Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?
wired.com
wired.com
tl;dr:
A cylinder of cobalt, probably used in a medical instrument. Things like that are understandably very expensive to properly and legally dispose of. Somehow it ended up in a heap of scrap copper.
How expensive? From the article: $700,000 expensive. For a "pencil-like cylinder 9 inches long and a third of an inch in diameter." Wow.
EDIT: ah, I was mistaken. See child comment. My error.
Well-written, long form articles are increasingly difficult to find in this day & age of Twitter-sized sound bites, even off the internet. It's nice to see that a publication billed as a sci/tech magazine is taking the time and effort to write them.
"Give Me Something to Read" is a pretty good online aggregator: http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ .
http://www.spiegel.de/international/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics
Spiegel International I believe has the best coverage of European affairs and The Atlantic the best of US affairs. The New Yorker will, on occasion, have bar none the best investigative journalism around, but at the cost of the coverage being too spotty to use as a primary news source. Recently Spiegel International has mostly become that for me. (I live in Germany, and actually the fact that they only publish 3-4 articles per day in English I find quite nice since it tends to reduce the noise and just publish the most important stuff – usually in long-ish format.)
An interesting tidbit on Spiegel – despite being (in print format) a German language magazine, if I remember correctly, the only news magazines with larger circulation in the world are Time, Newsweek and The Economist and it reportedly has the largest fact-checking department in the world.
It's a weekly, and I find 2/4 issues will have nothing to read, 1/4 something decent, and 1/4 so outstanding I literally want to dance for happiness. The two I enjoyed most recently were:
1) An article on Fukushima about how the japanese government structured incentives for nuclear power safety and proliferation. 2) An article on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping whistleblower Thomas Drake (a spectacular example of terrible management's attempt to organize a software project)
Unfortunately, those articles aren't easy to search up because they're buried in my iPad somewhere. Here is a link to a wired story about #2, although it makes the story sound less interesting. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/new-yorker-on-thoma...
It also starts with an intriguing hook but ends like a damp squid. I looked at the bottom thinking "oh great I have another three more pages to endure before finding out why the rod was there" and then realised that was it.
I suppose they didn't want to hold off on publishing it for another several months until the investigators in Leipzig came to a conclusion as to its origin and reason for being in that container.
I actually found that part pretty interesting, but admittedly it depends on what you already know and what you were hoping to get out of this article. To me, the radiation-disposal incident served as a nice set-up to explain the interlocking networks of containerized shipping and security, which aren't normally on my radar (I know all that exists, I just know nothing about it). I'll admit that if you approach it as a pure whodunnit, it's got a ton of padding and could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
I'll get voted down for this but what the hell
Apparently the guy who wrote it wants to be the next James Joyce but couldn't get his crap published, so now he has to work as a journalist to make a living and experiments with nonlinear reporting...
Web application: if anyone is looking for a Web application idea, how about something like readability that can spit out web pages as PDF files formatted to A6 with no margin and a choice of font size? Ideal for book readers.
Calibre can pull from news sites and format to epub then donwload to your ebook readr IITC
Nook Color + CM7.1 + InstaFetch Pro + Instapaper + Longreads.
The Longreads website integrates with instapaper, and the instafetch client will cache articles to the nook, so I don't have to be online to read. I haven't gotten around to playing with it, but I'm sure iPad + instapaper client would work well
Unless, of course, we start considering what else came through that port while so much attention and resources were focused on one very radioactive container.
As a general rule, a incident you read about in Wired is probably not the first or last of its kind. It seems pretty plausible that old medical stuff gets thrown in with scrap metal all the time.
I wonder if "new money" places like the petrodollar kingdoms and emirates might have the money to purchase and operate advanced medical machines but not necessarily the regulatory maturity to track the whole lifecycle through decommission and safe disposal.
Another historical radiation incident caused by failure to protect a radiation source from scrap thieves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident
If those thieves in the Goiania incident had just sold the the Cs source to a scrapyard immediately without breaking it open first, the two incidents might have been similar.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-j...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident#Theft_of_the_s...
Which might be what happened. We'll never know.
As a story trying to build a narrative it frequently concerns itself too much with the technical detail, or 'setting the scene', with little to no consideration for closing the personal elements it opens up throughout. It's littered with incidental detail but not a great deal of substance.
For example: what happened to Montagna? He's the first person to be mentioned, is described as doing something pretty dangerous, and is forgotten about.
It then ends on such a note as to trivialise the entire article. All of this is only a problem because the article was written in such a way to make it one.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356645/A-weapon-mas...
