Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If it was knocked off the road, though, the question will be if it fell into a crack or other such place because then the radiation is somewhat shielded and it would take much more measuring time to identify it.
I suspect if a few passes with vehicle-mounted detectors don't find it then some drones with detectors traveling along the sides of the road would be a good next step. If a critter moved it or ate it then it's probably gone forever. At a distance of 1 meter the dose rate from that source is already not extremely hazardous unless a person were exposed for an extended period of time (like a full day or two). Getting closer, like putting it directly against your torso, would mean serious health effects in a matter of minutes.
Given the parameters to maximize detection and minimize time/resources, how would you direct a drone or something to find the capsule?
How would that change with 2 drones? 4? 8? As many drones as there are flyable Geiger counters in the country?
Dunno if there's enough energy expected to set it off at the expected speeds travelled. Obviously they don't go "ding ding ding". Might find some spurious beta-radiation sources?
https://www.uth.edu/safety/radiation-safety/personal-radiati...
Post process the 256 value gamma spectrum, correcting for cosmic, aircraft signature, remove the mean average W.Australia backround signature, run a full rolling NASVD to peak sharpen and look for 32 and 662 kev twin peaks.
Then you'd start with the local area ground search.
Given the lapsed time already there's a good chance the slug in question was either magpie'd on site or has been picked up in a tire and gone off route.
Guidelines for radioelement mapping using gamma ray spectrometry data International Atomic Energy Agency (2003)
https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.p...
Or go full Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
and read the three publications linked at bottom and get the high res A0 wall map for the dorm room !
( A GUIDE TO THE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS FOR AIRBORNE GAMMA-RAY SURVEYS Grasty + Minty
https://d28rz98at9flks.cloudfront.net/14861/Rec1995_060.pdf
and the other two )
If you read all that and still feel game for more there's some mad bastard willing to tolerate PhD candidates that want to mix geology and big radiometric data, he even reckons (and I quote):
The integration of these different lines of research has the potential to improve greatly our ability to extract geological information from radiometric datasets for exploration purposes.
...or if there is already a crowdsourced detection effort for looking out for this sort of thing, that'd be a cool map to plot.
The one I got is on Amazon as "Geiger Counter Nuclear Radiation Detector, Professional High Accuracy Radioactive Detector Meter Beta Gamma X Ray Data Tester Marble Dosimeter".
In the budget price range (~$150 and under) my detector, which uses a solid scintillator, and a traditional Geiger tube based device are really the only options worth considering.
The pros of my detector are high range (max 20 mSv/hr vs typically 1 mSv/hr for common Geiger tubes), roughly 3x higher X-ray/gamma sensitivity, and automatic energy-correction of dose rate for better accuracy in realistic scenarios. I also think the design is pretty robust and user-friendly, people seem to like it.
A traditional Geiger tube has some pros also. The only ones worth getting in the budget range, in my opinion, are the GQ GMC type (there are variants but most are basically the same). They are a little cheaper and they have more bells and whistles like data logging. Another pro is that they have higher beta sensitivity, but that's a con also. Antiques like uranium glass and fiestaware are primarily low energy beta emitters so my detector reacts very weakly but a Geiger tube reacts very strongly. That's a con also, though, because when measuring dose you should NOT measure beta, so it means traditional Geiger tubes dramatically overestimate dose rate when they are exposed to beta (a common mistake among beginners).
Just please don't buy any of the super cheap import detectors that have suddenly appeared on the market in the last year or so, they are all terrible.
At higher prices (~$400 and up) there are a lot of different options with pros and cons, it just depends what the intended applications of the detector are.
Let’s hope that some random person doesn’t find it and turn it into a necklace or something. The TNG episode “Thine Own Self” comes to mind.
Stuff of nightmares.
If people are strongly affected by the radiation, then it's probably not going to be that long until the problem is tracked down and dealt with.
I suppose the worst case scenario would be if the radiation was in a place where it wasn't affecting people as acutely and lots of people were passing nearby it, such that the existence of the radiation wouldn't be as obvious or as easy to track down.
