from the is-there-anything-in-western-Australia-that-won't-kill-you? dept.
A Tiny but Deadly Radioactive Capsule Has Gone Missing in Australia:
The western end of Australia is dominated by a sweltering desert of ochre-colored soil and hearty shrubs, but there's something new hiding in the outback: a radioactive capsule. Australian officials are frantically searching for the object, which was being transported between two mines when it went missing. They're warning people in the region to steer clear of the object if they see it, as even brief exposure can be dangerous.
The capsule is tiny, just 6 x 8 mm in size. Inside the ceramic enclosure is a sample of cesium-137, a highly radioactive isotope that is used in mining equipment. Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) says the capsule was being moved from a mine near the town of Newman to one near Perth earlier this month. However, the capsule never made it, suggesting it fell off the truck somewhere on road.
Despite being so small, the capsule has a big radioactive footprint, according to DFES. The cesium-137 inside emits about 2 millisieverts per hour, which is the same dose as 10 medical X-rays or an entire year of normal background radiation at sea level. Officials say that holding the container even for a short time could cause radiation burns and increase the risk of severe illness.
[...] A similar radioactive capsule was lost in a Ukrainian quarry in the late 1970s. Authorities there gave up after a week of searching and went back to business as usual. The capsule eventually ended up in concrete that was used to construct an apartment building in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. From 1980 to 1989, the cesium-137 poisoned the residents of apartment 85. In all, four people died of leukemia, and 17 more received heavy doses of radiation before the object was found.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 31 2023, @12:43PM (24 children)
Really? Someone tossed this capsule into the bed of a truck, and took off? That little capsule just bounced out of the bed of the truck when it hit a bump? It's not contained in a hardened security box or something? Something with a nice lead lining?
It's hard to believe this thing is not transported in a secure container, at least the size of a large suitcase. Surely, they aren't seriously searching 700 miles of roadway for an item the size of a quarter.
And, if they really are searching for an item the size of a quarter, I would think that a helicopter with a geiger counter would be about the fastest way of locating it. Put something together ad hoc - geiger counters are that very hard to find. Fly low, fly slow, and have a crewman watch/listen for the counter to indicate something unusual.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @01:23PM (5 children)
A dingo ate my calibration source!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @01:45PM (3 children)
Bingo! If it's not one of these,
https://raims.co.uk/product/caesium-137-cs-137-sealed-sources-for-instrument-calibration-and-irradiation/ [raims.co.uk]
It's probably a similar calibration source.
If the dingo survives, maybe it will start a family of glow in the dark dingos...(joking).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @02:01PM (2 children)
I'd be more worried about the drop bear that eats the dingo that ate the capsule . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @03:38PM
Considering that almost all the insects and animals in Australia appears to want to kill you I'm not sure picking one over the other for the radiation upgrade is better or worse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 31 2023, @07:09PM
Some old lady in the audience said it's dingoes all the way down.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @01:51PM
If you thought King Kong and Godzilla were bad/awesome, wait when you see the Hogaroo. Tell yea, mate, Death, Destruction and Disease [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GloomMower on Tuesday January 31 2023, @01:51PM (10 children)
It is 17520000 times more than background radiation levels right at the source. But I think they'll still have a problem detecting it over background radiation even if they fly low, you probably really need to be on the ground.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @02:22PM (8 children)
Air is a poor attenuator for gamma. The factor that matters in this case is the decay with square of distance (flux conservation, spherical symmetry).
With the source with an average size of 7mm, at sqrt(17520000)*7e-3 = 29m, a counter will still be able to detect double the background radiation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 31 2023, @03:20PM (6 children)
29m is pretty damn low, unless you're on pancake flat terrain, and even then the odd tree or power transmission line can make life exciting.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday January 31 2023, @08:38PM
Or high jumping kangaroo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @09:27PM
Yeah, nah, mate, forget helicopters - only the dimming mind of decrepit sailors dream of aerial solutions to ground problems.
