. I presume in a mine it could be used say on a conveyor belt where you measure the lost radiation to help determine the density or weight of the ore.
Come on, what are the chances people will spend 10 minutes next to the thing? It will just be lying out in the desert somewhere, and maybe some animals might wander by for 2 minutes.
Of course, on the off chance someone does find it and pick it up, and then bring it into a town, etc. it can be bad. But I thought that, in Australia, most of that desert road is basically desolate for decades, except for cars coming by occasionally. Perhaps when they do road work, however...
This is really weird. FTA: "These gauges are designed to be robust and to be used in industrial settings where they may be exposed to weather and vibration,” Dr. Robertson said at a news conference on Saturday, “so it is unusual for a gauge to come apart like this one has."
See also this [1] article with a picture of an example gauge. Again making the point that this is really weird: "Radiation Services WA general manager Lauren Steen said it was a “highly unlikely” scenario, due to the safety measures typically in place for the transit of radioactive materials."
New material for a future Plainly Difficult episode once the investigation is complete.
"They believe that vibrations from the truck caused the sensor to shake apart and also dislodged a mounting bolt, leaving a hole in the bottom of the box. The capsule is believed to have fallen out of the sensor, through the bolt-hole, onto the surface of the truck, and bounced off into the road."
This explanation sounds pretty bogus so theft makes sense to me
Probably better to say "and no-one lives around where the capsule was misplaced". It _could_ of been lost in a "built up area" (more than 0.1 ppl/sq km) but statistically it's probably where no-one ever goes except wildlife. It's a HUGE area with very very few people in it.
> They believe that vibrations from the truck caused the sensor to shake apart and also dislodged a mounting bolt, leaving a hole in the bottom of the box. The capsule is believed to have fallen out of the sensor, through the bolt-hole, onto the surface of the truck, and bounced off into the road.
I have a bag of locking washers I would be more than happy to donate if it makes this kind of thing less likely to happen in the future. In the mean time, good luck.
These Nord-Lock washers [0] are excellent for that purpose. Do NOT use common split-washers, throw them away — they can actually speed the unlocking & loss of a nut.
(No relation, just a satisfied customer after finding they work well after being strongly recommended by a racecar engineer I know)
I don’t really buy the “fell off a truck” story, will be very surprised if they find this before it gives someone cancer… and if whoever took it knows what they’re doing, it will never be found.
It’d be very useful. Imagine having a weapon capable of killing someone off covertly. You could keep the capsule in a lead box, and whenever you want to get rid of an enemy, put the capsule somewhere close to where they sleep, and leave it there long enough to induce radiation sickness or cancer in the target. Then you could retrieve the capsule and continue this process with another enemy.
I guess maybe it's a lack of detail leading me to this suspicion, but I've moved lots of stuff, thousands of tons of stuff. I don't understand how a capsule this small could even possibly be unsecured to the point that it falls out of containment and into the road on its lonesome.
> Upon opening the package, it was found that the gauge was broken apart with one of the four mounting bolts missing and the source itself and all screws on the gauge also missing
If they were transporting it this sloppily it could have easily killed the transporters. I've moved empty USB sticks with more caution. If they find this just lying on the side of the road somewhere I'll eat my hat.
- "The first part of this section describes three different airborne surveys that successfully located lost radioactive sources. The three incidents were quite different in nature and provide useful information should similar accidents occur in the future. Section 9 concludes with a discussion showing how to estimate the count rate which would be observed by AGRS from a radioactive source. These results can be used to plan searches for lost radioactive sources."
Their first incident is basically identical to this one:
- "On 21 June 1968, a 325 mCi 60Co source3 was lost in transit somewhere between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Kansas City, Missouri, a distance of 1800 km."
Adafruit sells a geiger counter kit. It's been on my list of things to tinker with for scanning living and work environments for potential hazards. Just for fun. I'm curious if anyone here has ever found high levels of radiation while playing around with geiger counters?
I have had an old Geiger counter in my office for a number of years my dad gave me he got in a crate of junk he purchased. Best I can tell it doesn't work, I've tried bananas and the like. I've always had a mild fear that the thing itself might be radioactive.
People are more radioactive than bananas [1], so that's probably not too surprising. DrAwdeOccarim's sibling comment to yours mentions you can buy rocks to test with.
