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Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

nytimes.com

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Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#331

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

brutusborn wrote: post #325
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The family was just clueless and it would have been the job of the doctors to tell them the truth. But they wanted to use the rare case for some scientific glory.

Wikipedia says his wife wanted him to see the year 2000. I suspect doctors just followed family orders, not much glory in keeping an almost-corpse alive.

Ah, doctor is a trained professional, who is forced to uphold the truth and stand up as the agent of reason against delusional personal wishes of humans in denial. You can not see the year 2000 with shredded dna. They knew, they did not insist, they created the ilusion of possible cure and healing for what was essentially a hospice cure.

They created a situation, were they applied cures that could not work to a patient that wanted to die. And they knew. Let those monsters not be hidden behind the cluelessness of the family.

Clinging to life at all costs, until there is nothing left, but a heap of hellish pain and machines, a good doctor will, should & must prevent this.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#332

Post by paranoidrobot »

LarryMullins wrote: post #288
paranoidrobot wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is just a list of theories. > or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something There's few situations where someone might stop for a dead kangaroo, or really any other wildlife. Either because they see it's still alive, or because they're checking to see if it might be a female with live young. If it's clear that it's dead, nobody is going to stop. On a road, in WA, in summer -- yeah you're g…

Do people ever eat roadkill kangaroos? I know it's fairly common for people to eat roadkill deer in America, if they know the kill is fresh.

Ever? Possibly. I've not heard of it though.

Some Aboriginal communities will hunt and eat Kangaroo.

Hunting Kangaroo for sport/'population control' is a thing in some areas. But the meat is usually either wasted or fed to animals. I understand that with wild Kangaroo you have to worry about parisites.

You can get Kangaroo meat at the supermarket though.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#333

Post by Eleison23 »

Always42 wrote: post #230
bamboozled wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a critter moved it or ate it then it's probably gone forever. At a distance of 1 meter the dose rate from that source is already not extremely hazardous unless a person were exposed for an extended period of time (like a full day or two). Getting closer, like putting it directly against your torso, would mean serious health effects in a matter of minutes. Bit of contradiction in your statement here? If putting it…

Playing devils advocate, what if a bird grabs it and fly's 1000 meters before death?

[dead]

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#334

Post by animal531 »

sn9 wrote: post #178
BetterGeiger wrote: post #167

Radiation 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…

This is an interesting algorithm problem. Given the parameters to maximize detection and minimize time/resources, how would you direct a drone or something to find the capsule? How would that change with 2 drones? 4? 8? As many drones as there are flyable Geiger counters in the country?

What if we recreate the journey, use the same truck with the same type of containers and see if we can re-create the malfunction, then start the search forward/backwards from there?

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#335

Post by nineteen999 »

lmpdev wrote: post #253
nineteen999 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah we have a large park with a lake not far away, my daughter and I went tree planting there together for girl guides once. Signs everywhere warning about them, but I've never seen one there. My experience with snakes in the bush has basically been that they are more scared of us than we are of them, and can generally sense us moving from quite a distance.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#336

Post by BetterGeiger »

POPOSYS wrote: post #314
BetterGeiger wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I recommend mine ;) ... the "Better Geiger S-1" In the budget price range (~$150 and under) my detector, which uses a solid scintillator, and a traditional Geiger tube based device are really the only options worth considering. The pros of my detector are high range (max 20 mSv/hr vs typically 1 mSv/hr for common Geiger tubes), roughly 3x higher X-ray/gamma sensitivity, and automatic energy-correction of dose ra…

Do you have any partner company in Europe that would help with reducing shipping costs for individuals?

Unfortunately not yet. Right now I am struggling to keep up with demand but when I have some more units on hand I'll probably try to set up Amazon fulfillment in some countries in Europe.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#337

Post by shagie »

madeofpalk wrote: post #233
eternityforest wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

> Western Australia desert is very very big and empty.

The size is rather impressive... when I read the article there was another Australia article in the sidebar - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/world/australia/australia...

which is a prose version of https://twitter.com/cragget2/status/1614873268657475587

> For xmas, mum and dad drove from Kununura to Broome and then flew down to Perth (cheaper than flying from kun). Then a biblical flood came and destroyed the only road connecting Broome and Kununura, stranding their car in Broome..

> .. until dad got permission from mum to do this:

(embed map of northern Australia with a route of 64 hours and 4,770 km)

That's a hair under 3000 miles and as one reply commented ( https://twitter.com/tony_neilson/status/1615278118247497728 ) only 18km longer than driving from Gibraltar to Moscow by way of Pairs, Berlin, and Warsaw (which might be the fastest route?)

The twitter post continues with updates on the drive.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#338

Post by nineteen999 »

defrost wrote: post #272
nineteen999 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This capsule has been lost in one of the most remote, uninhabitated parts of the country. And we wonder why Western Australian Aboriginal poet and playwright Jack Davis, OBE, OA referred to kartiya as fringedwellers (clinging in fear to the edges of the continent). A quip second only to Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.

I had to look up the word "kartiya" because I hadn't heard it before, being from the East Coast.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kartiya

Which led me down the rabbit hole of the second quote, which is an interesting topic all on its own.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#339

Post by BetterGeiger »

sn9 wrote: post #178
BetterGeiger wrote: post #167

Radiation 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…

This is an interesting algorithm problem. Given the parameters to maximize detection and minimize time/resources, how would you direct a drone or something to find the capsule? How would that change with 2 drones? 4? 8? As many drones as there are flyable Geiger counters in the country?

Here's how I would approach it... Based on a given detector geometry you can imagine it has a detection efficiency as a function of distance from the detector. Now you can imagine the source traveling in a straight line such that it passes some minimum some distance from the detector and at some velocity. From that path there is an expected number of counts that the detector would receive on average from that source as a function of minimum distance. Using that function and the background count rate one can estimate how close the source path needs to be from the detector to reliably detect it. From this you can optimize the altitude and velocity of the detector traveling along the road. I hope this brief explanation makes some sense. The hardest part would be to decide what signal to noise ratio is acceptable. For vehicle mounted it would simpler because you can probably just fix the elevation and only focus on the velocity as a variable.

Re: Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny

#340

Post by timr »

fnands wrote: post #105
agoose77 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, it was a tiny source, and luckily emits alpha particles which are easy stop by even small amounts of material. > * 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.

Well, if there was paperwork, then the risk was fully mitigated. Paper does block alpha particles. /s
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