10 ms·

Urgent public health warning issued over lost radioactive capsule

76 points by mjsweet 4y ago

mschuster91 4y ago
That's like literally searching for a rice corn in a giant haystack. The only way I can see that search to remotely have a chance is an equally giant swarm of drones with radiation detectors.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  Not really. Just drive the route as slow as you need to for your extra sensitive Geiger counter to be able to tell you if it has picked up something beyond background radiation. It’s a road in the middle of nowhere, there shouldn’t be many uncharted radiation sources.
- axus 4y ago
  Sounds like a good interview question.
- defrost 4y ago
  More like a bright yellow corn in a flat bed of white rice .. the energy spectrum of the source is not at all like the natural background spectrum of primarily Potassium, Uranium, Thorium decay peaks.
hprotagonist 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  I can’t remember where but more recently some transiently homeless people died (I want to say in Europe) because they found an object emitting heat and used it for warmth, not realizing it was radioactive and was killing them. Quite sad.
  - rahidz 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
    - ComputerGuru 4y ago
      That’s the one. It’s from 2001 so I must have only stumbled upon a write up of it in recent years and mixed up the recency. Thank you!
  - zapdrive 4y ago
    Very intersting story. Do you have a source per chance? Google search didn't bring anything up. Edit: ok found it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
  - ipython 4y ago
    There are a lot of these incidents (“orphan source”) documented on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source
    - ComputerGuru 4y ago
      Thanks for giving me the missing keyword.
tablespoon 4y ago
An urgent warning to stay meters away from a button-battery sized object somewhere along a 1,400 km road? Seems kind of pointless. > DFES Country North chief superintendent David Gill said there would be "challenges" in locating such a small object. Wouldn't the radioactivity make finding such a small object far, far easier? It looks like the road is two lanes with a dirt shoulder. Couldn't they get a truck, mount several geiger counters on a pole long enough to sweep the road and shoulder, and drive the road looking for a spike in radiation?
- pixl97 4y ago
  Honestly it's likely one of those things you'd have to test so see what your sensitivity and detection radius is. If it stayed on or very near the road, I would expect it could be detected this way. Now, if it washed off the road in a storm, well good luck. And then you also must consider the natural background rate of radioactivity across that enormous area. Crank your sensitivity up too high to gain range and you might just detect radon or potassium, or whatever else is out there decaying.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > And then you also must consider the natural background rate of radioactivity across that enormous area. Crank your sensitivity up too high to gain range and you might just detect radon or potassium, or whatever else is out there decaying. Yeah. I would think they'd look for localized "spikes", then follow that up with an on-the-ground search. They don't need to eliminate all false positives. My idea is to have multiple Geiger counters spread across a 10+ meter pole. Since what they're looking for is small and localized, they could control for varying natural radiation by looking for a spikes that don't affect all the sensors equally.
- k1t 4y ago
  The article throws out the possibility that it's now lodged in somebody's tire, so it could be sitting in some random Australian's driveway instead. I assume that's the reason for the announcement.
- deleted 4y ago
graderjs 4y ago
Don’t they have satellites that pick up these readings? I’m always interested how top-secret technologies could filter into local law-enforcement or civil safety efforts, but are prevented from doing so because of the security classification. Like how many times, do you think a murder or something pertinent to solving that has been captured on some sort of satellite or surveillance feed, but it’s never released to that local jurisdictional investigation because The technologies involved are classified or some such.
- m4rtink 4y ago
  20+ km of atmosphere would block all the radiation before a satellite could pick it up.
  - graderjs 4y ago
    Yeah? But not signatures of radiation interacting with atmospheric particles, right? I think surely there’s gotta be a way to detect emitted light spectra, or a change in the spectra of atmospheric chemicals, as they’re reacting with that radiation.
    - graderjs 4y ago
      possibly relevant: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682622000931 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13646... "Estimate of the source parameters of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes observed at low-Earth-orbit satellites"
    - defrost 4y ago
