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Comment by galleywest200 | Hacker News Reader

This also happened in Ukraine. The capsule was lost in a gravel pit and ended up being built into the wall of an apartment and several people died as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

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Not really a regionally significant nuclear accident then. About the same as a gas leak?

A gas leak will either blow you up or kills you quicker and can be identified and fixed quickly but radiation kills you slowly, making identification of the cause very tricky for authorities.

Or you end up raising a family of mutants.

/goes to eat a Rio Red grapefruit.

Remember this? 8 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

“A few people here may die” is a relatively serious nuclear accident. Worse than three-mile island at least.

I don’t disagree. But I wonder if the cost to recovering this pellet would save more lives spent in another way.

A few grand to dig it out of a wall? A few hundo to slap some lead shielding over it (it is an X-ray source after all)?

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

I think finding it is the expensive part.

It pretty much broadcasts its location if you wave the right instrumentation around.

You "just" need to wave that instrument over 1400km of highway, potentially with a 100m+ width if the capsule has been kicked some distance away by a truck tyre.

I’m trying to imagine the scale of this. I guess it depends on how close you have to be to pick up the signal. And how many false signals there might be.

I was talking about the "gets concreted into a wall" case.

Did you work at Ford as an executive during the Pinto era?

I insist they are safe at any speed so long as you keep their gas tanks empty!

It seems the pinto narrative was framed in way to make it look worse but compared to other cars of similar type it wasn’t all that bad[1]. This exaggerated narrative despite vindicating data is perpetuated in biz ethics.

[1] https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-ca...

Yup. The lesson to be learned once you dig into it is "if you're doing some industry standard thing that someone could ever potentially portray as seedy definitely don't document it".

Not to rehash my other comment, but depending on the nature of the source it might become regionally significant if somebody screws up bad enough.

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