101–110 of 357 posts
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It pretty much broadcasts its location if you wave the right instrumentation around.
You "just" need to wave that instrument over 1400km of highway, potentially with a 100m+ width if the capsule has been kicked some distance away by a truck tyre.
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It could be stuck in a tree, so probably both.
Dang it, I wish I didn't have real architecture design work to do today, because this seems like it'd be a lot of fun to research. Pure horizontal scaling would be trucks with survey counters. Pure vertical would be getting the US to retask one of those radiation-sensing satellites they use to characterize stuff like the Urals trace. (Not that that'd be likely to happen - national security, etc. But have the embassy…
That's an extraordinary thing to mention in passing; do you have a source for this?
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Best reply on this thread. Everything in Australia kills you or at least causes horrible pain. Even that cute platypus or that harmless-looking shell on the beach. And now this.
No moose, bears, wolves, cougars, or other alpha predators in Australia though. About the worst are wild dogs / dingos, though they typically won't be a problem unless they're in a pack. I'll take Australian dangers over North American every day of the week.
I bet is has a great name in Australia - any Ozzies around who can comment?
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According to Wikipedia, Polonium is 5000 times more radioactive than Radium (just 0.001g of Po emits the same number of particles as 5g of Ra). It has a half life of just 138 days so in only 4.6 years the missing Polonium will be equivalent in radioactivity to Radium, which is known to cause cancer. This doesn't sound like something that should be treated lightly.
The important question is how much of a sample was lost. Ultimately, AIUI, the health risk depends upon the exposure in a ~ linear fashion. At least, in radiological protection that's used. The LNT model errs on the side of caution; assume that any exposure is harmful, linearly extrapolating from the high dosages seen in Hiroshima, etc, where we have data of the impact of exposure on the body. In reality, we expect a…
> * Unless it gets dispersed somehow.
Exactly, the real worry was that it would get crushed and would be breathed in, in which case it would be a real problem.
But even so, the school had to file a report with the nuclear regulator iirc. Lot of paperwork.
Of course, on the off chance someone does find it and pick it up, and then bring it into a town, etc. it can be bad. But I thought that, in Australia, most of that desert road is basically desolate for decades, except for cars coming by occasionally. Perhaps when they do road work, however...
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I'm kind of surprised that something this radioactive isn't pretty easy to hone in on with a good Geiger counter. Someone with better physics want to enlighten me about ranges and sensitivity?
I guess it's one of those things where the intensity of the radiation is proportional to 1/d^2. If you're holding it in your hand it emits enough radiation to be very unhealthy, but as soon as you put some distance between you and it then it becomes very hard to detect.
Unfortunately, Cs-137 is one of the bits of waste generated as fallout from nuclear testing, and its half-life is 30 years, so ambient levels are generally not identically zero.
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It could be stuck in a tree, so probably both.
Dang it, I wish I didn't have real architecture design work to do today, because this seems like it'd be a lot of fun to research. Pure horizontal scaling would be trucks with survey counters. Pure vertical would be getting the US to retask one of those radiation-sensing satellites they use to characterize stuff like the Urals trace. (Not that that'd be likely to happen - national security, etc. But have the embassy…
Weird assumption. Forced landings anywhere are unsafe. They are also very rare, because aircraft are quite reliable. The chances of the surveyors having a forced landing near the capsule must be minuscule (tiny danger zone compared to the extent of full search area, small probability of an aircraft having a forced landing at all).
If you are counting such minuscule dangers then you are ignoring much bigger (but still relatively small) dangers to the surveyors: they might trip during the survey, they might get into a traffic accident as they search or their aircraft might crash injuring them (irrespective of distance from the source). They might have a wildlife encounter as they are verifying a signal (false or true positive). They might suffer from heat stroke, or get sunburnt.
My intuition says that if you send out teams of people scurrying around the countryside these listed dangers are all more likely than having a forced landing right on top of the source. I also assume that you ignored them because they are all “everyday risks”, and you had tunnel vision concentrating on the radiation hazard.
The article didn't really explain the original purpose of the now-missing capsule, other than it was part of a sensor used in a mine. Can anyone explain a bit more what the original purpose of the sensor it was part of was? What did the mine need a bit of radiation to measure?
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No moose, bears, wolves, cougars, or other alpha predators in Australia though. About the worst are wild dogs / dingos, though they typically won't be a problem unless they're in a pack. I'll take Australian dangers over North American every day of the week.
They do have the saltwater crocodile[0], which looks close to alpha. Maybe unless it encounters an orca. I bet is has a great name in Australia - any Ozzies around who can comment? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_crocodile