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Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?
- charliepark 15y agoThank you for posting the "entire article as one page". It's appreciated.
- apaprocki 15y agoWhile reading this I was thinking it would be interesting to see an infographic which showed the relative size/mass you would need of various isotopes to detect, say, 500 msv/hr in open air at a fixed distance. Since most people never see radioactive substances, it could be interesting to compare them visually.
- bh42222 15y agoIf you enjoy reading long prose articles, with plenty of human content, do not let the following tl;dr: spoil this article for you: tl;dr: A cylinder of cobalt, probably used in a medical instrument. Things like that are understandably very expensive to properly and legally dispose of. Somehow it ended up in a heap of scrap copper.
- js2 15y agoReminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
- markbao 15y ago> very expensive to properly and legally dispose of How expensive? From the article: $700,000 expensive. For a "pencil-like cylinder 9 inches long and a third of an inch in diameter." Wow. EDIT: ah, I was mistaken. See child comment. My error.
- apaprocki 15y agoThe $700k was for the city and port to dispose of the contaminated container since no one was going to do it for them. The cost of a medical facility properly disposing of the original cobalt has to be a fraction of that (but, to the point, not free).
- markbao 15y agoThanks for the clarification, and sorry for the error. Still an astounding amount.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- w1ntermute 15y ago> If you enjoy reading long prose articles Well-written, long form articles are increasingly difficult to find in this day & age of Twitter-sized sound bites, even off the internet. It's nice to see that a publication billed as a sci/tech magazine is taking the time and effort to write them.
- jseliger 15y agoNot really: they're just as easy to find as ever if you subscribe to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Both are, as far as I know, on more-or-less the same publication schedule they've always used, since the 1920s and 1850s, respectively. If you like long-form stuff, there's also the NYRB, Harper's, and a bunch more in that general class; I just happen to like the first two the best. "Give Me Something to Read" is a pretty good online aggregator: http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ .
- wheels 15y agoThose are both excellent sources – two more that are often (surprisingly) good are Spiegel International and Rolling Stone Politics. http://www.spiegel.de/international/ http://www.spiegel.de/international/ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics http://www.rollingstone.com/politics Spiegel International I believe has the best coverage of European affairs and The Atlantic the best of US affairs. The New Yorker will, on occasion, have bar none the best investigative journalism around, but at the cost of the coverage being too spotty to use as a primary news source. Recently Spiegel International has mostly become that for me. (I live in Germany, and actually the fact that they only publish 3-4 articles per day in English I find quite nice since it tends to reduce the noise and just publish the most important stuff – usually in long-ish format.) An interesting tidbit on Spiegel – despite being (in print format) a German language magazine, if I remember correctly, the only news magazines with larger circulation in the world are Time, Newsweek and The Economist and it reportedly has the largest fact-checking department in the world.
- awakeasleep 15y agoGreat assessment of The New Yorker. It's a weekly, and I find 2/4 issues will have nothing to read, 1/4 something decent, and 1/4 so outstanding I literally want to dance for happiness. The two I enjoyed most recently were: 1) An article on Fukushima about how the japanese government structured incentives for nuclear power safety and proliferation. 2) An article on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping whistleblower Thomas Drake (a spectacular example of terrible management's attempt to organize a software project) Unfortunately, those articles aren't easy to search up because they're buried in my iPad somewhere. Here is a link to a wired story about #2, although it makes the story sound less interesting. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/new-yorker-on-thomas-drake/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/new-yorker-on-thoma...
- VladRussian 15y agooriginating in Saudi Arabia, the whole story sounds like a test run, done either by Al Qaeda or US DHS/CIA/etc.... (with neither coming out when the tab grew to $700K :)
- rbanffy 15y agoIf they really wanted to test something, they would use a much less powerful source hidden in a container that wouldn't normally be scanned.
- VladRussian 15y agoa "screwed-up" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433116/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433116/)
- rbanffy 15y agoYou do realize you are basing your assessment (and its very serious implications) on a movie, right?
