Radioactive capsule found

[anonymous-user]

Considering its size, I'm quite impressed it was found!

Less impressed it got lost in the first place.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-6448131...

[sherman]

They did find it whilst travelling at 43mph. It must be giving off a fair bit of radiation.

Will be interesting to see what the fine is going to be.

Edited by sherman on Wednesday 1st February 13:03

[deckster]

sherman said:

They did find it whilst travelling at 43mph. It must be giving off a fair bit of radiation.

Caesium 137 is seriously nasty stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_acciden... amongst several similar incidents.

[Dogwatch]

deckster said:

Caesium 137 is seriously nasty stuff.

Doesn't sound as if they were too bothered when loading it.

"Radioactive? No worries mate."

[poo at Paul's]

Amazing find, but worrying all them people going past it for a month!

[jimmyjimjim]

sherman said:

They did find it whilst travelling at 43mph. It must be giving off a fair bit of radiation.

Will be interesting to see what the fine is going to be.

Edited by sherman on Wednesday 1st February 13:03

From the article, $100 plus 14x$35 = $1490. 856 quid.

[hairykrishna]

deckster said:

sherman said:

They did find it whilst travelling at 43mph. It must be giving off a fair bit of radiation.

Caesium 137 is seriously nasty stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_acciden... amongst several similar incidents.

It rather depends on how much of it you have.

They apparently lost a 19GBq source, which is fairly pokey but not terrifying. Same order of magnitude as we make on our cyclotron every evening. According to my back of envelope if you sat 1m away from it for an hour you'd get ~1.5x the maximum allowed 'member of the public' dose. 15 chest X-rays or ~10% of a CT scan. Don't put it in your pocket but you don't have to run screaming.

The Goiânia accident was a whole different thing. The total there was about 50 TBq i.e. over 2000x the dose rate. That would be bad news. There's a reason those sort of capsules are sometimes engraved with "Danger radiation - drop and run".

Finding even a very weak source is quite easy, although not over 1400km. I bet they had a very large detector in their car gated on the characteristic gamma for the cesium.

[Panamax]

Easy enough to find with modern detectors. It'd show up like an LED in your garden at night.

When the Americans were doing their early nuclear weapons testing at White Sands in New Mexico they had little understanding of how pervasive fallout could be and how people might be affected down the line. "Hot-spots" were found at the gas/petrol stations where employees would stop to fill up on roads leading to and from the test area. And then it was found that attendants at those stations showed up in cancer statistics as a result of touching the cars from White Sands that stopped for gas/oil/air/windshield cleaning or whatever.

[J4CKO]

Maybe send marked as "Suppositories" to V Putin, The Kremlin, Red Square, Moscow ?

remember reading about the Goiânia accident, thats some scary stuff.

[Getragdogleg]

hairykrishna said:

Same order of magnitude as we make on our cyclotron every evening.

Medical radioisotope production?

[hairykrishna]

Getragdogleg said:

Medical isotope production?

Yes, we make Rubidium-81 for Krypton-81m generators - lung imaging. We make a ton of other stuff during the day but that's the boring evening shift that helps pay our bills.

[bongtom]

Panamax said:

Easy enough to find with modern detectors. It'd show up like an LED in your garden at night.

.

No so easy if your garden is 800 miles long.

[Panamax]

J4CKO said:

remember reading about the Goiânia accident, thats some scary stuff.

Yes, very unpleasant. A redundant medical radiotherapy source Caesium-137 carelessly guarded/handled and leading to several deaths.

Spain wasn't very pleased when the US accidentally lost four atomic weapons over there following a plane collision. None of the detonated but two broke open on impact and caused extensive plutonium contamination. That was back in 1966 and the clean-up is ongoing,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18689132

[MBVitoria]

deckster said:

sherman said:

They did find it whilst travelling at 43mph. It must be giving off a fair bit of radiation.

Caesium 137 is seriously nasty stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_acciden... amongst several similar incidents.

Bloody hell that's grim to read, that poor child too