I have one, it works, but I really want to connect it to a pi for data logging and visualization but I don’t have the time to code it up. If you go down this road, please let me know if you wind up finding a good open source project for managing the data! You can purchase rocks off ebay that have some radioactivity, which I use to show my kids how radiation works much to the chagrin of my spouse : )
Here's what gauge sources like this look like.[1] Here are some packed for shipping. bolted to a crate, as described in the NY Times article.[2] The locks are $8 Master Lock combination padlocks, probably just to keep people from opening the things by accident. The lock looks optional on the model in [2].
The lock is on the shutter end, anyway. The cover plate that gives access to the source for replacement is secured by four security-type Torx screws. No sign of anything like aircraft safety wires to prevent the screws loosening. That cover plate looks like the weak point here.
The wooden crate shown is "Type A" packaging, which is rated for "conditions normally encountered during transportation".[3] Doesn't even have to be fully watertight, just spray-resistant.
Not super tough, just strong enough to stack 5 high. That's all that the IAEA requires.
So you can see how a few hundred miles on a flatbed truck on a bumpy road could cause this accident. Especially on a decade old source. These gauge sources need a new radiation source every 10-15 years, so shipping them back for source replacement is routine.
> For xmas, mum and dad drove from Kununura to Broome and then flew down to Perth (cheaper than flying from kun). Then a biblical flood came and destroyed the only road connecting Broome and Kununura, stranding their car in Broome..
> .. until dad got permission from mum to do this:
(embed map of northern Australia with a route of 64 hours and 4,770 km)
That's a hair under 3000 miles and as one reply commented ( https://twitter.com/tony_neilson/status/1615278118247497728 ) only 18km longer than driving from Gibraltar to Moscow by way of Pairs, Berlin, and Warsaw (which might be the fastest route?)
The twitter post continues with updates on the drive.
The source fell out of the equipment, which somehow broke apart in transit. A detector on the equipment wouldn't help and you can't put a detector on the source itself, it's just a capsule that needs to go inside a certain place in the device.
A detector on the equipment would tell you when it stopped detecting radiation, or even just when it wasn't secured properly to stop it falling out in the first place.
If the radiation stops, you have really good info on where to look, and fast response time.
After seeing this I judge the probability of theft or human error in packaging to be higher than the probability of loss along the route. They should pursue further questioning of all parties involved who were near the items of interest before/during/after
transport.
Sometimes extracting this information is not easy b/c jobs/careers depend on it. E.g., did the fellow who packaged the capsule possibly drop it down a toilet accidentally and try to cover up the loss, did the truck veer off course at any time? Did a driver take any unreported stops or side trips (food, whorehouse, supplies, pick up a six-pack, etc.)?
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[ 0.87 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] thread> The capsule, which contains a small amount of cesium-137, is dangerously radioactive, according to the authorities. An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said.
I'd think this should be enough information to calculate the size (which the authorities should know, but we probably don't), and from the size the total beta and gamma flux should be calculable. Once the fluxes are understood, I imagine that could tell you how fast/slow you could/should drive on the highway to have a good chance of detection (I imagine the penetrating gamma signal would give better odds), for any given detector, assuming some maximum distance of the capsule from the highway.
Interesting problem, I hope they pick it up before someone gets hurt.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
Likewise the equipment to detect lead... And hundreds of other deadly pollutants.
Part of owning a house should involve getting it tested, perhaps once per 10 years, for all these contaminants. They might have been put in during construction - or it might be arsenic in the wood of your bed... Or a mixing mistake while making the plastic for your toothbrush handle... Or that mercury lightbulb someone smashed 50 years ago is still soaking through the foundations...
A simple test of the dust your vacuum cleaner picks up would detect most of the most hazardous stuff.
However contamination got into your house, there should be a government scheme to test for it, and possibly to remediate it too (environmental contamination can be seriously expensive to fix, and the last thing you want to happen is someone to hide it from an inspector and sell the house on to someone else)
Lots of problems with ‘meth detection’ companies that over-detect then sell you tens of thousands of dollars of remediation services.
Her facebook feed was full of lots of articles that deliberately confused the contamination from household meth labs with contamination from people who just used meth.
The large majority (>90%) of houses built before 1940 have lead paint in them somewhere and lead paint wasn't banned until 1970 in the US so many older houses still have lead paint somewhere
In a rising damp, wall wicking water scenario the lead may be leached out from the paint and transported to, say, food being grown near house.
The US had long term issues from lead in the water (being ingested) so there's a similar danger here if the lead isn't stable on the wall behind sealing layers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
I've even heard of work on realtime virus detection.