      Nope. Not for something that small (as a source) given the atmosphere thickness etc. If you're interested: Guidelines for radioelement mapping using gamma ray spectrometry data International Atomic Energy Agency (2003) https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.p... ( Although, frankly, IMHO, AGSO (Australian Geological Survey Org) have a similar better document, but lets not quibble ) 179 pages of breezing overview with simplified details, note that airborne radimetric surveys with ~ 50 litre sodium iodine crystal packs (that flash on an energy spectrum when a gamma ray interects with them) are flown at 80 metres ground clearance and NOT at 20 km+ ground clearance because of EXPONENTIAL signal strength decay . . .
tlhunter 4y ago
> cannot be weaponised It's smaller than a coin and could be sewn into someone's favorite shirt. I'd call that a weapon!
jacquesm 4y ago
> It is believed the capsule fell through the gap left by a bolt hole, after the bolt was dislodged when a container collapsed as a result of vibrations during the trip. I'd love to see the post-mortem on this one. That at first glance reads like several failures.
h2odragon 4y ago
I seem to recall, back when "dirty bombs" were a favorite topic in the news, that the USA was said to have had airborne radiation detectors that could spot quite tiny sources in cars on the highway. Perhaps I'm mistaken but i think they mentioned tracking banana shipments as an example of the sensitivity. Perhaps this would be a place to use that equipment?
ankaAr 4y ago
When I was living in Neuquén, Patagonia Argentina, we had the same situation. The city was closed almost a day because a truck driver lost the capsule while driving his truck. The mayor concern was someone trowing that to the river. That was 25 years ago I think. Edit: I'm reading that 6 years ago the same happened..
inejge 4y ago
As usual, the press omits the technical specification of the radiation source, leaving one trying to deduce it from the roundabout descriptions in the article. Would it kill them to put something like "a 37 MBq Cs-137 source" somewhere? Granted, the WA Health press release is not too informative either, but at least it identifies the material. (The X8 capsule from [1] is a dead ringer for the one described.) [1] https://www.qsa-global.com/industrial-cs-137-gamma-sources https://www.qsa-global.com/industrial-cs-137-gamma-sources
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  I expect nobody outside of the technician who ordered the shipment to understand any of those words.
748 4y ago
What is that device normally used for?
- ankaAr 4y ago
  X-ray on pipes
- i67vw3 4y ago
  Civil engineering works
- defrost 4y ago
  Dust cloud density estimation in a 24/7 running Rio Tinto primary crusher to tune dust suppresion measures. Like how household smoke dectors have a small radioactive source, only scaled up for a hundred tonnes an hour of throughput.
cosama 4y ago
I am a bit surprised they haven't found it a >1mCi Cs137 source should be quite easy to find, it can be detected with a medium sized detector from >10m distance. A car driving along the road with a bunch of detectors in the trunk or a helicopter with a stack of NaI bars mounted on the bottom should see the radiation emitted by the source. I am working at a National Lab in the US and this is the main focus of my research. Please have a look at our website if you are interested in learning more about this type of things [1]. [1]: https://anp.lbl.gov/ https://anp.lbl.gov/
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  If they just wait until night, they can use thermal vision goggles and find it via helicopter.
  - cosama 4y ago
    A radioactive source that weak won't emit much heat. You can touch it and it will not be hotter than a piece of metal. You would need a source quite a bit stronger (at least thousand times stronger) to actually feel/see the heat from it.
- defrost 4y ago
  > and this is the main focus of my research. Nice, so, just speculating with what is in the public domain here; * what kind of counts would you expect from a 19-becquerel caesium 137 ceramic source in a 50 litre NaI spectrometer ~ 40 metres away in a 1 second window ? I mean the spectrum is going to look like [1], of course, but I'm imagining a crop duster [2] draping at 70 metres / second for along the centre line of the 1,400km stretch of road, maintaining a 40 m clearance and coming preloaded with the 256 NASVD Hovgaard kernel of the West Australian Outback looking for a Cs137 peak and compton. Would you be expecting any radon interference here? Of course the fun starts if our nugget of interest isn't on the road but was picked up in a 4x4 | truck tire and carried along for a few hundred km. Would you expect a contact trace to show up along the road here, good enough that if it dies off one can investigate whether it fell out, or got carried elsewhere by the vehicle turning away? [1] https://www.gammaspectacular.com/blue/gamma_spectra/cs137-spectrum https://www.gammaspectacular.com/blue/gamma_spectra/cs137-sp... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks

76 points by mjsweet 4y ago

That's like literally searching for a rice corn in a giant haystack. The only way I can see that search to remotely have a chance is an equally giant swarm of drones with radiation detectors.