- VladRussian 15y agomy assessment has no implications, unfortunately. Movie reference is used only as a funny humorous illustration. My assessment is based on my knowledge and experience with real government screwedups even here in the US, like county office messing up real estate ownership info. Compare to that, planting the tracer into the container that will most probably be checked is hardly a screwedup.
- rbanffy 15y agoIf would find the implications of this being a test run disturbing. Luckily, we can dismiss it. Unless, of course, we start considering what else came through that port while so much attention and resources were focused on one very radioactive container.
- rbanffy 15y agoI imagine whoever dismantled the medical device must have a very peculiar medical record.
- pdenya 15y agoThanks for this. I appreciate both the warning and the tl;dr. It's interesting and well written but I don't have the time right now to make my way through it.
- rsanchez1 15y agoOh yes, I did enjoy reading that article. It was refreshing in today's world of 24-hour bite-sized news. All that trouble from such a little piece of radioactive cobalt. Imagine if some mad man decides to attach something like that to a cab in NYC. Just as stated in the article, it would cause a huge panic.
- marshray 15y agoRadioactive stuff gets flagged all the time in major ports. As the article mentioned, kitty litter, and other natural things can set off the detectors. As a general rule, a incident you read about in Wired is probably not the first or last of its kind. It seems pretty plausible that old medical stuff gets thrown in with scrap metal all the time. I wonder if "new money" places like the petrodollar kingdoms and emirates might have the money to purchase and operate advanced medical machines but not necessarily the regulatory maturity to track the whole lifecycle through decommission and safe disposal.
- gravitronic 15y ago100 million dollars in US $100 bills have been shot with 9 slugs of cesium?
- bitmage 15y agoThinking the same thing, right out of Spook Country.
- tallanvor 15y agoRead that a year or two ago, but I only started Reading Pattern Recognition a week ago (not sure how I ended up reading them out of order).
- mindcrime 15y agoDon't feel bad, I did as well. Or maybe "am as well" would be more apt, since I read Spook Country, then Zero History, and haven't started Pattern Recognition yet.
- gravitronic 15y agoaugh. I read it only to find this out too. Not sure if I am going to read the other two though, to be honest... it's no sprawl trilogy..
- aw3c2 15y agowhat is this referencing?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- helipad 15y agoI love the bureaucracy. Not a plight against Italians, most would be the same, but "Woah, this is more radioactive than Fukushima and none of us will go within 250 yards of it!" - 12 months, $700,000 later, government and port authority decide it's probably worth opening up. Good job, everyone!
- nobody31 15y agoVery sound engineering attitude. This container is emitting X, as long as we put Y tons of shielding around it and stay Z meters away it's safe. Or we could just immediately rip it open and see what happens.
- rbanffy 15y ago> this is more radioactive than Fukushima ... and is contained in a steel box. This gave them time to decide what would be the proper course of action.
- nobody31 15y agoAnd there is more than one of these in every hospital radiotherapy machine, in every machine for sterilizing surgical instruments or medical supplies and even in machines for preserving seeds. Amazing this sort of thing doesn't happen more often
- rbanffy 15y agoYou mean... like being discovered? I'm quite sure these accidents happen more frequently than they are discovered.
- nobody31 15y agoHospitals tend to notice clusters of people dying of radiation poisoning - at least in places with hospitals. In places without hospitals - I'm sure the contents of a lot of these machines end up being dumped in the 3rd world, to be 'recycled' like most toxic waste
- dbbo 15y agoMy first thought was of the prologue level of Modern Warfare 1.
- nicwest 15y agoI was sad to see that 307703 was ripped to pieces and scrapped, it's like the companion cube all over again :(
- CurtHagenlocher 15y agoHow can the number "307703" uniquely identify a container owned by a company that "owns more than 2.4 million boxes just like it"? (SSCC-18 codes are all-numeric.)
- ejames 15y agoBy having a 7-digit serial and omitting leading zeroes, perhaps?