These apps have been found to work but only for gamma, sensitivity isn't great, I have seen it described as an "am I already screwed?" detector app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
Sure. Free heater! That doesn’t look ominous at all.
But I guess that’s hindsight speaking. Because who’d expect two major radioactive sources to just be lying next to the road :/
There's documented incidents of radiation burns (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/33268...) and cancer (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1451360/).
At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a "List of all Civilian Radiation accidents[0], which has at least 50 more cited situations since the 1950s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...
How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect?
Further, asking questions is indeed the point of these discussions. Re-reading the standards I see no prohibition.
And reading that reference article, the loss it cites was 19Tb (19 trillion bequerels). This lost capsule in Australia contains less than 100. So around what? 10 billion times less dangerous?
Thanks for the reference material, now I'm more sure than ever that this article is some kind of clickbait about a fairly miniscule risk being trumpeted as a national incident.
First, it's important to keep in mind that there are different forms of radiation: ionizing[1] which is dangerous and non-ionizing which is not typically dangerous[2]. Furthermore, ionizing radiation consists of three types, alpha, beta and gamma which have different properties and thus dangerous in different ways and amounts.
The source in question contained cesium-137, which decays almost entirely (95%) by emitting beta particles. The beta particles are stopped by about 1 meter of air[3], but can do significant damage to living cells if nearby.
Thus, trying to detect it is a bit like trying to see a bright flashlight in a fog. Even though it's bright you won't see it until you're really close.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle
Where in the HN rules is it forbidding to ask questions?
I think he's referring to this. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I imagine that "you're only asking questions" is a reference to an usual technique of conspiracy theorists of pretending they're just asking questions to defend against being called out on baseless accusations. "Are they putting something in the water that's making the frogs gay? I'm just asking questions".
We don't know the intent here, but I agree with him that "something doesn't add up" could be an insinuation of conspiracy theory, and so against the guidelines.
But surely you have to concede that "I'm just asking questions" make it really easy to insinuate without directly stating, yes?
The triple handspring is when you insinuate that users of that phrase must be insinuating. Perfect 10 - 10 - 10 - 10 Olympic finish is when it is all done out of an abundance of paranoia.
I thought the conspiracy theorists were the paranoid and deranged ones, which is why we didn't want their unfounded and nutty comments? Apparently there is a conspiracy theorist lurking behind every tree, bush and use of, "I'm just asking questions".
Surely you have to concede with that logic there must be innumerable other phrases, trees and bushes that we haven't yet discovered?
I propose that we form a committee so that we may ensure the safety of our fragile establishment views from this menace.
Or maybe we could just skip it and engage with comments at face value, in good faith. Maybe he said just what he said? Don't know about you, but I'm a terrible psychoanalyst. Nor do I have time to go deep on every turn of phrase on the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
In any case the primary expense is going to be one of paying off all the people to get the right approvals. Crunching the numbers on how to safely rectify it and actually going through those actions will be dirt cheap compared to getting someone with the "right credentials" to tell the government, the insurers and whoever else that your obvious solution any highschooler can crunch the numbers on is in fact acceptable
[1] https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-ca...
It's important to understand the numbers - and the magnitude of this radiation source is concerning but not dire.
is key here -- leading to ingestion, which is much more dangerous than brief proximity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factor...
Ingesting is of course a completely different story and will indeed kill you horribly.
Inside your body? Another story.
The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to health care.
What jobs you're referring to? Your examples cite years and months but the quoted sentence states "in an hour."
This sort of thing has happened before with loose radioactive sources.
If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.
That said, this method while effective may take some time, and the major concern here may not be so much the direct radiation emission from the intact source, as the possibility of damage leading to dispersal of its contents. In the Goiânia incident of 1987 [1], scrappers removed a Cs-137 source from an improperly decommissioned radiotherapy machine and broke it open, dispersing the loose isotope material it contained in ignorance of the danger it posed. Several people died, others were badly injured, and at least one house and a lot of soil had to be removed for disposal. If this lost Australian source is similar in design to that one, warning people about it while looking for it is an eminently sensible public safety measure.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
If the military lost a hand grenade on a similar road trip, I'm sure people would want to find it, and this source is at least as dangerous.
