Tiny radioactive capsule lost in Australian outback found | Hacker News Reader

Tiny radioactive capsule lost in Australian outback found

theguardian.com

55 pointsbloat25 comments

> The Australian defence force is now verifying the small radioactive device by its serial number.

Would be funny (depending on how weird your sense of humor is) if they found out it wasn't the device they're looking for, but another one that was lost years ago and never reported...

"Sir, I've got some bad news....

We were looking for capsule 9089, but this one is 6806..."

That's why you'll never get ahead in life. The way to phrase that is:

"Sir, I've got some good news and bad news..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34560399

nice, of all the possibly outcomes it's cool it was just found on the side of the road. kind of the most likely outcome but glad it actually happened

Edit: user defrost provided some good looking context comment exactly of the form I was looking for, thanks. The specifics of the available technology matters when assessing these claims.

For some reason I'm actually skeptical it has actually been found. A cynical reading is they scanned all the places people were ever likely to intentionally stop on that road and found nothing. So harm is just very unlikely, but leaving the item unaccounted for was just really, really bad press. I want to hear more about the sensitivity of this scanning device, particularly when used at this speed, and from someone knowledgeable in the field.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34574163

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34551688

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34607673

Why skeptical? It's easy to find sources of ionising radiation, and it sounds like this capsule was a pretty powerful one for it's size. You can buy a device capable of detecting it for $30 on Amazon - and I'm sure the searchers had far more sophisticated/sensitive equipment at their disposal.

If they really didn't think it was dangerous (or findable) and didn't want bad publicity then they would have just hushed it up in the first place and never gone to the government & press.

ARPANSA in Australia some of the most decent radiation detecting equipment I've seen, I imagine they would have been engaged early in the process.

Turns out it was (ARPANSA), Defence, and the Western Australia Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) as part of a multi-agency response.

I don’t think the risk/reward works out here. Lots of people had knowledge of the search; if any one of them goes to the press, then a minor public embarrassment becomes a career-ender, at best. Public agencies leak too much for this sort of thing. Not to mention that they could have just not announced the loss if they wanted to hide it.

That’s some impressive gymnastics of logic… It would have been far easier to just stay quiet about the initial than making it public, generating news report around the world, then ending it this way.

"Don't touch this if you see it." becomes "We're now actuarially confident you're not likely to see this, and if you do, we can say we lost two after all." We'd like to hope this sort of truth twisting is unthinkable in that country, but countries everywhere are getting weird.

Impressive:

"It was initially detected by staff inside a car that was travelling at 70km/h past the capsule."

Referred to in a news report as being 'like looking for a needle in a haystack', but with the convenience that the needle is detectable at quite a distance (10s of metres), assuming it hasn't fallen down a crack or been covered by something.

It's certainly makes the job of finding a needle in a haystack easier if that needle is giving off ionising radiation!

Maybe we need to invent geiger counters for needles!

Maybe we need to invent radioactive needles, to make them easier to find in case they get lost in haystacks.

That's some A+ Cave Johnson level thinking!

Or you could use a metaldetector?

Like looking for a capsule in the outback

This must be some heavy shit. Is Australia building a nuclear bomb ?

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34607423

Whew. Marvel Phase 5 averted.

yay

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