- nobody31 15y agoNo - spec calls for 6 digits.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cshesse 15y agoWell as long as they add more digits for longer numbers, I foresee no problems.
- nobody31 15y ago200 million container movements across 100 countries - all computerized, all labelled with a fixed format ID. And you don't see the problem with expanding a serial number field in the middle of the code?
- nobody31 15y agoYou only strictly need to use code for transhipping containers on another carrier - if you own the container and the ship you don't need to label it - although it causes no end of problems if you don't! What tends to happen is that an 'owner' will have multiple owner codes for different subsidiaries or companies they have taken over/merged. The containers also have a lifetime of 10-20years so presumably you can reuse numbers of containers that have been lost or scrapped.
- 15y ago
- tlrobinson 15y agoWhy don't they just attach a radiation detector to each crane or something?
- nobody31 15y agoBecause if it's sensitive enough to detect a bomb it will be set off by marble, bananas or a dozen other things. So the port only checks containers likely to have radioactive contamination, like scrap metal, which they did and they found this - system worked precisely as it should. You could have monitors on the cranes to detect very high levels of radiation, so high you don't even want to check it manual - as in this case, But these happen so rarely it's not worth it. And with 250 Million container movements a year what sort of error rate would you need to achieve?
- maaku 15y agoAnd, as is mentioned in the article, pretty pointless. A bomb can be shielded to the point of giving off less radiation than normal cargo. That said, the eventually used a much more precise germanium-based detector that was able to identify the radiation by source. Such a detector could distinguish the decay of shielded U-235 from a shipment of bananas. I wonder how much those detectors cost...
- msbarnett 15y ago> I wonder how much those detectors cost... "The team then brought in one of the most sensitive portable detectors on the market, an $80,000 Ortec HPGe Detective DX-100T. Inside the unit, a 1.65-pound chunk of germanium..."
- maaku 15y agoHah! Odd that I remembered it was built with a ~1 1/2 lbs chunk of germanium, but glossed over the price..
- cnvogel 15y agoI have no idea if this is a reasonable price, but the mentioned product is a self-contained measurement system in a ruggedized enclosure with built in computer and software that identifies isotopes automatically. It is marketed to "homeland security" type agencies, so expect it to have quite a sales-margin :-) If you'd want to be on the cheap side, there's a used Ge on eBay for $3k right now, add a HV supply anda suitable ADC card for your PC and you can go recording γ-spectra in no time, possibly on a $5k budget. As you'll have to identify the isotopes yourself, check http://www.inl.gov/gammaray/catalogs/catalogs.shtml http://www.inl.gov/gammaray/catalogs/catalogs.shtml for reference spectra.
- tomeast 15y agoSomeone needs to make a for-pay service that lets me submit quality long form articles like this and get back a (quality) audio file that I can listen to on my commute home.
- thebigshane 15y agoThey never mention the intended destination. I am sure the intended recipient was investigated and all but it's a curious detail to omit in an otherwise, very thorough article.
- castewart 15y agoIt says it was headed to a scrap yard in Italy.
- maaku 15y agoYeah they did--a scrap recycler in Italy.
- thebigshane 15y agoAs maaku and castewart point out: I just missed it. 307703’s load was bound for a foundry called Sigimet in the town of Pozzolo Formigaro, 40 miles north of Genoa. I think I was thrown off with all of the talk about US policy, DHS, 9/11: So after 10 years and more than $1 billion spent on scanners, radiation detectors, and beefed-up intelligence, most US ports are still scanning containers onshore, after unloading. I still don't get the connection here. It seems they are implying we need tighter security to avoid this happening in this US. Instead, I inferred that this container was heading here. Oops.
- mikeash 15y agoI think the connection is that one reason to scan containers for radiation is to prevent a nuclear bomb from being smuggled in. Detecting a nuclear bomb after it's already on the loading dock is too late. I assume they mentioned the US simply because Wired is US-centric.