ComputerGuru 4y ago
Not really. Just drive the route as slow as you need to for your extra sensitive Geiger counter to be able to tell you if it has picked up something beyond background radiation. It’s a road in the middle of nowhere, there shouldn’t be many uncharted radiation sources.
axus 4y ago
Sounds like a good interview question.
defrost 4y ago
More like a bright yellow corn in a flat bed of white rice .. the energy spectrum of the source is not at all like the natural background spectrum of primarily Potassium, Uranium, Thorium decay peaks.

hprotagonist 4y ago

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

ComputerGuru 4y ago
I can’t remember where but more recently some transiently homeless people died (I want to say in Europe) because they found an object emitting heat and used it for warmth, not realizing it was radioactive and was killing them. Quite sad.
- rahidz 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    That’s the one. It’s from 2001 so I must have only stumbled upon a write up of it in recent years and mixed up the recency. Thank you!
- zapdrive 4y ago
  Very intersting story. Do you have a source per chance? Google search didn't bring anything up. Edit: ok found it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
- ipython 4y ago
  There are a lot of these incidents (“orphan source”) documented on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    Thanks for giving me the missing keyword.

tablespoon 4y ago

An urgent warning to stay meters away from a button-battery sized object somewhere along a 1,400 km road? Seems kind of pointless. > DFES Country North chief superintendent David Gill said there would be "challenges" in locating such a small object. Wouldn't the radioactivity make finding such a small object far, far easier? It looks like the road is two lanes with a dirt shoulder. Couldn't they get a truck, mount several geiger counters on a pole long enough to sweep the road and shoulder, and drive the road looking for a spike in radiation?

pixl97 4y ago
Honestly it's likely one of those things you'd have to test so see what your sensitivity and detection radius is. If it stayed on or very near the road, I would expect it could be detected this way. Now, if it washed off the road in a storm, well good luck. And then you also must consider the natural background rate of radioactivity across that enormous area. Crank your sensitivity up too high to gain range and you might just detect radon or potassium, or whatever else is out there decaying.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > And then you also must consider the natural background rate of radioactivity across that enormous area. Crank your sensitivity up too high to gain range and you might just detect radon or potassium, or whatever else is out there decaying. Yeah. I would think they'd look for localized "spikes", then follow that up with an on-the-ground search. They don't need to eliminate all false positives. My idea is to have multiple Geiger counters spread across a 10+ meter pole. Since what they're looking for is small and localized, they could control for varying natural radiation by looking for a spikes that don't affect all the sensors equally.
k1t 4y ago
The article throws out the possibility that it's now lodged in somebody's tire, so it could be sitting in some random Australian's driveway instead. I assume that's the reason for the announcement.
deleted 4y ago

graderjs 4y ago

Don’t they have satellites that pick up these readings? I’m always interested how top-secret technologies could filter into local law-enforcement or civil safety efforts, but are prevented from doing so because of the security classification. Like how many times, do you think a murder or something pertinent to solving that has been captured on some sort of satellite or surveillance feed, but it’s never released to that local jurisdictional investigation because The technologies involved are classified or some such.

m4rtink 4y ago
20+ km of atmosphere would block all the radiation before a satellite could pick it up.
- graderjs 4y ago
  Yeah? But not signatures of radiation interacting with atmospheric particles, right? I think surely there’s gotta be a way to detect emitted light spectra, or a change in the spectra of atmospheric chemicals, as they’re reacting with that radiation.
  - graderjs 4y ago
    possibly relevant: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682622000931 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13646... "Estimate of the source parameters of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes observed at low-Earth-orbit satellites"
  - defrost 4y ago
    Nope. Not for something that small (as a source) given the atmosphere thickness etc. If you're interested: Guidelines for radioelement mapping using gamma ray spectrometry data International Atomic Energy Agency (2003) https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.p... ( Although, frankly, IMHO, AGSO (Australian Geological Survey Org) have a similar better document, but lets not quibble ) 179 pages of breezing overview with simplified details, note that airborne radimetric surveys with ~ 50 litre sodium iodine crystal packs (that flash on an energy spectrum when a gamma ray interects with them) are flown at 80 metres ground clearance and NOT at 20 km+ ground clearance because of EXPONENTIAL signal strength decay . . .