Pure horizontal scaling would be trucks with survey counters. Pure vertical would be getting the US to retask one of those radiation-sensing satellites they use to characterize stuff like the Urals trace. (Not that that'd be likely to happen - national security, etc. But have the embassy in DC call NASA anyway, just in case they do have something.) Both would be GA aircraft doing a broad survey while trucks retrace the route. In any case the logistics would be critical, and speed as ever would be costly - good thing we have government-scale resources to work with.
And, yes, the system in this case would be implemented on a human substrate, not a silicon one. This isn't Chernobyl; we don't need robots to do this job, the problem is of limited enough scope to be safely handled by properly trained and equipped humans - finding whom would be an early logistical concern. (The surveyors would be safe enough barring a forced landing or breakdown very near the source, which is unlikely but we still want to get rescue services on standby, or hire a couple of civil helicopters from the oil industry or similar, for fast recovery just in case.) And for a one-off job like this that needs to be done as fast as possible, there isn't time to design, build, and debug robots that can do it.
That's an extraordinary thing to mention in passing; do you have a source for this?
Weird assumption. Forced landings anywhere are unsafe. They are also very rare, because aircraft are quite reliable. The chances of the surveyors having a forced landing near the capsule must be minuscule (tiny danger zone compared to the extent of full search area, small probability of an aircraft having a forced landing at all).
If you are counting such minuscule dangers then you are ignoring much bigger (but still relatively small) dangers to the surveyors: they might trip during the survey, they might get into a traffic accident as they search or their aircraft might crash injuring them (irrespective of distance from the source). They might have a wildlife encounter as they are verifying a signal (false or true positive). They might suffer from heat stroke, or get sunburnt.
My intuition says that if you send out teams of people scurrying around the countryside these listed dangers are all more likely than having a forced landing right on top of the source. I also assume that you ignored them because they are all “everyday risks”, and you had tunnel vision concentrating on the radiation hazard.
I would think we need to clarify the theoretical and practical limits of the detectors.
Depending on how the sensors work the search might look very different.
If you can get some expensive lab gear and distinguish the radiation of this source from the background from hundreds of kilometers then you only need to measure at a few strategic locations to triangulate it.
If you need to get a sensor within ten meters from the source before it can be detected then you need to lug the sensor around on the ground. That would be too low for a manned aircraft to fly at.
How fast does the sensor detect? If the sensor can detect up to 100 meters but need 5 second to measure that will make the search much different than if it can measure with 500hz for the same distance.
Do we think we can sense only the source or also the places the source has been at? Does it leave a detectable trace?
What of these is hard limit by physics (nobody, for no amount of money can build a better detector) vs limit of resources (it would be very expensive to do x)? If it is a limit of resources how does detector quality scales with resources spent?
Without having solid answers to these it would be foolish to jump at designing a search method.
Fortunately for us in this case, aerial radiological surveying has long since been reduced to practice. [1] [2] The detection equipment described in those references is on the order of tens of thousand times more sensitive than consumer-grade G-M counters, and is commercially available. [3]
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6084
[2] https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2016/05000/...
[3] https://www.berkeleynucleonics.com/nai-sodium-iodide
Part of this seems to be (sometimes?) to find radioactive sources: "The goal of this part of the exercise was to find two radioactive sources which, for training purposes, had been placed somewhere in an area of about 2,500 km2"
The Geiger counter is filled with gas and will not effectively interact with gamma ray photons; the solid state detectors interact much more strongly with them, and (particularly the semiconductor detectors) have very good energy resolution, to spot the particular energy of photons from this particular radioisotope.
Or maybe even https://georesults.com.au/product/rs-350-backpack-human-port...
I imagine they are both rather expensive.
https://radiascan.com/
A good intro to what it can be used for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1UZdLVlBXg
If you're holding it in your hand it emits enough radiation to be very unhealthy, but as soon as you put some distance between you and it then it becomes very hard to detect.
Unfortunately, Cs-137 is one of the bits of waste generated as fallout from nuclear testing, and its half-life is 30 years, so ambient levels are generally not identically zero.
Now find a road that's about 1400KM (870mi) long and pick some random point on there to drop it.
Wait a week for other passing traffic to disturb it, maybe get caught in a tire and sent even further astray.
Now go find it, remembering that even with sensitive equipment, you might need to be a few tens of meters away to pick it up out of the background radiation.
https://www.arktis-detectors.com/products/
https://www.ansto.gov.au/products/detection-and-imaging-cori...
