What an engineer thinks: "Why not attach this thing to a beacon so that it can't be lost?"
What everybody else thinks: "Why not persecute everybody responsible to the fullest possible extent?" Which is just our reptilian brain looking for somebody to blame but isn't actually helping anything.
Would the beacon survive for long while being irradiated?
Also, this thing was part of a reasonably large object (I assume one full of radiation warnings), but that object broke down during transport. If one attached a beacon, that similarly could end up detached from the capsule.
I wouldn’t know whether the pictures on that Wikipedia page resemble what this was on, but I expect it to have been of similar size.
The problem was that something (¿excessive car vibrations?, ¿a speed bump?, ¿bad packaging? ¿bad design of the gauge? That’s to be researched) dislodged it from that device and that it then dropped out of the car.
Not very useful beacon if you don't detect when you lost it or you need to put an enormous search party to find it.
We have GPS devices with satellite comms that can periodically transmit information about where they are that anybody who plans to trek in the wilderness can buy and use to start a SAR operation.
It's a 6x8mm cylinder, fingernail-sized. They're little pellets that get inserted into larger machines for medical imaging.
See also (or don't, it's a bit gruesome): the Goiânia accident.
Or put cameras everywhere to deter crime.
Unless you are an individual who walks around with a highly toxic, highly dangerous radiation source, requiring it to have a beacon will not limit your freedom.
As to putting cameras to deter crime, they are shown not to work. The crime just moves to where there are no cameras. Or stupid people will crime anyway. US is leading or close to leading in both crime rates and incarceration rates, at least in the western world. Suggesting the basic premise of what US is doing may be flawed, from engineering standpoint.
It also is not a better way to solve the problem. Now someone has to replace the batteries of the "beacon" or remember to charge it? How are they going to remember? Why not just have that same person remember to check that the source is secured properly?
Attaching a beacon to highly dangerous radiation source is questionable, and has "undoubtedly" unintended consequences?
Looks like searching for a problem where there isn't one.
It’s literally radioactive. It is a beacon.
They found it because it is literally a beacon.
Beacons do nothing to prevent loss, they only facilitate relocation.
If it would have bounced just a few meters further off the road, landed in a ditch and get covered by something, or its emission beam angled away from the road/sky (for directional sources), it might never be found (or not before it causes some harm).
I'm not sure if this specific source is isotropic or directional, but it's very possible for it to be both extremely hard to detect from even a couple of meters away, yet still pose a great hazard.