But k/r^2 (different k) is a whole different beast. It’s infinitely worse at zero distance!
Of course, the radioactive source itself is not a point, and the human body isn’t a point either, so it’s not infinitely bad at zero range. Closer than a meter or so (very roughly the size of a body), it will merely concentrate the exposure over a smaller portion of the target and deliver a larger fraction of its total output to the target. The latter effect is a constant factor not vastly greater than 1 when comparing 1 meter to zero meters.
I believe the popular term is "not great, not terrible" ;)
Bit of contradiction in your statement here? If putting it against your torso would mean serious health effects in minutes, how would a critter "eat" it and get more than a few meters away?
I guess by minutes you mean tens of minutes?
Credentials: I've read about the demon core[0] and watched Chernobyl on HBO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents#Im...
They created a situation, were they applied cures that could not work to a patient that wanted to die. And they knew. Let those monsters not be hidden behind the cluelessness of the family.
Clinging to life at all costs, until there is nothing left, but a heap of hellish pain and machines, a good doctor will, should & must prevent this.
First of all, this part is not necessarily common knowledge but serious health effects does not mean incapacitated, and in the case of radiation it usually means effects that come on in the days/weeks following exposure, at least for humans. Animals can have different radio-sensitivity.
Regardless of that, a critter could easily travel a few hundred meters or more in a matter of minutes!! The search area then grows enormously. Total game changer.
a) by moving more than 1 meter per minute.
b) You should not read "serious health effects" as "instant death" where radiation is concerned. There is usually a lag time between radiation exposure and consequences. At low doses, this is "likely cancer, years later". But I think you'd still call that "serious health effects" if it happened to you.
At higher doses the consequences are "radiation sickness, days or hours later", which is plenty of time to disperse the source.
This thing has been missing for months. Their current detection strategy is to post a picture of a watch battery on Facebook and hope it just magically shows up.
We're a little deficient in technology here in Australia, especially in government, doubly so in state government.
It was lost in transit at most 20 days ago between January 11 and January 16.
It was logged as missing five days ago on January 25.
> Their current detection strategy is to post a picture of a watch battery on Facebook and hope it just magically shows up.
This is patently false.
> We're a little deficient in technology here in Australia
Perhaps surprisingly Australia is one of the world leaders in international radiometric mapping having expertise going back 50+ years having mapped multiple entire countries (Australia, Fiji, Mali, and a number of others).
See (for example): https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025 (2009)
Perth is home to several radiometric mapping companies and capable airframes.
Where are you getting months from?
" ... the truck made the journey from 12th to 16th of January, the capsule was not discovered to be missing until the 25th of January."
It's been missing for 2 weeks, and known to be missing for 5 days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioacti...
Also to say the tactics being used to find the capsule being limited to “post a picture of a watch batter on Facebook and hope it magically shows up” would be misleading.
1)The public alerts and posts are to keep the public informed as to what it is. This is for the very small chance someone does stumble onto it to limit the risk to the public.
2)They are searching the route with handheld detectors and soon detectors on vehicles using the trucks GPS data to map the route
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/29/new-t...
tldr: It's going to take a while
The search area is immense. People (even locals) fail to understand the incredibly vast distances. Sure, you can think up a comparison from your own context of a few hundred kms... but does your example have nothing, and I mean, literally nothing manmade but the road infrastructure itself in the proximity of the horizon for sometimes hundreds of kms? Few places do. In more remote places than this, say in the Kimberly, you might as well be on the moon. There's nothing out there to support you or resupply you; you always have to think about that ahead of time.
It's the middle of summer here, we are approaching our hottest month (February). Pavement, being a heat island, makes working alongside or on it a slow process. Exposure and heat stroke are real risks.
