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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

#181

Post by shirro »

anakaine wrote: post #89
AlbertCory wrote: post #51

Earlier 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.

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.

Same. Also if some small critter bit you in Australia you don't have to worry about rabies though there is a similar virus can be carried by bats. I have a shed full of hundreds of potentially lethal spiders and there are several highly venomous snakes endemic to the area and I don't care. The actual risk is close to nil. Living in inland southern Australia the only place that scares me in the ocean where there are sharks, rips, blue rings and jellyfish. The most dangerous thing here is motor vehicles and the idiots that drive them same as everywhere else.

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

#183

Post by cwillu »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #46
phyzome wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

“Walk on the crushed capsule [and then] brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe [and then] eat a sandwich? Die horribly.” is the intended reading.

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

#185

Post by rcme »

dsauss wrote: post #120
londons_explore wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equipment to detect high levels of radiation is very cheap. Likewise the equipment to detect lead... And hundreds of other deadly pollutants. Part of owning a house should involve getting it tested, perhaps once per 10 years, for all these contaminants. They might have been put in during construction - or it might be arsenic in the wood of your bed... Or a mixing mistake while making the plastic for your toothbru…

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!

Do not use lead testing kits. They’re a waste of money. The best thing to do would be to find an EPA-licensed lead profession to test your property with an XRF gun. You get a breakdown of every place in your house, inside and out.

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

#186

Post by tialaramex »

testplzignore wrote: post #115
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, hyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. An x-ray is a fraction of a year's natural exposure from the sun. Airline pilots experience this radiation in a few months at work. The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to…

To back up your point: If "X-ray" is a chest x-ray, then per https://xkcd.com/radiation/ this would be equivalent to one-tenth of a head CT scan, which are routinely done without consideration to any increased risk of cancer. If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.

You're bad at arithmetic, that's 100 boxes on the XKCD chart, so it's one-hundredth of a head CT scan, and the medics might not tell you they considered increased risk, but if they actually didn't consider it they're incompetent, that's a non-trivial effect.

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

#187

Post by nosmokewhereiam »

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…

Any recommendations for detection at home? Are wearable dosimeters enough to detect before damage occurs?

...or if there is already a crowdsourced detection effort for looking out for this sort of thing, that'd be a cool map to plot.

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

#188

Post by ehnto »

karmakaze wrote: post #4

Here's a story about a lost capsule[0] that ended up being made into building material for the wall of an apartment if you think something small isn't worth being concerned about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

There is a video game about this event called The Lights of Svetlov. It was a great indie game, and I had no idea what it was about so the mystery unraveling in front of you was quite impactful.

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

#189

Post by HarryHirsch »

karmakaze wrote: post #4

Here's a story about a lost capsule[0] that ended up being made into building material for the wall of an apartment if you think something small isn't worth being concerned about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

For something close to home look here: https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/health... - radioactive gold jewellery because someone somewhere in upstate New York sometime in the 1930's got their hands on some radon seeds and mixed those in with the rest of the scrap gold.

There's documented incidents of radiation burns (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/33268...) and cancer (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1451360/).

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

#190

Post by Retric »

Gigachad wrote: post #169
throwaway6734 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Americans would still choose not to do this because any knowledge of a positive lead test means that you need to report it when you sell your house which might effect resale value. The large majority (>90%) of houses built before 1940 have lead paint in them somewhere and lead paint wasn't banned until 1970 in the US so many older houses still have lead paint somewhere

Presumably if you care about testing for lead, you'd also care enough to have it dealt with while you are living there.

Is there any reason to care about interior lead paint if it’s under several more recent lead free layers and not chipping off?
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