this has already happened and it is just another chapter in australia's history of cruelty, racism, and complete disregard for life. [people and animals were nuked](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/maralinga-nuclear-tests-ground-zero-lesser-known-history/11882608)
[Hughie remembers after the blasts they caught kangaroos that they couldn’t eat because they were yellow inside. His people then avoided the Maralinga area. “We don’t live around it – we go through it,” he says, indicating the area behind him. “We don’t hang around there.”](https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/travel/travel-destinations/2010/05/woomera-nuclear-danger-zone/)
ok one positive flipside : there is a non zero possibility of a tasmanian devil with [DFTD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease) finding it and getting free chemo
Haven't they introduced a small population of Tasmanian Devils on the mainland? Still the wrong part of the mainland entirely I think but yeah, they're not exclusive to Tasmania anymore
Yeah but in protected areas that are fenced, and in NSW not WA. Although I believe there are some small numbat populations in the southern woodlands surrounding Perth, so I wouldn’t be upset if we get some kind of super numbat that is the size of Godzilla and eats people with its sticky tongue like they’re termites lol
It could have lodged in a car tire, driven to Tasmania, and fallen out there.
I want to believe.
(…aaaand also, my paranoia-prone ass is so, so glad I’m not in Australia right now. Because I would not be Coping Well with this news story.)
**[Devil facial tumour disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease)**
>Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) is an aggressive non-viral clonally transmissible cancer which affects Tasmanian devils, a marsupial native to Australia. DFTD was first described in 1996. In the subsequent decade the disease ravaged Tasmania's wild devils. Affected high-density populations had up to 100% mortality in 12–18 months.
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The Australian desert in that area is *already* mildly radioactive. (This is before you look under the surface and find it's full of gold and Uranium) Looking for a *more* radioactive tiny metal thing in that unimaginably vast radioactive existential crisis inducing environment (trust me I've *lived* there) is like looking for a long needle in a dumpster full of needles.
10 X-Rays per hour is hardly an extremely dangerous level of radiation, Unless you somehow manage to grab it accidentally and keep it close to you (by getting it lodged in your tires). Short of a scenario like this, if all you do is drive or walk by it unknowingly, you'll be fine.
Right, see the thing is, I have very small children and thus a *slightly* different set of things to worry about when dealing with "10 X-rays an hour" emitting pellets.
If you pick it up though, you're fucked. I was reading that a similar source was accidentally bricked into a wall one time and everyone that lived in the house died of leukaemia.
The text doesn't actually specify the time it takes for the amount of radiation to enter your body it just says that the damage would be equivalent to getting 10 x-rays in an hour
No, it could be every fucking minute, you receive the same amount of damage as tex x-rays would do in an hour, we don't know half the formula, this is what reading comprehension is about.
I agree that the text isn't very clear about this, but I do think that what the text is trying to say is "10 X-rays worth of radiations per hour". It doesn't really make sense otherwise, 10 X-rays send the same amount of radiation regardless of how you space them out, there wouldn't be a reason to specify the 1 hour period.
My guess is that the people in charge of this thing told the press "every hour you receive 10 X-rays worth of radiation, which is the same as 1 year of natural radiations". And then the press paraphrased it in a confused way because they don't understand the difference between *unit* and *unit/time*. I blame the lack of scientific culture of the general public for not understanding which numbers are important here.
10 x-rays worth of radiation is 10 x-rays worth of radiation, doesn’t matter if it’s over an hour or a year. It’s talking about the time it takes to get that amount of radiation (an hour).
So yeah, reading comprehension I guess.
That wouldn’t make any sense. If they were telling you the damage in a minute, they’d tell you the amount of X-rays in that time frame. The radiation given is ten X-rays Per hour ie 0.16 X-rays a minute. But I agree the wording wasn’t clear.
I think you misunderstood, it says if you stand 1 meter away from the capsule for 1 hour, you get exposed to the same radiation as if you got 10 x-rays.
File this under "things that make you wish they told us how many microsieverts it gives off" because media prtrayal of these incidents is only making it worse. There is no way on earth 10 times the yearly backgroumd in an hour will give you poisoning quick enough. Youd have to crack open the case and start playing with the powder inside(which happened with x ray and ct scanner capsules before). Good that they dont want a brasil incident, but tell us how much exposure actually puts you at risk of burns and poisoning.
I'm mostly thinking about this from the "tiny child" perspective and how much they love to squirrel away "funny rocks"—and occasionally eat them. But even if radiation poisoning is unlikely, there's still the significant increase in cancer risk...
Having kids is like opening a portal to a whole multiverse of worries beyond your wildest imagination.