It was lost while on a road trip between two outback mines. Just drive the same road with a Geiger detector, chances are the thingy just fell down, not flung a good deal away from the road.
If it's not on the road, maybe you can forget about it - not like the outback is densely populated with curious kids picking small cylinders from dirt.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday February 01 2023, @03:34AM (3 children)
Not sure if you're familiar with the geography of Western Australia, but pancakes are a lot more bumpy than the landscape over there
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2023, @06:57AM (1 child)
geographytopography(hills, valleys, mountains, etc.)
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday February 01 2023, @10:25PM
You are technically correct...
...which is the best kind of correct!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2023, @03:24PM
Righto, mate, so fucken boring that they started to dig pits just for variation. Some struck iron and reckon'd they'd make moar money if only they'd call it a mine.
(Score: 2) by GloomMower on Tuesday January 31 2023, @03:47PM
Thanks for doing the calculations. What if it is gets pushed under some dirt and rock? I guess it could be worth trying it. 700 miles seems like a lot.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday January 31 2023, @09:01PM
That's why they are just driving the road, at 50km/h. But if it gets stuck in a tire and is not by the road anymore, well, hopefully no one tries to eat it when they find it next year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident [wikipedia.org]
Of course, that source was quite a bit stronger.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 31 2023, @02:25PM (4 children)
This was in a device, used by a mining company, handled by a contractor. There were more than adequate security precautions and handling procedures laid out by the device manufacturer. By the time we get to the, no doubt untrained, contractor handling the device, they failed to secure the four safety bolts holding the capsule in the device, chucked the device in the back of a truck unsecured, drove hundreds of miles on bad roads, and then fucked right off after getting paid.
One of the safety bolts was outright missing as well as the dangerous capsule it secured, the other three were loose. Somebody needs to add Loctite blue goo to their procedures.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 31 2023, @05:40PM (3 children)
+1 karma for knowing Loc-tite blue from his elbow.
Made a terrible mistake here, a couple years ago. Brought home some Loc-tite red, and it disappeared. Then I started finding it on things that I wanted to disassemble, for one reason or another. I've worked with a lot of people who couldn't tell you the difference.
Rule of thumb: if you don't want to heat something to about 600 degrees F to take it apart, stay away from the Loc-tite red. The torch will destroy a lot of things, before the red comes loose!
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday January 31 2023, @06:10PM (2 children)
It's way off-topic, but I very much wish Loc-Tite would put the Red/Blue/Green/Purple into bottles of the corresponding color or transparent bottles. They make amazing products, but I really shouldn't have to spray paint the lids to know which one I'm grabbing. :/
As a sidebar, if you ever have some weird bonding requirements, contact their sales team; They have capital E engineers that are both helpful and competent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2023, @07:11PM
> spray paint the lids
Will colored sharpies suffice?
I hate to use just a little bit of spray can paint. I still have to invert the can after use, and spray to clear the tube & nozzle==wasted paint & solvent.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 31 2023, @08:00PM
Despite my extremely poor color vision, I agree with you. That, and they could print LOC-TITE $COLOR in big, bold letters on every bottle. It's even worse on those little bottles sold in most hardware and auto parts stores, where the boldest print amounts to fine print in a contract.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Tuesday January 31 2023, @04:49PM (1 child)
You wish it was the size of a quarter. 6mm x 8mm is about 1/4" x 1/3".
Methinks the only way to find it is to mount some Geiger counters to a truck and slowly re-drive the route. Or maybe it's easier to program a bunch of drones, I dunno.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 31 2023, @06:37PM
We could do it the Soviet way (as described in the story) and look for mysterious radiation burns and leukemia illnesses over the next few centuries. /sarc On the serious side, probably ought to be doing that anyway. Who knows how many such things have already been lost?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 31 2023, @02:26PM (6 children)
My first thought was that some sort of radiation detection would quickly locate it. But can it be detected at all beyond a rather short range of, I dunno, 10 meters? If it was in a vacuum, yes, but surrounded by matter, I guess not.
