8 ms·

Good job, but a lot of the reports really exaggerate the size of the search area. > in the formidable conditions of the outback... > It’s fair to say finding

Good job, but a lot of the reports really exaggerate the size of the search area. > in the formidable conditions of the outback... > It’s fair to say finding a piece of equipment the size of a button in a vast desert was no easy task Let's not go too far here. It was two metres from the road and they knew exactly which 1400km of roads to check.

gggggg5 4y ago
I was rather baffled by so many sources claiming that this would be super difficult to find. It seemed like such a simple task to drive up and down roads with some radiation detection equipment, log the data and investigate any hotspots. Well, I guess it was? Or maybe I'm severely underestimating the complexity of this?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The problem was the unclear scope - it was not sure if the capsule didn't get stuck into someone's tire, an animal ate or played with it, or if it got damaged by a car running over it.
- curiousgal 4y ago
  Well imagine if the pellet fell on the road, another car drove by and the pellet got stuck in one of the car's tire grooves. The car eventually makes it to a parking lot, or to the back of someone's ranch. Good luck finding it, short of monitoring hospitals for radiation poisoning patients.
  - maven29 4y ago
    Perhaps a nation-wide campaign to cover your phone camera lens with tape and then look for artifacts from gamma rays hitting the CMOS sensor?
    - hilbert42 4y ago
      Well, that's one way. Monitoring/surveillance cameras in hot spots in nuclear facilities are often known to have horrible fuzzy images (sometimes it's difficult to see what's being monitored). It's an interesting question how close one would have to get for the CMOS sensor to register notably in this instance. Given the stated radiation signature of this sample it's likely one would have to get pretty close, so it may not be a useful technique. I can't recall having read anything about smartphone CMOS sensors and radiation thresholds so I'd be interested in hearing from anyone whose knowledgeable about the matter.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    You might as well make up a story about a kangaroo eating it and then someone hunting and eating the 'roo. The odds for any one small object to get not only picked up but picked up and not tossed back out are astronomically tiny.
- noja 4y ago
  Depends if the wind blows it away.
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's steel around a ceramic slug mix doped with Cs-137 .. think about cutting 8mm off the end of a 6mm diameter steel bolt and dropping that to the ground. It's going to take a good wind to blow that very far.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Especially once it drops a little bit below grade. Or gets covered with a bit of sand on the windward side. Unless picked up it was never going to be more than a few meters away from where it was lost. I'd love to see some re-enactments and the spread of the spots where the pallet ended up after being lost on step one, that might give some indication as to whether it was found near its original landing point or further away from it.
  - adwww 4y ago
    Or a radioactive magpie.
- throwbadubadu 4y ago
  In some other thread I believe someone said with his known equipment, even if not occluded, a scan would take some seconds... so with that wouldn't have been to be that easy? So now not sure if normal.or amazing that they can do this with a 70km/h drive by?! ( Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623782 sounds like not too amazing :) )
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's not too amazing. Perth has a few companies that do this work for a living - as a grind job, flying contracts for an actuall million line kilometres of 256 channel radiometric mapping at anything from $7 to $15 AU per line kilometre for mineral exploration. This has been ongoing for 50 years (see: Radiometric Map of Australia) and I'm slighlty baffled why a plane wasn't flown along the road on day one. Realistic guesses are that all airframes were fully booked AND the national agencies wanted to shine and test their new gadget. It's slightly complex gear to set up - but no more so than properly running the lines for a concert from pickups to to desk to foldback and main speakers, etc. If you can do one you can do the other. Complicated is when you go and map some area in India near the Pakistan border and suddenly a surprise nuclear test happens beneath you .. which happened to one local crew .. but that's a whole other story.
    - wnkrshm 4y ago
      I want to know this other story, I haven't found it by cursory search - what should I be searching for?
      - defrost 4y ago