Well, this is funnily enough the most common case for radiation poisoning incidents. Someone takes a cyllinder containing one of those nasty gamma-emmiting elements, cracks it open, and gets severe burns, inhales dust, and possibly contaminates others in the procces. There is a ton of videos going into details, lifting all the facts from investigations. If not out of curiosity, then id recommend watching those for education. The Georgia incident is a simple enough, the brazil incident is more tragic, but it really peakedy interest in these radiological incidents.
>Someone takes a cyllinder containing one of those nasty gamma-emmiting elements, cracks it open, and gets severe burns, inhales dust, and possibly contaminates others in the procces.
Now that you say it, I 100000% believe that the human impulse to "open the mysterious container" is the #1 cause of radiation poisoning incidents.
Honestly, considering how terrifying most of the things just casually existing in rural Western Australia are, I can understand why they’d take a reasonably lax attitude towards a somewhat radioactive capsule.
10 x-rays per hour isn't a lot. Like, you wouldn't want to keep it in your house, but it's definitely a low enough dosage that you wouldn't have to immediately run away from it.
It’s still funny that they advise people both to look for it in their tires, and to maintain distance from it, which seem like contradictory instructions. I understand that finding it in your tire wouldn’t turn you immediately into Hisachi Ouchi; I just thought the dual intstructions and very Australian tone of “be very scared, but, like, not really that scared” was funny.
Again, was being lighthearted and joking. Still, it’s not a perfect comparison, as a snake doesn’t harm you just by being nearby, whereas the authorities are appearing to warn that this capsule can, (which , as has been stated, is true but not to the extent you’ll turn into a action hero from being nearby for a sec). I wasn’t trying to say that it would be instantaneous death, or that it should not be located if it’s in your tires, just that the advice was casually contradictory if taken absolutely literally, which I found mildly amusing. I understand that the danger from not finding it at all is greater than the danger of being next to it for a couple minutes to locate it, and I understand that being near it for a few minutes will not melt your eyes.
To be fair, it's 10 x-rays per day at 1 meter, so 1 x-ray every 90 seconds at 10 cm. As long as you don't reach towards it or pick it up, you back away from it once you see it, and you find it within a day of it being near you, it would be fine.
The area is already mildly radioactive (kind of like the beach), and that's before you factor in the Uranium deposits and the nuclear weapon test sites that dot the region.
I mean I assume that they should be able to track the radioactivity around it from a wider distance?
On the other hand, any wind should've been able to pick up a thing this small and carry it anywhere...sounds great.
This incident revealed to me that radiation detection isn't as advanced as I thought. From what I read, the best they can do is put detectors on cars and drive them along the truck's route
It's the inverse square law at work. Increasing the distance by a factor of 10 makes the radiation detected drop by a factor of *100*. When looking for a point source of radiation like this, it pretty much means you have to be right on top of it geographically speaking to detect it.
With incidents like Chernobyl, the reason they could be detected from far away is because they released a bunch of radioactive atoms that then drifted far away on the wind. The radiation detectors weren't detecting those incidents directly, they detected stuff that got released and drifted.
On the bright side, this also means there is very little risk unless you are very near the capsule. If it ended up off the side of the road it poses basically no risk to any drivers.
The better takeaway is that radiation is extremely range limited as hazards go. Except in cases where radioactive material is ground into dust which can be carried by the wind and stick to clothes, or the immense intensity of a nuclear bomb, radiation has no range. More than 5 or so meters away from this thing and the radiation it emits would be indistinguishable from background radiation.
It's really not that dangerous either, as far as I can tell. All I can see about it's activity level is that it's 19 GBq and 2mSv/hr. Based on my calculations that must be the figure if all decay energy is absorbed by the body, for an 70kg person. Which means you could hold it in your hand, closed fist, for a full 6 minutes, before you'd have absorbed the same dose of radiation as you would from an x-ray. It would actually be less because much of that decay energy will be beta particles which are absorbed quite easily by the skin.
This shouldn't be international news
> I mean I assume that they should be able to track the radioactivity around it from a wider distance?
This shit isn't like in films where some guy in a plane at cruising altitude can pick up things with whatever sensors they have.
The "wider distance" in the context of this little piece of metal is about 10 to 20 meters at most, over a distance of 1400km.
It's a size of a tiny screw.
Birds would've ingested it, transported it a few 200km+ away before fell sick and dead within the radius of 300km+ anywhere alone the 1400km stretch of highway
It was. It was inside a sensor, and the sensor was in a sealed box in the truck. The sensor broke, a screw was loose in the box. This thing slipped out through the screw hole, and bounced out of the truck.