The northern wind brings snow and ice Humans starve and freeze The Fimbul winter has arrived And soon the world will cease to be Brother will be brother′s bane No one shall be spared All will die, none remain That is mankind's share
The southern sphere is set ablaze Muspel′s fire is set free The sun is on its final chase And soon the world will cease to be
Across the western sky he runs A wolf so grim and mean Devours the eternal sun And soon the world will cease to be
Everything in Australia kills you or at least causes horrible pain. Even that cute platypus or that harmless-looking shell on the beach.
And now this.
I'll take Australian dangers over North American every day of the week.
I bet is has a great name in Australia - any Ozzies around who can comment?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_crocodile
Unfortunately plenty of drunk campers have a habit of doing this.
Arguably the most dangerous animal on the planet for a human (I think Nile crocodiles and Hippos kill more but that's more to do with them inhabiting areas with humans in them)
Those megafauna in North America are pretty hard for a human to encounter accidentally. As opposed to these:
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2013...
I can't fully agree with their ratings, as someone who has lived in the bush in queensland, I'll re-rank these how I imagine someone native to the area has sees it.
Irukandji (rarer but more painful) is MUCH nastier than the box jellyfish (painful but more common), I wanted to kill myself with a very mild Irukandji sting.
The paralysis tick is much worse than a bull ant, which just hurts quite a bit, but the symptoms/fatality of the tick is worse (which doesn't really hurt, just ends up killing you slowly)
The gympie gympie stinging tree(common, but not listed) is much more painful than the bull ant, and people with grass allergies get even more pain from it.
Oh and stonefish, fuck stonefish. I've seen a tough bastard get stung and bastard was weeping like a baby for hours even after the anti venom. I think the guy almost died from the shock alone.
When you're in the city, a lot of this risk isnt anywhere near you, when you are working on the farm in the country near either the desert or the rainforest , native flora and fauna risks are very real.
Never heard of that tree.
There being North America? Been a handful of times. Enjoy snowboarding and hiking. Thankfully I've never run into anything on the trail.
The guy below me posted about the Gympie Gympie tree. Been stung by one, twice. First time from a dead leaf. Second time from a very much alive and still on the tree leaf. That tree is rather painful. Both times treated with a cold wax strip. Had to ring around to find one on the second occasion as it was at night.
Yes, for 85% of the country, risk is small.
Crocodiles are the only major danger, and they're isolated to the far north of the country.
But they are truly terrifying, in that they are silent and invisible in the water, intelligent, and capable of watching a human for days to learn their routine and plan an ambush.
Although I did go on a kayaking expedition to Dunk Island, where there were only four 2-person kayaks, unusually high waves, and my boat-mate asked, "Are we going to sink?" Obviously we didn't.
Of course this is all for laughs, but some HN'ers are incapable of that.
I grew up in far north Queensland, the risk of crocodials are always one of those real but manageable risks in your life, I was very young and remember a family friend being taken by a large one (Search for Beryl Wruck in Daintree), I am very familiar with the risks, but risks are part of life in that area.
I regularly spend time there and was canooing one of the fresh water creeks which lead into the river to the sea. I had done a few different creeks a few times to the mouth of the daintree river, this time my wife wanted to join, she wasnt keen to paddle.
She took the first half (~18km) of the trip easy, barely paddling, we got to the main river where the water turned from fresh to brackish a smallish (3m) croc was sunning himself in the winter sun (crocs are more active in hotter months, so he was just chilling). Within seconds of pointing it out I no longer had to paddle, "mrs trash" was inspired to help with her part of the paddling.
I know that many people here would be mad about taking risks, but its just part of life living in the country.
The lethality of Australia is vastly overstated. I'm guessing North and South America are both much more dangerous than here.
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/
Conversely, I've been bitten by red-back spiders, by a bat, many large lizards and goannas, a 4m python, by a wobbygong shark and by a red-bellied black snake. I encounter many more dangerous critters here in Oz than I did in California. I do kind of bring it on myself though, 'cos of my penchant for picking up snakes and spiders.
And don't forget the Cassowary, a confirmed vegan bird that if startled can disembowel you in one strike. Not only apex predators can kill humans. I wasn't aware moose was an apex predator by the way, although they are plainly dangerous.
This capsule has been lost in one of the most remote, uninhabitated parts of the country.
The dangers of living in Australia are vastly overblown ...
Brown snakes are extremely common in cities but you have to enter "their" territory
And we wonder why Western Australian Aboriginal poet and playwright Jack Davis, OBE, OA referred to kartiya as fringedwellers (clinging in fear to the edges of the continent).
