21–30 of 244 posts
Anybody has a clue how / what for this is used in mining? And are there alternatives for the future?
on the discussion when it went missing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34560399
By measuring how much radiation is absorbed through some material you can determine how much metal it contains
Granted this is not a Venusian capsule so there is that...
If you look at the timeline of events (see link from dang comment), they reacted extremely quickly and professionally, from the contractor doing the transport to Rio Tinto informing the authorities.
For me Rio Tinto was the company not taking care of our environment[0] in its operations, so for once, I am positively surprised.
[0]: Oil & gas are pretty good at it where there is no regulatory pressure.
Anybody has a clue how / what for this is used in mining? And are there alternatives for the future?
Estimating iron ore grade on the fly as recently blasted ore beds are dumped through a load out into train carriages for transport to ocean side processing (further crushing, screening, fine grading and blending) and loading onto shipping. It's an 800 million tonne per year operation in W.Australia (somewhat larger than the US ~ 48 million tonne iron ore mining figures (IIRC)). The alternatives are to find something…
This whole "economic" growth is just another bubble ready to pop, similar usefull to crypto in the long run.
Destroyed the planet, for what..
If this had been found by the wrong people, what kind of nefarious uses could it have had?
Radiation-poison people? There's not enough material, even if it was Uranium or Plutonium to make any sort of bomb IIRC, you need kilos for that not, (micro)grams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing that even though tho capsule is tiny, its radiation signature could be detected from quite a distance using a Geiger counter.
Because the output pulse from a Geiger–Müller tube is always of the same magnitude (regardless of the energy of the incident radiation), the tube cannot differentiate between radiation types. No "signature" detection possible with simple counters I'm afraid. They used trucks on the road with large doped sodium iodide crystal pack (tubes with a scintallation (flash) detector at the ends) that produce a second by secon…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the output pulse from a Geiger–Müller tube is always of the same magnitude (regardless of the energy of the incident radiation), the tube cannot differentiate between radiation types. No "signature" detection possible with simple counters I'm afraid. They used trucks on the road with large doped sodium iodide crystal pack (tubes with a scintallation (flash) detector at the ends) that produce a second by secon…
Sounds like the sort of complex setup developed prior for other more exotic use cases...