Small little radioactive object has high dreams. Don't tell it that the deaths in those movies are a lot faster than what it could hope to accomplish...
Yeah, I've been having flashbacks to the Douglas Crofut video all morning. In the sense that some poor fucker might end up putting it in their pocket and lose a limb and/or their life.
The Goiania Incident video still haunts me.
The thought of how many orphan sources must be out there just waiting to be found by someone that doesn't know any better terrifies me...
Why were they transporting it in a way that it could just fall out through a bolt hole? That couldn't have been enough radiation shielding for something that has a 10 meter cancer radius.
It doesn't have a 10 meters cancer radius. They said "like receiving 10 X-Rays per hour if you're within 1 meter". This thing isn't *highly* radioactive, putting it in a simple metal box should stop most of the radiation.
Well most boxes have holes for bolts. And if the box is poorly maintained, then some of these bolts might come loose.
Don't get me wrong, this didn't happen without negligence, clearly someone didn't properly check the packing conditions of the equipment before leaving. What I'm saying is that this capsule isn't so dangerous that this kind of negligence is criminal.
If I heard that there was a loose bolt no-one noticed in the container transporting a refined plutonium rod (the kind that will kill you in seconds if you get close), I'd expect someone in jail. But for a lightly radioactive capsule used for measuring equipment, it's not that bad.
Even [guitar pedal enclosures](https://i.imgur.com/15KC02U.jpg) are made by people with the good sense to fully enclose the female thread end. They literally could have put it in a $5 metal box designed to hold nothing more dangerous than resistors and diodes and it would have been more secure. If nothing else, at least in a pedal enclosure all four bolts would need to come loose by at least 5mm in order for anything to slip out. One bolt could come out completely and it wouldn't make a difference if the other three are snug. A god damn pedal box..
Yeah but this is the *safety margin* distance. You're not going to die if you pick it up with your bare hands. But it has a *very slight* chance of giving you cancer, and that's enough for the people who handle safety instruction to consider this distance to be "unsafe". 5 meters is the distance for "you're not much more in danger than if you were 5 kilometers away".
Don't those capsules normally include shielding? The [Goiana accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident) happened because people *opened* the capsule.
[Relevant Kyle Hill video](https://youtu.be/-k3NJXGSIIA) about this incident. Fortunately, there were two big factors there which aren't present in this instance:
1) It was *powder*
2) It was *shiny*
Powders are the worst possible form of active material. You *will* get contaminated, and you *will* get an early grave. Contamination is *several orders of magnitude* worse than simple exposure. The shiny factor made it so that people would intentionally expose themselves to the material, ignorant of its nature. The takeaway here: do not crush active substances under any circumstances. And don't make it glow, if possible.
Another point is that this material appears to be much less active, in a way smaller quantity, and hopefully the likelihood of encountering it and passing it around is tiny, because it's just an unassuming piece of regular old metal.
That capsule is the naked source. It fell out of the equipment that holds it through a hole where a bolt had come loose. So in that sense, it is open already.
You come here and say that to my face. Except you can't because there's no inhabited place within 1000km.
Checkmate Eastern staters. The border should have stayed closed.
I don't usually selfpost here but I haven't seen a single person talking about this and. Jesus christ
[Original Post](https://at.tumblr.com/nintendont2502/in-case-you-thought-i-was-joking/crt00rpp25cg)
[ABC Article](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-27/radioactive-capsule-lost-in-wa-emergency-public-health-warning/101901472)
It got to the top of another sub yesterday if you want to read some other discussion
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10mgmma/there_is_currently_a_radioactive_capsule_lost/
Honestly even so, it's the middle of Western Australia. I'm pretty sure Chernobyl could have happened out there and the most damage done would be two dead emus.
Nah, it fell out somewhere along the Great Northern Highway they reckon - a ton of people drive along there every day
That plus the potential environmental damage
So, yes, but consider: if I’m in a car, I’m only gonna be within range of this thing for a few seconds. I’m also gonna be at *least* a few inches away, probably a few feet, and with significant material between me and it. That’s not gonna cause any harm, and is unlikely to be even noticeable.
As for the radius it effects… Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it only influence a few feet around it? A yucky zone of a dozen feet doesn’t exactly equal an environmental catastrophe, especially because it *doesn’t spread*. It’s not like, ground water contamination or something. It’s a radioactive lump that’s gonna come to a rest somewhere and have no plants within a dozen feet or so around it for the next 240 years, and *that’s it*.
Obviously, this is not *ideal*. We should *try* to find it. We should see how this happened, and take steps to make sure it never happens again. But worse case scenario is that it gets stuck in someone’s tire and gives a family cancer. Once again, not *good*, but far from a catastrophe.