tlhunter 4y ago

> cannot be weaponised It's smaller than a coin and could be sewn into someone's favorite shirt. I'd call that a weapon!

jacquesm 4y ago

> It is believed the capsule fell through the gap left by a bolt hole, after the bolt was dislodged when a container collapsed as a result of vibrations during the trip. I'd love to see the post-mortem on this one. That at first glance reads like several failures.

h2odragon 4y ago

I seem to recall, back when "dirty bombs" were a favorite topic in the news, that the USA was said to have had airborne radiation detectors that could spot quite tiny sources in cars on the highway. Perhaps I'm mistaken but i think they mentioned tracking banana shipments as an example of the sensitivity. Perhaps this would be a place to use that equipment?

ankaAr 4y ago

When I was living in Neuquén, Patagonia Argentina, we had the same situation. The city was closed almost a day because a truck driver lost the capsule while driving his truck. The mayor concern was someone trowing that to the river. That was 25 years ago I think. Edit: I'm reading that 6 years ago the same happened..

inejge 4y ago

As usual, the press omits the technical specification of the radiation source, leaving one trying to deduce it from the roundabout descriptions in the article. Would it kill them to put something like "a 37 MBq Cs-137 source" somewhere? Granted, the WA Health press release is not too informative either, but at least it identifies the material. (The X8 capsule from [1] is a dead ringer for the one described.) [1] https://www.qsa-global.com/industrial-cs-137-gamma-sources https://www.qsa-global.com/industrial-cs-137-gamma-sources

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
I expect nobody outside of the technician who ordered the shipment to understand any of those words.

748 4y ago

What is that device normally used for?

ankaAr 4y ago
X-ray on pipes
i67vw3 4y ago
Civil engineering works
defrost 4y ago
Dust cloud density estimation in a 24/7 running Rio Tinto primary crusher to tune dust suppresion measures. Like how household smoke dectors have a small radioactive source, only scaled up for a hundred tonnes an hour of throughput.

cosama 4y ago

I am a bit surprised they haven't found it a >1mCi Cs137 source should be quite easy to find, it can be detected with a medium sized detector from >10m distance. A car driving along the road with a bunch of detectors in the trunk or a helicopter with a stack of NaI bars mounted on the bottom should see the radiation emitted by the source. I am working at a National Lab in the US and this is the main focus of my research. Please have a look at our website if you are interested in learning more about this type of things [1]. [1]: https://anp.lbl.gov/ https://anp.lbl.gov/

1970-01-01 4y ago
If they just wait until night, they can use thermal vision goggles and find it via helicopter.
- cosama 4y ago
  A radioactive source that weak won't emit much heat. You can touch it and it will not be hotter than a piece of metal. You would need a source quite a bit stronger (at least thousand times stronger) to actually feel/see the heat from it.
defrost 4y ago
> and this is the main focus of my research. Nice, so, just speculating with what is in the public domain here; * what kind of counts would you expect from a 19-becquerel caesium 137 ceramic source in a 50 litre NaI spectrometer ~ 40 metres away in a 1 second window ? I mean the spectrum is going to look like [1], of course, but I'm imagining a crop duster [2] draping at 70 metres / second for along the centre line of the 1,400km stretch of road, maintaining a 40 m clearance and coming preloaded with the 256 NASVD Hovgaard kernel of the West Australian Outback looking for a Cs137 peak and compton. Would you be expecting any radon interference here? Of course the fun starts if our nugget of interest isn't on the road but was picked up in a 4x4 | truck tire and carried along for a few hundred km. Would you expect a contact trace to show up along the road here, good enough that if it dies off one can investigate whether it fell out, or got carried elsewhere by the vehicle turning away? [1] https://www.gammaspectacular.com/blue/gamma_spectra/cs137-spectrum https://www.gammaspectacular.com/blue/gamma_spectra/cs137-sp... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks