Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Stuff of nightmares.
Or in a wall of a building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
What a terrible story
Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
251–260 of 357 posts
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reason to care about interior lead paint if it’s under several more recent lead free layers and not chipping off?
Not particularly if it's dry and sealed in, however .. In a rising damp, wall wicking water scenario the lead may be leached out from the paint and transported to, say, food being grown near house. The US had long term issues from lead in the water (being ingested) so there's a similar danger here if the lead isn't stable on the wall behind sealing layers.
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Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fortunately, over 85% of us live in the cities, due to much of the rest of the country where most of the dangerous shit is being mostly uninhabitable anyway. The further south you live the safer you are generally speaking. Where I live (far south) the most dangerous creature you're going to run into in the city is probably a redback spider, which is related to a black widow, and there hasn't been a confirmed death fr…
I go golf ball hunting in Brisbane
Brown snakes are extremely common in cities but you have to enter "their" territory
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I found a polonium-loaded anti-static brush for photography in a box from my parents’ attic. Scared the shit out of me at first. Called the hazardous waste folks and had a fun chat with a perplexed employee. We finally decided that, as it was from the 70’s, it had long since decayed into harmlessness and was fine to throw away.
Uhhh be careful with that reasoning. Some radioactive isotopes don't decay into stable isotopes but into other radioactive, sometimes more dangerous ones. It can be a whole chain until it reaches a stable element.
Not sure about this particular polonium isotope. But don't expect something to be harmless after 10x the half-life per se.
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#255Radiation detection is my specialty. This source is Cs-137, few hundred mCi. It's easy to detect within a few seconds at distances of a few tens of meters or more with professional detection equipment if there is direct line of sight. If it was knocked off the road, though, the question will be if it fell into a crack or other such place because then the radiation is somewhat shielded and it would take much more meas…
Please consider writing to the responsible government department and give them your credentials and suggestion. This thing has been missing for months. Their current detection strategy is to post a picture of a watch battery on Facebook and hope it just magically shows up. We're a little deficient in technology here in Australia, especially in government, doubly so in state government.
Not sure what this has to do with the Australian Government? This particular item of lost property belongs to a mining company, and since they don't want to take the blame, they've already trying to passed the blamed onto the contractor who was given the job to move the item.
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#256Really scary. For those unaware of how badly this kind of situation can end up, read about the horrific Goiânia incident in Brazil. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
Here's a another story (2011) of a medical source of radioactivity showing up where it wasn't supposed to be:
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff-radioactivecargo/
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#257Radiation detection is my specialty. This source is Cs-137, few hundred mCi. It's easy to detect within a few seconds at distances of a few tens of meters or more with professional detection equipment if there is direct line of sight. If it was knocked off the road, though, the question will be if it fell into a crack or other such place because then the radiation is somewhat shielded and it would take much more meas…
The biggest problem is going to be if it got embedded in a tire. The hope is that it’s “just on the side of the road”. But there’s a very real possibility that this could get picked up by someone’s car, wedged into the tire tread, and sit in their garage slowly exposing them and/or their family if the garage is used for anything else. Or any other car related exposure scenarios such as part time rideshare driver or work vehicles. And it could spend some time
Slowly getting its surface chipped and abraded by regular driving wear, spreading out the risk… which could be good or bad depending on how large the pieces are.
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
That's one meter away.
Inside your body? Another story.
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't imagine those things are available anywhere for that cheap. Why not require 4g tracking on them all if they're already $1000 items?
Western Australia desert is very very big and empty. No 4G there.
iPhones can send sms via satellite now, seems achievable to have these capsules sent their gps coordinates every few hours or so...just in case.
Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there testing services you’ve used before or would recommend to perform the testing? There does not seem to be a major brand or service provider offering this. Thank you!
Yeah it sounds amazing in theory, but none of us have the time to figure that out. It's just way too complicated. It needs to be dumbed down so that you contact one single company, they send a guy over with a bunch of kits and translates it into an easily understandable how-fucked-are-you score, with upsells for improving your score.
Sounds like a business opportunity