5 ms·

Curious. I would expect something that seems so threatening, has such a tiny effect on the environment that it can't even be detected. Something not adding up.

throwaway89201 4y ago
[flagged]
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Not my question at all. How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect? Further, asking questions is indeed the point of these discussions. Re-reading the standards I see no prohibition. And reading that reference article, the loss it cites was 19Tb (19 trillion bequerels). This lost capsule in Australia contains less than 100. So around what? 10 billion times less dangerous? Thanks for the reference material, now I'm more sure than ever that this article is some kind of clickbait about a fairly miniscule risk being trumpeted as a national incident.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I think it’s more about a failure of process than this particular piece of radioactive material. Being proportionally cavalier about it would invite lazier handling. The next piece of radioactive material could be more dangerous. The mining company will be sent the bill and police get to practice a real life scenario. And everyone knows don’t do that again.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    > How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect? First, it's important to keep in mind that there are different forms of radiation: ionizing[1] which is dangerous and non-ionizing which is not typically dangerous[2]. Furthermore, ionizing radiation consists of three types, alpha, beta and gamma which have different properties and thus dangerous in different ways and amounts. The source in question contained cesium-137, which decays almost entirely (95%) by emitting beta particles. The beta particles are stopped by about 1 meter of air[3], but can do significant damage to living cells if nearby. Thus, trying to detect it is a bit like trying to see a bright flashlight in a fog. Even though it's bright you won't see it until you're really close. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >You are only asking questions, I understand. Please don't do that here [1]. Where in the HN rules is it forbidding to ask questions?
  - gnad_sucks 4y ago
    > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. I think he's referring to this. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I imagine that "you're only asking questions" is a reference to an usual technique of conspiracy theorists of pretending they're just asking questions to defend against being called out on baseless accusations. "Are they putting something in the water that's making the frogs gay? I'm just asking questions". We don't know the intent here, but I agree with him that "something doesn't add up" could be an insinuation of conspiracy theory, and so against the guidelines.
    - 13of40 4y ago
      I read that as "don't accuse other HN users of being shills" not "you can't say this news article seems a little suspect".
      - gnad_sucks 4y ago
        I agree the two are different in some respects; at the same time I think the idea that baseless insinuations undermine the conversation works just as well towards news articles as towards HN users.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      That rule bans exactly what he's doing, accusing people of "just asking questions" in the derogatory sense.
      - aww_dang 4y ago
        I'm amazed at the gymnastics possible with such an innocuous phrase. It is almost perverse. Imagine trying to parse this out starting from a position of good faith.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
galleywest200 4y ago
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_accident?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Not really a regionally significant nuclear accident then. About the same as a gas leak?
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    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.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      Or you end up raising a family of mutants.
      - dehrmann 4y ago
        /goes to eat a Rio Red grapefruit.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      Remember this? 8 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
  - aqme28 4y ago
    “A few people here may die” is a relatively serious nuclear accident. Worse than three-mile island at least.
phyzome 4y ago
This is the nature of highly radioactive materials. Walk past it? No problem. Walk on the crushed capsule, brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe, eat a sandwich? Die horribly.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Hyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" So no, walk on it and you would never know. Nobody dies, not without carrying it around for days. Then they get burns. It's important to understand the numbers - and the magnitude of this radiation source is concerning but not dire.
  - colanderman 4y ago
    > crushed capsule is key here -- leading to ingestion, which is much more dangerous than brief proximity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factor...
  - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
    "An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said." Ingesting is of course a completely different story and will indeed kill you horribly.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    “Walk on the crushed capsule [and then] brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe [and then] eat a sandwich? Die horribly.” is the intended reading.
  - SamPatt 4y ago
    That's one meter away. Inside your body? Another story.
  - phyzome 4y ago
    The point is that the danger depends on how people interact with it. That's why they're doing this PSA (and trying to recover it). It would be very easy for that little canister to get ruptured, and loose radioactive material is a very different game from nicely-packaged-in-a-capsule material.
genmon 4y ago
Because it’s enormously dangerous to stand a meter from, and people near it won’t even know (eg it could have been picked up in a tyre tread so someone is carrying it around), but radiation and therefore ability detect drops according to the inverse square law so it will be hard to find from much further away. And Australia is big.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Again, hyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. An x-ray is a fraction of a year's natural exposure from the sun. Airline pilots experience this radiation in a few months at work. The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to health care.
  - dalmo3 4y ago
    > People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. What jobs you're referring to? Your examples cite years and months but the quoted sentence states "in an hour."
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    It's all sort-of fine until someone brings it home and sticks it on a shelf and thereby kills their entire family. Walking around with this in your pocket will kill you eventually. This sort of thing has happened before with loose radioactive sources.
  - testplzignore 4y ago
    To back up your point: If "X-ray" is a chest x-ray, then per https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ this would be equivalent to one-tenth of a head CT scan, which are routinely done without consideration to any increased risk of cancer. If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.
throwanem 4y ago
Cs-137 is dangerous to animals (including humans) in close proximity, precisely because of the gamma radiation it emits. But, like any radiative emission, the power density drops off with the inverse square of distance from the source, which makes it detectable well beyond any range at which it poses a hazard. Think of stadium lights: if you stand five feet in front of one, it will blind you, while from a mile away, it's harmless but you still can see it. With gamma radiation you need a detector (ie a Geiger counter), and with an at the moment presumably unshielded Cs-137 source, a reasonably sensitive detector will indeed pick it up at some distance. So, at worst, if you put enough people in trucks with Geiger counters along the same route the original truck followed, sooner or later you will find the lost source. That said, this method while effective may take some time, and the major concern here may not be so much the direct radiation emission from the intact source, as the possibility of damage leading to dispersal of its contents. In the Goiânia incident of 1987 [1], scrappers removed a Cs-137 source from an improperly decommissioned radiotherapy machine and broke it open, dispersing the loose isotope material it contained in ignorance of the danger it posed. Several people died, others were badly injured, and at least one house and a lot of soil had to be removed for disposal. If this lost Australian source is similar in design to that one, warning people about it while looking for it is an eminently sensible public safety measure. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
Ankaios 4y ago
If you dropped a Cs-137 source of this scale way out in the middle of nowhere, far away from any road or crops, it might not be a big deal. The half life is only 30 years, and it could get buried under soil or in silt. However, losing it near civilization isn't good. (Even sparsely settled areas.) It's a shiny metal object, and if it's in a gas station, hotel, or restaurant parking lot, some kid could easily find it. Plus, gamma sources are relatively easy to detect, which should help the search. If the military lost a hand grenade on a similar road trip, I'm sure people would want to find it, and this source is at least as dangerous.