        Pokhran-II was a series of five nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India in May 1998, Pakistan responded with six underground nuclear tests at the Chagai and Kharan test site conducted fifteen days after India's last test. It was all abit unexpected at the time and the US was interested to know how it came to be that Australians were present.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  The news was a bit of a beat-up and the chances of just accidentally stumbling on it out there were pretty remote to essentially nil. But what's authority to do? If some kid had found it and took it to school there'd be hell to play. Based of its stated radiation signature it was always going to be easy to find. Right, it was a simple but nuisance task and took about as long as expected.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    It was probably a mistake to report it to the public while it was still missing. That probably attracted a bunch of amateurs who could have ended up finding it. Far safer to look for it quietly first.
    - laci37 4y ago
      I guess that was because they were afraid of it getting stuck in a tire. If I found a strange metal cylinder in my tires, I would probably pick it up a try to find out what it is.
      - HPsquared 4y ago
        Did they close the road and/or put a checkpoint in place? That'd eliminate that risk.
        prollings 4y ago
        The road you're talking about was 1400km long
        bell-cot 4y ago
        1400km / (70km/h) = 20 hours of driving. This was no "a thousand volunteers on foot spent days searching for even a scrap of evidence" effort.
        rmccue 4y ago
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  they were initially concerned it would lodge in a knobby truck tire's treads and be carried off the known path, or so i read.
a2800276 4y ago
Also: “... we’re a sophisticated nuclear nation and in many ways, we’re world leaders that punch above our weight when it comes to nuclear expertise and stewardship." The stewardship claim bit seems maybe a bit overstated considering they weren't able to secure an object the size of a button leading to it "falling off the back of a truck" My minds eye is seeing a crocodile Dundee type holding a beer in one hand and carefully balancing the capsule next to a sleeping kangaroo on a truck bed and securing it one handed with twine.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  Your minds eye didn't see the koala riding shotgun?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  "Call that a radiation source? Now that's a radiation source. " he said between bouts of violent vomiting.
- swalberg 4y ago
  > The stewardship claim bit seems maybe a bit overstated considering they weren't able to secure an object the size of a button leading to it "falling off the back of a truck" As I understand it, this wasn't fuel, it was part of an instrument used by a mining company to measure the density of iron ore. The mining company (or a contractor depending on what you read) are the ones that lost it, the Australian government agency just came in to help find it.
  - argiopetech 4y ago
    And, it was secured inside an instrument inside a box strapped to a truck. The instrument had an unplanned disassembly in transit, and the cesium capsule fell through a hole in the bottom of the box, presumably used to bolt it down to its previous location. Failure to secure that hole (and any others in the box) was, in my opinion, the true failure of the mining company in this case.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Really I have no idea why this entire story has been made out to be such a big deal. Feels like deliberate distraction mass media usually does.
mabbo 4y ago
That still a massive search area for a very tiny object. It's the distance between Austin TX and Los Angeles, CA. And they didn't know it was within 2m of the road- it might have bounced much further, or been hit by another vehicle and sent further. It might have been picked up by another vehicle, stuck in the tire perhaps. Previous incidents like this have lead to deaths. Let them celebrate.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >It might have been picked up by another vehicle, stuck in the tire perhaps. Or used by Emus[1] to develop nuclear weapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
bolanyo 4y ago
And it is vastly more radioactive than background. They might have used clever technology but someone in the passenger seat with a Geiger counter on their knee would probably have found it.
jschveibinz 4y ago
I agree. It seems that a simple gamma ray direction finder mounted to a low flying aircraft should have been sufficient assuming that the background radiation was not a concern. They could have triangulated/geolocated to a small area very quickly. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7009180_A_simple_gamma_ray_direction_finder https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7009180_A_simple_ga...