On the upside, the roads are sealed, and in relatively good condition and well designed when compared to say much of the US or the poorer parts of Europe but the odds that it falls into a crack or pothole will scale with the distance. A vehicle-mounted detector makes obvious sense but could be costly. However, as we know, especially at these temperatures, roads are slow moving rivers. It might even become embedded if it did indeed land on the surface. In which case it sounds like we may never find it.
Assuming it's most likely in the literal middle of nowhere. The risk of a member of the public coming into to direct physical contact would be highly unlikely. There are sections of road that haven't had human feet walk on them since they were last poured. But that introduces an interesting problem. What happens next time maintenance replace that section? Do crews need to be wary of digging it up, possibly aresolising it in the process? Maintenance is probably the most likely human contact scenario. Does every safety management plan now include the incredibly remote chance of finding it?
Sorry to nitpick, but I've driven across the USA many times and I've never had much to complain about with regards to our roads (outside of Ohio, fuck that state). Doubly so when comparing our road infrastructure to poorer countries.
They even have a saying - there are two seasons in Michigan, Winter and Road Construction.
The road is mostly sealed (Perth (State Capital City) -> Mt Newman (Big hub town in Pilbarra)) with a short tail end road of maybe 50 km to the site in question that'll be probably graded gravel - rough, bumpy, but essentially flat.
With five days gone it's already been flown and driven .. at this stage they're either looking at trace signal and indications the slug has gone well off route in a truck tyre OR doubling back to see if any site workers flying out pilfered it as a souvenir and flew out to Thailand for a holiday since.
Also: the Kimberley is not like the moon.
[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.
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.
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...
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.)?
> 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
> 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.
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
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-...
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..
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)
I kept reading articles looking for this information, questioning what process could have possibly lead to this "surely it wasn't just standalone, surely it was in some form of lead box or something." This finally answers my question but leads to even more questions: Why is it just hanging out in the flatbed of a truck in a box? Does the driver know they're hauling something radioactive? Did nobody consider that this might happen?
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-many-bananas-would-...
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?
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.
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...
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/...
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.
A good intro to what it can be used for:
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...
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.
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.
- "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-...
The northern part of Western Australia, especially away from the coast is some of the most sparsely populated land anywhere.
The highway looks like this for pretty much its entire length: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-24.8925923,119.4609135,3a,7...
Nobody is stopping regularly by the side of this road to wander around and pick up shiny objects.
The search team has thoroughly checked all of the rest stops where the driver took a break, which was easy enough since the truck had GPS tracking.
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...
Maybe this capsule was kept in a bigger container, maybe not. In any case, if they are so dangerous, IMHO every capsule should be kept in its own large container individually tracked. Hell, nowadays you could cheaply fit a container with its own GPS tracker and eliminate risks of loss altogether.
>"The capsule was not lost through cartoonish buffoonery, but through an almost cinematic series of events."
It then goes on to state:
>"Although the truck made the journey from Jan. 12 to Jan. 16, the capsule was not discovered to be missing until Jan. 25."
and
>"It was only when the box was unpacked for inspection for the first time on Jan. 25 that the capsule was discovered missing, he added."
Doesn't that sequence of events constitute buffoonery though? I mean why wouldn't you inspect the contents on arrival given all the special attention paid to packing it for transport? Instead they waited 9 days after arrival before doing so?
Especially if they prank one group by not telling them. :-D
When I read the summary I thought they were going to say someone flogged it.
On the other hand, for a transport route that takes several days, it's NOT put into any form of sealed, shielded or lead-lined container - but just stuck to another item (where it can come off through vibrations) which in turn is carried around in a wooden box?
Isn't that a health risk to the truck driver, even if nothing goes wrong?
The cab driver several meters away and with material (including the equipment material likely made to absorb and block radiation) between him and the capsule will be exposed for several orders of magnitude less radiation than the person who includes it in their necklace.
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.
It's pretty effective on other planetoids, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Prospector?useskin=vecto...
https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-the-radioacti...
> 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.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/food-irra...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radura_international.svg
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
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...
"the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour"
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 equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour"
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.
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.