But then, satellites can see the damnedest things, with vision so sharp that from space they can read a book over your shoulder,or so I've heard. So, maybe a satellite looking in the right wavelengths could detect an excess against the background. It wouldn't see any radiation directly, it would see only an anomalous glow, good enough to nearly pinpoint it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 31 2023, @02:53PM (5 children)
Detecting that glow against the background is a tall order for a satellite.
A swarm of drones flying low and slow over the desert up to 100m to either side of the roadway where the device was (hopefully) lost should make quick work of finding it with Geiger counters. Sounds expensive until you compare that with four deaths from leukemia.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday January 31 2023, @06:19PM (1 child)
I love throwing technology at a problem, but you can start searching much quicker with human-driven trucks mounted with Geiger counters. You can add swing arms to cover a wider swath of roadway.
The unfortunate bit is that it's the right size to get stuck in a tire and then it could go anywhere. They are looking for a needle the size of a couple of watch batteries in a 700-mile long haystack. It is not an enviable task.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 31 2023, @08:44PM
Photo I saw had it as a cylinder 6mm x 8mm... basically a pencil eraser.
If it gets into a truck tire that's going into civilization, they should pick it up with their "Five Eyes" or whatever the hell they call it these days nuclear materials monitoring program.
I agree it should be close to the road, and you could get going with the trucks and boom arms pretty quick... or you could call the Chinese who put on those drone shows with hundreds in a swarm and just hang Geiger counters on'em with a screamer siren attached for any hits... I'd be afraid that ... if it didn't get stuck in a tire tread ... that it would get kicked up and thrown farther from the roadside than a boom would reach, that and being pushed by a dung-beetle or whatever can get you pretty far.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday February 01 2023, @01:35AM (2 children)
This.
It's a perfect situation for drones. But it could also have been picked up by vehicle tyres and be slowly poisoning some family. Or many families, if the devices is picked up by other cars.
The company responsible also needs to pay to deploy radiation detectors (such as Geiger counters and radiation bracelets) into the community. And pay also to deploy crowdsourced apps that look for radiation-generated noise captured by phone cams and webcams, especially in mobile devices.
But mostly, consult with an organisation with a history of getting such matters resolved. I recall reading a book on Bayesian statistics where the US armed forces had statisticians using Bayesian methods successfully drive the search for a missing H-bomb.
Who knows, maybe the next version of the iWatch will have a personal radiation detector.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2023, @04:16AM (1 child)
I read a book like that too. Enjoyed it. I don't remember the name. It was written in the late 60s or early 70s (I think). I checked it out of the library. It was a history of Bayes statistics, written during a time when the frequentists had the academic upper hand (Fisher cast a very long intellectual shadow).
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday February 01 2023, @08:14AM
Wow, we read two very similar book written decades apart - the one I read talks about frequentists and their tussles with the Bayes people too.
I tracked down 'my' book - this one, published in 2011:
https://www.amazon.com/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die/dp/0300169698 [amazon.com]
It pointed me to WinBUGS, a software tool for Bayesian statistics. I have looked at that yet though.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 01 2023, @10:59AM (2 children)
Several sites, including the BBC, are reporting that the Cesium capsule was found [bbc.co.uk]. Apparently it was 2m off the road:
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Wednesday February 01 2023, @11:02AM
OK, you beat me to it :P
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 01 2023, @01:14PM
Yeah they're still pushing the fearmongering hard, at least in the articles I've seen, which is typical/funny of them.
(Score: 2, Informative) by drgibbon on Wednesday February 01 2023, @11:00AM
The capsule was found [abc.net.au], laying about two metres from the side of the road.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 01 2023, @01:58PM
IF you wore this capsule as a necklace, it may give you cancer. Half life about 35 years, beta emitter.
Meanwhile, cars and coal power stations kill millions every year and no one cares.