throwaway89201 4y ago

[flagged]

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Not my question at all. How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect? Further, asking questions is indeed the point of these discussions. Re-reading the standards I see no prohibition. And reading that reference article, the loss it cites was 19Tb (19 trillion bequerels). This lost capsule in Australia contains less than 100. So around what? 10 billion times less dangerous? Thanks for the reference material, now I'm more sure than ever that this article is some kind of clickbait about a fairly miniscule risk being trumpeted as a national incident.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I think it’s more about a failure of process than this particular piece of radioactive material. Being proportionally cavalier about it would invite lazier handling. The next piece of radioactive material could be more dangerous. The mining company will be sent the bill and police get to practice a real life scenario. And everyone knows don’t do that again.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  > How can it be so deadly/radioactive, yet so hard to detect? First, it's important to keep in mind that there are different forms of radiation: ionizing[1] which is dangerous and non-ionizing which is not typically dangerous[2]. Furthermore, ionizing radiation consists of three types, alpha, beta and gamma which have different properties and thus dangerous in different ways and amounts. The source in question contained cesium-137, which decays almost entirely (95%) by emitting beta particles. The beta particles are stopped by about 1 meter of air[3], but can do significant damage to living cells if nearby. Thus, trying to detect it is a bit like trying to see a bright flashlight in a fog. Even though it's bright you won't see it until you're really close. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>You are only asking questions, I understand. Please don't do that here [1]. Where in the HN rules is it forbidding to ask questions?
- gnad_sucks 4y ago
  > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. I think he's referring to this. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I imagine that "you're only asking questions" is a reference to an usual technique of conspiracy theorists of pretending they're just asking questions to defend against being called out on baseless accusations. "Are they putting something in the water that's making the frogs gay? I'm just asking questions". We don't know the intent here, but I agree with him that "something doesn't add up" could be an insinuation of conspiracy theory, and so against the guidelines.
  - 13of40 4y ago
    I read that as "don't accuse other HN users of being shills" not "you can't say this news article seems a little suspect".
    - gnad_sucks 4y ago
      I agree the two are different in some respects; at the same time I think the idea that baseless insinuations undermine the conversation works just as well towards news articles as towards HN users.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    That rule bans exactly what he's doing, accusing people of "just asking questions" in the derogatory sense.
    - aww_dang 4y ago
      I'm amazed at the gymnastics possible with such an innocuous phrase. It is almost perverse. Imagine trying to parse this out starting from a position of good faith.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

galleywest200 4y ago

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_accident?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Not really a regionally significant nuclear accident then. About the same as a gas leak?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  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.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Or you end up raising a family of mutants.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      /goes to eat a Rio Red grapefruit.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Remember this? 8 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
- aqme28 4y ago
  “A few people here may die” is a relatively serious nuclear accident. Worse than three-mile island at least.