gggggg5 4y ago

I was rather baffled by so many sources claiming that this would be super difficult to find. It seemed like such a simple task to drive up and down roads with some radiation detection equipment, log the data and investigate any hotspots. Well, I guess it was? Or maybe I'm severely underestimating the complexity of this?

mschuster91 4y ago
The problem was the unclear scope - it was not sure if the capsule didn't get stuck into someone's tire, an animal ate or played with it, or if it got damaged by a car running over it.
curiousgal 4y ago
Well imagine if the pellet fell on the road, another car drove by and the pellet got stuck in one of the car's tire grooves. The car eventually makes it to a parking lot, or to the back of someone's ranch. Good luck finding it, short of monitoring hospitals for radiation poisoning patients.
- maven29 4y ago
  Perhaps a nation-wide campaign to cover your phone camera lens with tape and then look for artifacts from gamma rays hitting the CMOS sensor?
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    Well, that's one way. Monitoring/surveillance cameras in hot spots in nuclear facilities are often known to have horrible fuzzy images (sometimes it's difficult to see what's being monitored). It's an interesting question how close one would have to get for the CMOS sensor to register notably in this instance. Given the stated radiation signature of this sample it's likely one would have to get pretty close, so it may not be a useful technique. I can't recall having read anything about smartphone CMOS sensors and radiation thresholds so I'd be interested in hearing from anyone whose knowledgeable about the matter.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  You might as well make up a story about a kangaroo eating it and then someone hunting and eating the 'roo. The odds for any one small object to get not only picked up but picked up and not tossed back out are astronomically tiny.
noja 4y ago
Depends if the wind blows it away.
- defrost 4y ago
  It's steel around a ceramic slug mix doped with Cs-137 .. think about cutting 8mm off the end of a 6mm diameter steel bolt and dropping that to the ground. It's going to take a good wind to blow that very far.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Especially once it drops a little bit below grade. Or gets covered with a bit of sand on the windward side. Unless picked up it was never going to be more than a few meters away from where it was lost. I'd love to see some re-enactments and the spread of the spots where the pallet ended up after being lost on step one, that might give some indication as to whether it was found near its original landing point or further away from it.
- adwww 4y ago
  Or a radioactive magpie.
throwbadubadu 4y ago
In some other thread I believe someone said with his known equipment, even if not occluded, a scan would take some seconds... so with that wouldn't have been to be that easy? So now not sure if normal.or amazing that they can do this with a 70km/h drive by?! ( Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623782 sounds like not too amazing :) )
- defrost 4y ago
  It's not too amazing. Perth has a few companies that do this work for a living - as a grind job, flying contracts for an actuall million line kilometres of 256 channel radiometric mapping at anything from $7 to $15 AU per line kilometre for mineral exploration. This has been ongoing for 50 years (see: Radiometric Map of Australia) and I'm slighlty baffled why a plane wasn't flown along the road on day one. Realistic guesses are that all airframes were fully booked AND the national agencies wanted to shine and test their new gadget. It's slightly complex gear to set up - but no more so than properly running the lines for a concert from pickups to to desk to foldback and main speakers, etc. If you can do one you can do the other. Complicated is when you go and map some area in India near the Pakistan border and suddenly a surprise nuclear test happens beneath you .. which happened to one local crew .. but that's a whole other story.
  - wnkrshm 4y ago
    I want to know this other story, I haven't found it by cursory search - what should I be searching for?
    - defrost 4y ago
      Pokhran-II was a series of five nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India in May 1998, Pakistan responded with six underground nuclear tests at the Chagai and Kharan test site conducted fifteen days after India's last test. It was all abit unexpected at the time and the US was interested to know how it came to be that Australians were present.
hilbert42 4y ago
The news was a bit of a beat-up and the chances of just accidentally stumbling on it out there were pretty remote to essentially nil. But what's authority to do? If some kid had found it and took it to school there'd be hell to play. Based of its stated radiation signature it was always going to be easy to find. Right, it was a simple but nuisance task and took about as long as expected.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  It was probably a mistake to report it to the public while it was still missing. That probably attracted a bunch of amateurs who could have ended up finding it. Far safer to look for it quietly first.
  - laci37 4y ago
    I guess that was because they were afraid of it getting stuck in a tire. If I found a strange metal cylinder in my tires, I would probably pick it up a try to find out what it is.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      Did they close the road and/or put a checkpoint in place? That'd eliminate that risk.
      - prollings 4y ago
        The road you're talking about was 1400km long
        bell-cot 4y ago
        1400km / (70km/h) = 20 hours of driving. This was no "a thousand volunteers on foot spent days searching for even a scrap of evidence" effort.
        rmccue 4y ago
jjtheblunt 4y ago
they were initially concerned it would lodge in a knobby truck tire's treads and be carried off the known path, or so i read.

a2800276 4y ago

Also: “... we’re a sophisticated nuclear nation and in many ways, we’re world leaders that punch above our weight when it comes to nuclear expertise and stewardship." The stewardship claim bit seems maybe a bit overstated considering they weren't able to secure an object the size of a button leading to it "falling off the back of a truck" My minds eye is seeing a crocodile Dundee type holding a beer in one hand and carefully balancing the capsule next to a sleeping kangaroo on a truck bed and securing it one handed with twine.

SanjayMehta 4y ago
Your minds eye didn't see the koala riding shotgun?
willcipriano 4y ago
"Call that a radiation source? Now that's a radiation source. " he said between bouts of violent vomiting.
swalberg 4y ago
> The stewardship claim bit seems maybe a bit overstated considering they weren't able to secure an object the size of a button leading to it "falling off the back of a truck" As I understand it, this wasn't fuel, it was part of an instrument used by a mining company to measure the density of iron ore. The mining company (or a contractor depending on what you read) are the ones that lost it, the Australian government agency just came in to help find it.
- argiopetech 4y ago
  And, it was secured inside an instrument inside a box strapped to a truck. The instrument had an unplanned disassembly in transit, and the cesium capsule fell through a hole in the bottom of the box, presumably used to bolt it down to its previous location. Failure to secure that hole (and any others in the box) was, in my opinion, the true failure of the mining company in this case.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Really I have no idea why this entire story has been made out to be such a big deal. Feels like deliberate distraction mass media usually does.

mabbo 4y ago

That still a massive search area for a very tiny object. It's the distance between Austin TX and Los Angeles, CA. And they didn't know it was within 2m of the road- it might have bounced much further, or been hit by another vehicle and sent further. It might have been picked up by another vehicle, stuck in the tire perhaps. Previous incidents like this have lead to deaths. Let them celebrate.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>It might have been picked up by another vehicle, stuck in the tire perhaps. Or used by Emus[1] to develop nuclear weapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

bolanyo 4y ago

And it is vastly more radioactive than background. They might have used clever technology but someone in the passenger seat with a Geiger counter on their knee would probably have found it.

jschveibinz 4y ago

I agree. It seems that a simple gamma ray direction finder mounted to a low flying aircraft should have been sufficient assuming that the background radiation was not a concern. They could have triangulated/geolocated to a small area very quickly. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7009180_A_simple_gamma_ray_direction_finder https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7009180_A_simple_ga...