Missing radioactive capsule found in WA outback after frantic search

People can really suck. It may be a corporation, doing the crime, but an individual made the decision to do it.

I remember a DJ, in Washington DC, talking about parking fines.

Parking in DC is expensive, with monthly passes, costing hundreds of dollars a month.

His reasoning was that he parked illegally in lots around the studio, and occasionally got tickets, that he paid without issue, and it cost him far less than getting a pass.

I assume these were not “tow away” lots.

If you think about it, the impact's more pervasive and serious than that. Even simply saying, "hey, isn't there a potential issue with this bolt" shifts the appearance of blame on the person who's asking. When something does go wrong, the lawyer-attitude types can point to your words, and say "look: they were aware of possibility X at time Y, and they failed to stop it. They were negligent". "If you raised issue A, why then did you fail to take actions B, C, and D, and document them appropriately? You were negligent". To discuss Issue A is high-friction and risky -- for all values of A.

That's at the core of legal culture: "don't put it in writing"; "don't talk to the opposing counsel"; "don't make public statements unless we vetted them (to be as vague as possible)". Opacity. What aspect of human nature underlies this? It's this: blame is nebulous, and it attaches to whatever's most visible. Guileless honesty is a *hazard* in a culture of suspicion.

Obviously that's the exact opposite of what you want from an engineering culture! You want anyone to be able to raise issues freely, fearlessly.

That's the true cost of a blaming-people culture. You're not merely disincentivizing communication at the very final stage ("cover up the disaster"); you disincentivize all communication about risk, at any time. Anything that places you visibly closer to responsibility is a peril.

It's funny how profit flows up, but legal responsibility trickles down.

Or put cameras everywhere to deter crime.

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.

It’s literally radioactive. It is a beacon.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Let's not forget they're sitting on $64 billion US worth of Copper in the US on native lands either.

The equipment was logged when loaded on the 11th, the load sat and then travelled for a couple of days and was unloaded and then sat until it was first inspected (to have the capsule replaced) at which point the loss was noted and reported.

Feel free to explain how you would do this better in a cost effective manner.

> That doesn't seem that quick or professional to me...

Wikipedia says they started to unload the shipment on 25th, found out about the missing item, and reported to authorities on the same day.

I think they are strongly responding to a shift in higher demand for carbon neutral materials with their big clients. I read about a sustainability labelling of Aluminium using Blockchain technology and it sounds like they're quite invested in green tech...a flip from the mining companies of yore

Radiological dangers are uniquely hazardous - bacteria and viruses dry out and die, poisons and acids can be neutralized. Almost every other hazard on Earth can be eradicated with nothing more than a good hot fire. But unstable isotopes answer to no one but time.

Radiation is not "spread" in the manner you are suggesting. The only affect on passers-by would be transient exposure - less than ideal, but not a fatal risk.

If the capsule were breached and radioactive material were spread, then that would be a disaster posing actual risk to the public at large.

It was an Australian nuclear scientist (who later became the South Australian Governor) who convinced the USofA that building an atomic weapon was in fact possible.

Australia has a reasonable number of people in the International weapons inspection (conventional and atomic) game.

Australia performs a significant amount of radiometric surveying.

There is no nuance on anything nuclear here (in Australia) because most people choose to remain unaware.

Edit: found them: https://old.reddit.com/user/JephriB/submitted/

It could even use a low power solid state sensor since the radioactivity is so strong, and when it detects radiation, start dead reckoning until it gets a GPS lock, so you could potentially still get good info with a coin cell level device, although you'd want more, because ideally you'd have a satellite signal.

I wonder if there's any way to use the EPIRB satellites for that, or if the data is too limited to add a "Watch out, there's nuclear stuff here, this isn't a stranded hiker" flag?

This whole "economic" growth is just another bubble ready to pop, similar usefull to crypto in the long run.

Destroyed the planet, for what..

You'll also see radioactive sources in household smoke alarms on a smaller scale to estimate smoke load in air, and in mineral exploration in downhole detectors mapping density of surrounding materials, in oil and gas measuring the density profiles of fluids as they flow past, etc.

Flashlights are visible light spectrum sources, gamma emitters are similar in function ( Cs-137 emits a 32 KeV x-ray peak and the 662 keV gamma peak ) as they "shine" through materials opaque in the visible spectrum and can be measured after for absorption.

I’m assuming it’s something similar.

Fairly safe. I had a radiation badge which never showed anything. We know the badges worked because someone stored the badge with the nuclear device which caused them to be quite alarmed when that test came back. Keeping distance reduces exposure.

We had to have paperwork from the US regularitiry commission to transport it from site back to office. I remember it was stored in a giant orange box which we tied down in the back of our truck.

Looking it seems like new models are designed not to need that.

https://troxlerlabs.com/egauge-model-4590-soil-density-gauge...

With a radiation source like this even a dust sized particle, if ingested or inhaled, is enough to cause excruciating death. Anything that turns the capsule into a powder and releases it into the air near a large group of people or into a water source or even a public pool could cause mass fatalities.

ADDED: (for the curious)

Interview with a former Rio Tinto aboriginal minesite operator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWQ-FFgDRYk&t=64s

Job Oppotunities (BHP): https://www.bhp.com/careers/indigenous-peoples-bhp

    Because the output pulse from a Geiger–Müller tube is always of the same magnitude (regardless of the energy of the incident radiation), the tube cannot differentiate between radiation types.

They used trucks on the road with large doped sodium iodide crystal pack (tubes with a scintallation (flash) detector at the ends) that produce a second by second full spectrum of gamm energies seen.

Processing software is used to filter out cosmic radiation signatures, the ground vehicle signatures, the mean expected background signature of the Western Australian region, and to enhance the target peaks from the Cs-137 source.

But the serial number check itself is an obvious thing to do and it doesn't necessarily imply they believe there are more of the capsules missing.