- joejohnson 15y agoI know this article is long, but Wired writes such interesting and well-researched pieces. This story reads like an awesome thriller novel.
- kleiba 15y agoReally? I found the 20 or so times of "but that day wasn't an ordinary day for Montagna" phrases quite tiring, and the off-takes into background information too frequent, long and sometimes too unrelated. Sometimes less is more.
- brazzy 15y agoDunno, reads like someone desparately wanted to write a 4 page article but had only 1 page worth of story.
- leanucci 15y agoTL;DR
- jakeonthemove 15y agoHow can someone just dump a highly radioactive (at short distances) source in a scrap yard? Gee, some people... I bet the guy who did it is dead now. This reminds me of this list: http://listverse.com/2011/08/07/10-more-cases-of-deadly-radioactive-exposure/ http://listverse.com/2011/08/07/10-more-cases-of-deadly-radi... and how most people should never be trusted with something that can affect thousands of other people...
- ceejayoz 15y ago> How can someone just dump a highly radioactive (at short distances) source in a scrap yard? "I could pay a few thousand dollars to properly dispose of this, or I could throw it over the fence of the local junkyard."
- catch23 15y agoalthough usually those who own the equipment containing the radioactive material usually have a financial incentive to dispose it properly. The doctors owning the medical device in the Goiania incident were essentially fined to bankruptcy for their mistake.
- ceejayoz 15y ago> although usually those who own the equipment containing the radioactive material usually have a financial incentive to dispose it properly. Only if you get caught.
- marshray 15y agoOr I can pick up the phone and have the yard pay me and send over guys who can't read long words like "radioactive" to pick it up.
- jerrya 15y agoReminds me of a Daily Mail reports from February that an assistant port director in San Diego made a statement interpreted to mean that dirty bombs have been found shipped to, and within, the United States. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356645/A-weapon-mass-destruction-U-S--Shock-confession-Customs-officer.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356645/A-weapon-mas...
- clintboxe 15y agoI'm a BI Developer for a big logistics company and I immediately hit up our data warehouse to see if we had ever moved this container. Alas, we hadn't. Only it's near relatives. :)
- tzs 15y agoAssuming your username reflects your real name, did you take the job to fit in with your last name? If not, do people ever joke about the coincidence?
- charliesome 15y agoI particularly enjoyed this part: bearing logos like Yang Ming, Hamburg S\0xFCd, ...
- nobody31 15y agoDon't you just want to see this painted on a ship due to a small email screw-up
- runningdogx 15y agoThe capsule could have been from some industrial entity that should have protected the capsule until it was handed off to a recycler (one who knew what they were getting), but didn't (maybe to cut disposal costs, or by accident/laziness). Someone could then have sold the capsule to a Saudi Arabian scrapyard, and they packed it into a container to be melted down in Italy. Another historical radiation incident caused by failure to protect a radiation source from scrap thieves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident If those thieves in the Goiania incident had just sold the the Cs source to a scrapyard immediately without breaking it open first, the two incidents might have been similar.
- aristus 15y agoThere was another incident 25-odd years ago near where I grew up on the US/Mexico border. Radioactive steel (with cesium or cobalt, from medical equipment, IIRC) was sold for scrap and turned into various things like restaurant tables. It was only discovered when a geiger counter was turned on by a bored geologist waiting for food.
- abbasmehdi 15y agoWow, anything written on the subject?
- aristus 15y agoSurprisingly it's hard to track down. The Wiki article linked abode has one or two mentions of a "Mexico incident", but that's it. Here are some others: http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-juarez-looms-as-one-of-worst.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-j...
- lgv 15y agoThere's this: http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html
- 15y ago
- tectonic 15y ago"It was hardly the first fishy shipment to pass through Gioia Tauro. Famously, just six weeks after 9/11, workers there heard noises coming from inside a container being transshipped to Nova Scotia via Rotterdam. Inside, police found an Egyptian-born Canadian carrying a Canadian passport, a satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, cameras, maps, and security passes to airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. The container’s interior was outfitted with a bed, a water supply, a heater, and a toilet. Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again."