And you don't see the problem with expanding a serial number field in the middle of the code?
What tends to happen is that an 'owner' will have multiple owner codes for different subsidiaries or companies they have taken over/merged.
The containers also have a lifetime of 10-20years so presumably you can reuse numbers of containers that have been lost or scrapped.
Worst case they just add another company code to handel the next million unventilated, 20-foot-long dry shipping container boxes.
Size and Type Codes
ISO 6346 also gives size and type codes for containers. When displayed on the container, the size and type codes shall be used as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Containernumber.jpg
the size and type codes aren't used in the check digit, are not required, and are usually displayed on a separate line:
http://www.containerking.co.uk/buy-cabins/images/Shipping%20...
anyway, back to the original question, you can't have two containers with the same owner code, same container ID and made unique through the size and type codes
the problem is solved because the large shipping firms (ie. the 5 or 6 that control the industry) each have dozens of manufacturing codes. see my answer in the other part of this thread
That is why they also color-code the containers and put their logos on them.
The code is ISO 6346[1] and was defined a long, long time ago and didn't scale very well (or you could say that is scaled perfectly well - nobody imagined that 5-6 companies would control most of shipping). The container ID part, ie. the '22G1', that the article mentions actually isn't part of the ISO code and is usually printed below the ISO code. So the container needs to be identified between the top-level company ID and the 6-digit container ID, hence lots of top-level ID's for the big companies.
The whole topic of containerization and how the world came to agree on standards is interesting and has a parallel in web standards[3]. You can ship a container from Canada to Niger and know that when it gets off a ship they will have a crane to pick it up, a barcode to scan and lookup its contents, the right power plugs to power it if it is refrigerated, a way to identify the destination, owner, etc. Fascinating stuff.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346
[2] http://www.containerking.co.uk/buy-cabins/images/Shipping%20... <- see the '22G1' is printed below the ID
307703’s load was bound for a foundry called Sigimet
in the town of Pozzolo Formigaro, 40 miles north of Genoa.
So after 10 years and more than $1 billion spent on
scanners, radiation detectors, and beefed-up intelligence,
most US ports are still scanning containers onshore, after unloading.
This container is emitting X, as long as we put Y tons of shielding around it and stay Z meters away it's safe.
Or we could just immediately rip it open and see what happens.
... and is contained in a steel box. This gave them time to decide what would be the proper course of action.
Amazing this sort of thing doesn't happen more often
I'm quite sure these accidents happen more frequently than they are discovered.
In places without hospitals - I'm sure the contents of a lot of these machines end up being dumped in the 3rd world, to be 'recycled' like most toxic waste
“The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems: They won’t find a nuclear bomb, they won’t find highly enriched uranium, and they won’t find a shielded dirty bomb,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and president of the Center for National Policy. “Other than that, they’re great pieces of equipment.”
Better to do some than none.
bearing logos like Yang Ming, Hamburg S\0xFCd, ..."I could pay a few thousand dollars to properly dispose of this, or I could throw it over the fence of the local junkyard."
Only if you get caught.
I remember reading an article on HN where there was a recommendation for a style of prose that might be useful in today's lifestyle. The author recommended summarizing everything in the first paragraph, then having having a more detailed middle section ( few paragraphs), and then having even more detailed paragraphs in the end. Depending on the interest level of the reader, if he stopped at the end of any paragraph, he would have still gotten the gist, only the finer details would be missing!
So the port only checks containers likely to have radioactive contamination, like scrap metal, which they did and they found this - system worked precisely as it should.
You could have monitors on the cranes to detect very high levels of radiation, so high you don't even want to check it manual - as in this case, But these happen so rarely it's not worth it. And with 250 Million container movements a year what sort of error rate would you need to achieve?
That said, the eventually used a much more precise germanium-based detector that was able to identify the radiation by source. Such a detector could distinguish the decay of shielded U-235 from a shipment of bananas. I wonder how much those detectors cost...
"The team then brought in one of the most sensitive portable detectors on the market, an $80,000 Ortec HPGe Detective DX-100T. Inside the unit, a 1.65-pound chunk of germanium..."
If you'd want to be on the cheap side, there's a used Ge on eBay for $3k right now, add a HV supply anda suitable ADC card for your PC and you can go recording γ-spectra in no time, possibly on a $5k budget.
As you'll have to identify the isotopes yourself, check http://www.inl.gov/gammaray/catalogs/catalogs.shtml for reference spectra.
I'd guess an intern took over at that point, fired up wikipedia and started filling in the other 4000 words.