A quip second only to Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kartiya
Which led me down the rabbit hole of the second quote, which is an interesting topic all on its own.
Fun questions that might have prompted include: Given the number of lanuages [1] why would a Noongar person [2] from the South West of Western Australia use a word from the Western Desert Group?
To be honest it's something he said in both English (in his work) and Noongar in response to the play | movie The Fringe Dwellers [3] and common usage of the phrase.
Trouble is, like most oral language words, there's no consistent spelling with an internet search hit for the word he did use, however it's similar enough to what I used .. with a harder intial 'G' sound and more of a running hard "ddd" sound in the middle.
My apologies for dragging you down a rabbit hole, I hope you enjoyed the adventure.
[1] https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Davis_(playwright)
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091081/
Luckily it was a small source and Polonium has a relatively short half-life, but the department had to go through a whole song and dance of declaring an incident.
It has a half life of just 138 days so in only 4.6 years the missing Polonium will be equivalent in radioactivity to Radium, which is known to cause cancer. This doesn't sound like something that should be treated lightly.
They were letting undergrads handle it, so definitely wasn't a large source.
Also, hey Chase! Funny to see you in the wild (Ferdi here)
At first, I was very surprised to hear it's a thing, but apparently it is and one can buy for just $170:
https://amstat.com/products/anti-static-brush-with-ionizing-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBHIp967TD8
Not sure about this particular polonium isotope. But don't expect something to be harmless after 10x the half-life per se.
The dose of radiation has different meanings; absorbed, equivalent, effective. These are just different calculations, starting from how much energy the body received (absorbed), to taking into account the different kinds of radiation whose effects differ (equivalent), to where in the body the dose as received (different organs at different risk, effective).
The half-life of 210Po is 138 days, so it's ~10x less active than 223Ra. That's meaningless with respect to the health risk, though; the activity of the sample is ultimately selected by its intended use. Most samples are sized according to the dose requirements. At least, that's my understanding (physics, not medical). In general we don't want to over-size a source as there are greater regulations. Similarly, we don't want sources to become useless too quickly.
In any case, this is definitely bad — 5000x less activity is not good if it's greater than the lethal dose. Because radioactive sources are so small, the risk is not likely to be distributed; you get the whole dose, or nothing.*
* Unless it gets dispersed somehow.
Dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_dose#/media/File:SI... LNT: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2663584/
> * Unless it gets dispersed somehow.
Exactly, the real worry was that it would get crushed and would be breathed in, in which case it would be a real problem.
But even so, the school had to file a report with the nuclear regulator iirc. Lot of paperwork.
Radium, in contrast, emits gamma radiation, which presents more of a threat to casual bystanders. All of which is to say: you can't just compare "radioactivity" levels and extrapolate to "danger".
Cheap eBay Geiger counters will probably tell you if gamma rays are an immediate danger, and if you're close enough to have problems, your probably also close enough to detect it.
It's not an either/or sort of thing. Gamma decay occurs after alpha or beta decay, so a gamma source will also emit alpha or beta radiation. In the case of Cs-137, it emits a lot of beta radiation. Normally this is shielded, but normally it doesn't fall off a truck..
Especially if they prank one group by not telling them. :-D
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
> Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the radioactive material that had been left behind.[7] Figueiredo then warned the president of Ipasgo, Lício Teixeira Borges, that he should take responsibility "for what would happen with the caesium bomb".[7] The Court of Goiás posted a security guard to protect the site.[8] Meanwhile, the owners of IGR wrote several letters to the National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), warning them about the danger of keeping a teletherapy unit at an abandoned site, but they could not remove the equipment by themselves once a court order prevented them from doing so.[7][8]
> In light of the deaths caused, the three doctors who had owned and operated IGR were charged with criminal negligence. Because the accidents occurred before the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988 and because the substance was acquired by the clinic and not by the individual owners, the court could not declare the owners of IGR liable. One of IGR's owners and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building. The two thieves were not included as defendants in the public civil suit.
I'd consider it very likely it wasn't moved for 2 years because the director pulled some strings to make sure it'd stay there, consequences be damned
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/04/248737662...
How much is 300 curies?
A mole of cobalt 60 weighs 60 g, so it was a quarter of a gram if I did the calculations right.
The ln 2 factor is because the probability of a decay happening in a second is ln 2 divided by the half life.