- rsanchez1 15y agoA man like that shouldn't have just been let go without finding out exactly what he was doing.
- brazzy 15y agoReally? Why do you think so?
- tsotha 15y agoI dunno what he's thinking, but I agree with him because of the airport security passes. They should have held him unless he had a damn good reason for security passes to three different airports.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoBased on the contents of that container, he seemed like a high flight risk.
- Anti-Ratfish 15y agoYeah. They should have extrodina rily rendered him and tortured the hell out of him. If they can do that to random innocents I'm sure someone as suspicious as this could even be interesting o interview
- dspeyer 15y agoOr injected with a very hard to find radio tracking tag, or audio bug if that's possible, and then led to think he escaped on his own. Which might be what happened. We'll never know.
- mmaunder 15y ago4476 words. IMO this is badly written. The article stalls at "That mix of ubiquity and interchangeability makes the shipping container one of the most radical developments in global commerce since World War II. The first dedicated container ship was built in 1956, and virtually overnight the new logistical approach transformed the cargo business..." I'd guess an intern took over at that point, fired up wikipedia and started filling in the other 4000 words.
- westicle 15y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. I got a similar impression - lots of words, little pay-off.
- jablan 15y agoNot only that (it would be OK if it was the only problem): the article is in a form of a thriller-movie rather than a scientific (or popular science) article - too many interspersed digressions, you have to read it until the very end to get the basic facts (contrary to the "inverted pyramid" principle). I would expect such an article to be broken down, with trivia such as details about the container markings extracted to text boxes.
- bandushrew 15y agoI dont agree, I think that the discussion of the shipping container and the security issues it has created provided some very interesting (to me) context to the story. I particularly enjoyed the quick discussion of the round trip the DHS took on achieving 100% scanning of container ships - from there to 'oh, hey, we'll make sure they all get scanned before they leave the remote port, thats exactly the same thing right?'
- yycom 15y agoIt seems to me stupendously incompetent to scan for radiation without a plan.
- ars 15y agoIt's even more incompetent to not scan at all. Better to do some than none.
- c4urself 15y agoThis struck me as security which makes you feel safe aot security that makes you safe. “The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems: They won’t find a nuclear bomb, they won’t find highly enriched uranium, and they won’t find a shielded dirty bomb,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and president of the Center for National Policy. “Other than that, they’re great pieces of equipment.”
- FuzzyDunlop 15y agoIn comparison to their long form story on the Stuxnet virus, which was really boosted by the personal element, this one reads mostly as a tease with no satisfying pay-off. As a story trying to build a narrative it frequently concerns itself too much with the technical detail, or 'setting the scene', with little to no consideration for closing the personal elements it opens up throughout. It's littered with incidental detail but not a great deal of substance. For example: what happened to Montagna? He's the first person to be mentioned, is described as doing something pretty dangerous, and is forgotten about. It then ends on such a note as to trivialise the entire article. All of this is only a problem because the article was written in such a way to make it one.
- thewisedude 15y agoI am sure this was an interesting article. But I did NOT read the whole article. Let me reason that in a fair way. The internet has a plethora of interesting information. the style used here makes me spend 20 minutes on this article without knowing if what I find in the end would be worth my time. I rather like a style where you get to the outcome soon( say in the first paragraph), and then get into more detail for those people who think that this article is relevant or interesting. I remember reading an article on HN where there was a recommendation for a style of prose that might be useful in today's lifestyle. The author recommended summarizing everything in the first paragraph, then having having a more detailed middle section ( few paragraphs), and then having even more detailed paragraphs in the end. Depending on the interest level of the reader, if he stopped at the end of any paragraph, he would have still gotten the gist, only the finer details would be missing!
- mariuolo 15y agoI find a bit disturbing that the Italian press never mentioned the story. Anyway the 'ndrangheta explanation (cheap disposal of hospital waste) more credible than the international plot.