phyzome 4y ago

This is the nature of highly radioactive materials. Walk past it? No problem. Walk on the crushed capsule, brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe, eat a sandwich? Die horribly.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Hyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" So no, walk on it and you would never know. Nobody dies, not without carrying it around for days. Then they get burns. It's important to understand the numbers - and the magnitude of this radiation source is concerning but not dire.
- colanderman 4y ago
  > crushed capsule is key here -- leading to ingestion, which is much more dangerous than brief proximity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factor...
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  "An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said." Ingesting is of course a completely different story and will indeed kill you horribly.
- cwillu 4y ago
  “Walk on the crushed capsule [and then] brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe [and then] eat a sandwich? Die horribly.” is the intended reading.
- SamPatt 4y ago
  That's one meter away. Inside your body? Another story.
- phyzome 4y ago
  The point is that the danger depends on how people interact with it. That's why they're doing this PSA (and trying to recover it). It would be very easy for that little canister to get ruptured, and loose radioactive material is a very different game from nicely-packaged-in-a-capsule material.

genmon 4y ago

Because it’s enormously dangerous to stand a meter from, and people near it won’t even know (eg it could have been picked up in a tyre tread so someone is carrying it around), but radiation and therefore ability detect drops according to the inverse square law so it will be hard to find from much further away. And Australia is big.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Again, hyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. An x-ray is a fraction of a year's natural exposure from the sun. Airline pilots experience this radiation in a few months at work. The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to health care.
- dalmo3 4y ago
  > People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. What jobs you're referring to? Your examples cite years and months but the quoted sentence states "in an hour."
- roywiggins 4y ago
  It's all sort-of fine until someone brings it home and sticks it on a shelf and thereby kills their entire family. Walking around with this in your pocket will kill you eventually. This sort of thing has happened before with loose radioactive sources.
- testplzignore 4y ago
  To back up your point: If "X-ray" is a chest x-ray, then per https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ this would be equivalent to one-tenth of a head CT scan, which are routinely done without consideration to any increased risk of cancer. If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.

throwanem 4y ago

Cs-137 is dangerous to animals (including humans) in close proximity, precisely because of the gamma radiation it emits. But, like any radiative emission, the power density drops off with the inverse square of distance from the source, which makes it detectable well beyond any range at which it poses a hazard. Think of stadium lights: if you stand five feet in front of one, it will blind you, while from a mile away, it's harmless but you still can see it. With gamma radiation you need a detector (ie a Geiger counter), and with an at the moment presumably unshielded Cs-137 source, a reasonably sensitive detector will indeed pick it up at some distance. So, at worst, if you put enough people in trucks with Geiger counters along the same route the original truck followed, sooner or later you will find the lost source. That said, this method while effective may take some time, and the major concern here may not be so much the direct radiation emission from the intact source, as the possibility of damage leading to dispersal of its contents. In the Goiânia incident of 1987 [1], scrappers removed a Cs-137 source from an improperly decommissioned radiotherapy machine and broke it open, dispersing the loose isotope material it contained in ignorance of the danger it posed. Several people died, others were badly injured, and at least one house and a lot of soil had to be removed for disposal. If this lost Australian source is similar in design to that one, warning people about it while looking for it is an eminently sensible public safety measure. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

Ankaios 4y ago

If you dropped a Cs-137 source of this scale way out in the middle of nowhere, far away from any road or crops, it might not be a big deal. The half life is only 30 years, and it could get buried under soil or in silt. However, losing it near civilization isn't good. (Even sparsely settled areas.) It's a shiny metal object, and if it's in a gas station, hotel, or restaurant parking lot, some kid could easily find it. Plus, gamma sources are relatively easy to detect, which should help the search. If the military lost a hand grenade on a similar road trip, I'm sure people would want to find it, and this source is at least as dangerous.