Or 5,2 years
If the capsule is on or very near the road, a single trip from start to finish with a NaI(Tl) or CsI scintillation counter will find it. Every CBRN team in the world has these, so they have obviously completed the first run at this without finding it. The capsule is not on or near the road.
Australia is famous for road trains on the Great Northen Highway. They travel fast and heavy on the paved road that runs through the outback. If the tires of one of those hit the capsule, they could fling it a fair distance into the desert. There's nothing between the road and the sandy desert to stop it.
If the capsule is a fair distance off the road, the inverse square law is going to reduce gamma detections closer to background. There won't be a clear peak in the data. If the vehicle with the detector moves slowly, there will be a wide peak in the time dimension that may just look like a natural variation in the background. If the vehicle moves fast, it may miss the source completely.
It will be a matter of looking at the data to try to find a pattern that indicates where the capsule may be. This will be made more difficult becuase they don't likely have a pre-capsule-loss run that would allow them to subtract normal variations of the background.
Adding to the problem is the stochastic nature of radiation. It is entirely possible to have a significant peak in the count rates that is not a strong point source; just a random variation in the background. Lower peaks from random confluence of background sources are likely; higher peaks are less likely, but not impossible. It may require a large number of runs to eliminate random events.
Real vehicles on real roads experience a lot of variations in speed, plus random starts and stops because the driver had to pee, or eat, or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something. A fair bit of work will need to be done to standardize multiple runs.
This can be partly solved by using multiple detectors on the same vehicle, with the idea being that peaks that are the result of natural variations in the background should only affect one detector at a time--so they can be subtracted out. But, again, CBRN teams have enough resources that they have already done this and they haven't found it.
So it is reasonable to conclude that the capsule is either quite far off the road, or has been picked up by a passing vehicle.
Another possibility is that the idea that it "fell off a truck" is wrong and that some human grabbed it by dissasembling the apparatus. This could be out of curiosity, or ignorance, or a misguided attempt to steal the source or use it for nefarious purposes.
If that is the case, the capsule is going to be nearly impossible to find unless it happens to pass a fixed gamma detector somewhere, such as a port.
The incident is a good argument for building scintillation crystals into all cellphones. This would be cheap and easy. Small scintillators are not very sensitive, and they are not great for spectroscopy, but they are extremely cool, very small, don't interfere with the workings of the phone, and use extremely little power.
A network of scintillators in every phone would be amazing for finding stuff like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34607423
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/d47c6a97fd9b93de...
That was my first thought too. Do you think it’s physically possible to make a MEMS scintiallation device?
This page [0] has an image of a small scintillator plus photomultiplier, but probably too thick for a phone.
[0]https://scan-electronics.com/en/dosimeters/radiacode-101
There isn't so many cases in daily life that one can encounter a radioactive source. Even if you are actively looking for one (don't do it), you will have a hard time if you don't work with radioactive sources occupationally.
Also, it's not physically possible to create a small and yet sensitive radiation detector.
It was reported in the national news within 12 hours of being found lost, so I don't think they had done that yet, especially given the distance.
> or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something
There's few situations where someone might stop for a dead kangaroo, or really any other wildlife. Either because they see it's still alive, or because they're checking to see if it might be a female with live young.
If it's clear that it's dead, nobody is going to stop. On a road, in WA, in summer -- yeah you're going to smell that for a long ways. Scavangers will deal with it pretty quickly, anyway.
Some Aboriginal communities will hunt and eat Kangaroo.
Hunting Kangaroo for sport/'population control' is a thing in some areas. But the meat is usually either wasted or fed to animals. I understand that with wild Kangaroo you have to worry about parisites.
You can get Kangaroo meat at the supermarket though.
I looked up Fukushima satellite maps, and they all say they are fluid simulations based on ground sensor data.
> The LAT detects gamma rays by using Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation in a technique known as pair production. When a gamma ray, which is pure energy, slams into a layer of tungsten in the detector, it can create a pair of subatomic particles (an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron). The direction of the incoming gamma ray is determined by projecting the direction of these particles back to their source using several layers of high-precision silicon tracking detectors.
https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/221503main_GLAST-041508.pdf
It's pretty effective on other planetoids, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Prospector?useskin=vecto...
Of course, on the off chance someone does find it and pick it up, and then bring it into a town, etc. it can be bad. But I thought that, in Australia, most of that desert road is basically desolate for decades, except for cars coming by occasionally. Perhaps when they do road work, however...
