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Luckily it was a small source and Polonium has a relatively short half-life, but the department had to go through a whole song and dance of declaring an incident.
Oh, reminds me a of a time some students lost a Polonium source in the physics lab while I was a Masters student. The HoD had them crawling around the building for days with a Geiger counter, but they never found it. Luckily it was a small source and Polonium has a relatively short half-life, but the department had to go through a whole song and dance of declaring an incident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want it to scale horizontally, vertically, or both?
It could be stuck in a tree, so probably both.
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 in DC call NASA anyway, just in case they do have something.) Both would be GA aircraft doing a broad survey while trucks retrace the route. In any case the logistics would be critical, and speed as ever would be costly - good thing we have government-scale resources to work with.
And, yes, the system in this case would be implemented on a human substrate, not a silicon one. This isn't Chernobyl; we don't need robots to do this job, the problem is of limited enough scope to be safely handled by properly trained and equipped humans - finding whom would be an early logistical concern. (The surveyors would be safe enough barring a forced landing or breakdown very near the source, which is unlikely but we still want to get rescue services on standby, or hire a couple of civil helicopters from the oil industry or similar, for fast recovery just in case.) And for a one-off job like this that needs to be done as fast as possible, there isn't time to design, build, and debug robots that can do it.
Oh, reminds me a of a time some students lost a Polonium source in the physics lab while I was a Masters student. The HoD had them crawling around the building for days with a Geiger counter, but they never found it. Luckily it was a small source and Polonium has a relatively short half-life, but the department had to go through a whole song and dance of declaring an incident.
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.
Curious. I would expect something that seems so threatening, has such a tiny effect on the environment that it can't even be detected. Something not adding up.
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.
"the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour"
It's important to understand the numbers - and the magnitude of this radiation source is concerning but not dire.
Curious. I would expect something that seems so threatening, has such a tiny effect on the environment that it can't even be detected. Something not adding up.
Because it’s enormously dangerous to stand a meter from, and people near it won’t even know (eg it could have been picked up in a tyre tread so someone is carrying it around), but radiation and therefore ability detect drops according to the inverse square law so it will be hard to find from much further away. And Australia is big.
"the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour"
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 health care.
Interview question: can you design a system to safely locate and retrieve the capsule?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. I think he's referring to this. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with asking questions. I imagine that "you're only asking questions" is a reference to an usual technique of conspiracy theorists of pretending they're just asking questions to defend against being called out on baseless accusations. "Are they putti…
That rule bans exactly what he's doing, accusing people of "just asking questions" in the derogatory sense.