See also this [1] article with a picture of an example gauge. Again making the point that this is really weird: "Radiation Services WA general manager Lauren Steen said it was a “highly unlikely” scenario, due to the safety measures typically in place for the transit of radioactive materials."
New material for a future Plainly Difficult episode once the investigation is complete.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-28/radioactive-capsule-s...
This explanation sounds pretty bogus so theft makes sense to me
There's a famous Australian sketch about an oil spill from 1991 that uses very similar wording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E8LW7qaDG4
I have a bag of locking washers I would be more than happy to donate if it makes this kind of thing less likely to happen in the future. In the mean time, good luck.
https://www.loctiteproducts.com/en/products/specialty-produc...
(No relation, just a satisfied customer after finding they work well after being strongly recommended by a racecar engineer I know)
[0] https://www.nord-lock.com/nord-lock/
> Upon opening the package, it was found that the gauge was broken apart with one of the four mounting bolts missing and the source itself and all screws on the gauge also missing
If they were transporting it this sloppily it could have easily killed the transporters. I've moved empty USB sticks with more caution. If they find this just lying on the side of the road somewhere I'll eat my hat.
- "9. SEARCHING FOR RADIOACTIVE OBJECTS"
- "The first part of this section describes three different airborne surveys that successfully located lost radioactive sources. The three incidents were quite different in nature and provide useful information should similar accidents occur in the future. Section 9 concludes with a discussion showing how to estimate the count rate which would be observed by AGRS from a radioactive source. These results can be used to plan searches for lost radioactive sources."
- "9.1. RECOVERY OF A LOST 60CO SOURCE"
- "9.2. LOCATING THE LOST ATHENA MISSILE"
- "9.3. COSMOS-954 INCIDENT"
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... ("Airborne Gamma Ray Spectrometer Surveying", 1991)
Their first incident is basically identical to this one:
- "On 21 June 1968, a 325 mCi 60Co source3 was lost in transit somewhere between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Kansas City, Missouri, a distance of 1800 km."
Where can I read more about this? How does one lose a missile?
https://wsmrmuseum.com/2021/11/10/in-1970-an-athena-missile-...
https://www.adafruit.com/product/483
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-many-bananas-would-...
The lock is on the shutter end, anyway. The cover plate that gives access to the source for replacement is secured by four security-type Torx screws. No sign of anything like aircraft safety wires to prevent the screws loosening. That cover plate looks like the weak point here.
The wooden crate shown is "Type A" packaging, which is rated for "conditions normally encountered during transportation".[3] Doesn't even have to be fully watertight, just spray-resistant. Not super tough, just strong enough to stack 5 high. That's all that the IAEA requires.
So you can see how a few hundred miles on a flatbed truck on a bumpy road could cause this accident. Especially on a decade old source. These gauge sources need a new radiation source every 10-15 years, so shipping them back for source replacement is routine.
IAEA overview of such gauges.[4]
[1] https://www.advgauging.com/product/berthold-7440-d-cr-500-mc...
[2] https://www.qsa-global.com/industrial-cs-137-gamma-sources
[3] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
[4] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f14/rmem2_0....
I guess at least they have this footnote: “Note: Users must be licensed to possess them before they can be purchased.”
The size is rather impressive... when I read the article there was another Australia article in the sidebar - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/world/australia/australia...
which is a prose version of https://twitter.com/cragget2/status/1614873268657475587
> For xmas, mum and dad drove from Kununura to Broome and then flew down to Perth (cheaper than flying from kun). Then a biblical flood came and destroyed the only road connecting Broome and Kununura, stranding their car in Broome..
> .. until dad got permission from mum to do this:
(embed map of northern Australia with a route of 64 hours and 4,770 km)
That's a hair under 3000 miles and as one reply commented ( https://twitter.com/tony_neilson/status/1615278118247497728 ) only 18km longer than driving from Gibraltar to Moscow by way of Pairs, Berlin, and Warsaw (which might be the fastest route?)
The twitter post continues with updates on the drive.
This is IMO the real puzzle.
If the radiation stops, you have really good info on where to look, and fast response time.
Sometimes extracting this information is not easy b/c jobs/careers depend on it. E.g., did the fellow who packaged the capsule possibly drop it down a toilet accidentally and try to cover up the loss, did the truck veer off course at any time? Did a driver take any unreported stops or side trips (food, whorehouse, supplies, pick up a six-pack, etc.)?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5eqBDPMDg