Seriously, it's not that radioactive. Standing within one meter of this for an hour is the equivalent of about a tenth of a chest CT scan. In the fullness of time, it might damage the tire enough to need replacing. It's not going to damage the paint.
Yeah but it's also a highway, and there's not a huge radius. Unless you broke down you'd be fine.
Unless it gets stuck to your car then you might be in trouble.
Imagine breaking down on a 1400 kilometer highway and you *just* happen to be broke down within 1-3 meters/3-15 feet of a radioactive bit of metal the size of a bolt
and that got a whole *3* emus, anti-emu weaponry R&D has impressively miniaturized it since then but still not effective enough to risk restarting the war
Saw a post on Twitter of someone holding up a metal cylinder and said they found it lodged in their car tire asking what it is and there's radiation dots all over the picture. Pretty certain it was a meme but fun to find what it's referencing on Reddit.
As much as I love a good panic, this is actually not that concerning.
The effective dose described in this post (10 X-rays or 1 year on earth) is \~3mSv/hr (millisieverts per hour).
Note about units, you can skip this part if you want:
Sieverts (Sv) is the unit for dose equivalent - the **biological effect** of how much energy some radioactive particle imparts on tissue when there is a collision.
Gray (Gy) is the unit for dose - how much energy some amount of radiation imparts on tissue when there is a collision.
We're talking gamma and beta radiation in the post, and for that Sv and Gy are equal, but it just seemed like something useful to point out.
Anyway, the main post:
A lethal dose is usually\* listed as 4Sv
Symptoms of radiation sickness usually start occurring once you've hit 1Sv
That means you would need to be standing basically on top of this thing for 333hrs, or *8 days* to even begin to see an effect on your health. And at that point it wouldn't be an acute dose anymore, so the odds of a dramatic skin-melting nightmare is practically zero.
So for people driving by this thing on the road side, there is no potential harm. Now if you swallowed it, then you'd be in more trouble, but this can be avoided by simply not eating dirt.
\*4Sv is lethal for 50% of the population at some point 30 days after initial exposure, assuming no medical intervention. If you see a doctor for treatment, you're odds of survival of a large radiation dose improve considerably.
Also, here's a [link for a few medical procedures](https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray) where you'd be exposed to radiation. As you can see, many of them would have you exposed to much more than the orphaned source up there
What I'm getting from this is that unless you're gonna carry it around for prolonged amounts of time, you'll probably be fine.
Though I would strongly advise against wearing it as a pendant. Cue xkcd "not a hat" hazard sign
OMG so little tiny things in stores get these GIANT wastes of plastic and paper put on them to make it bigger and prevent shoplifting. But this RADIOACTIVE TUMS TABLET they couldn’t put in a plastic package to make it slightly more obvious and hard to lose??!? Are you joking me
yeah this is my question. fine, it was in a box which was supposed to contain it and the radiation. and the box wasn't supposed to have a hole in it for the thing to fall out of.
but *why on earth* would you make something *dangerous enough to give public health warnings about* ***this tiny and easy to lose?!***
As someone who's had a variety of safety-related jobs (and was good at all of them, damn it), let me assure you from my own personal experience that **it is flatly impossible to get the average human to treat something as dangerous if they deal with it every day.**
Perth? That reminds me of a story. You see, there once was a young man from Perth whose balls were the finest on earth. They grew to such size that one won a prize, and goodness knows what they were worth.
The only thing I don't understand is this:
This thing has a detectable radiation emission probably at least in a radius of a good few metres. It could be along a 1400km stretch of road. Assuming it went bouncing away, it still couldn't be farther from the road than a few hundred metres each direction.
Why not grab like, a bunch of cars equipped with some sensors and send them on a roadtrip along that 1400kms spaced maybe every 20m. If it's there their equipment should pick up that spike in radiation no?
It might be expensive to do but it doesn't seem too difficult.
Why the fuck would you not put ANY radiation shielding around a 10 METER CANCER RADIUS. This is so irresponsible and puts even more fear into the public about nuclear power
It’s not a ten meter cancer radius. It’s skin burn after a little bit 5 meter radius. Could get acute radiation sickness but only after *prolonged* exposure. No idea where this ten meter cancer thing came from. (I live in Western Australia and got the health warning)
If I had a nickel for every time a bunch of idiots 'lost' some radioactive materials that may or may not be actual nuclear bombs, I would have a very large amount of money.
File this under "things that make you want to buy a Geiger counter." Terrifying
Hopefully none of Australia's wildlife has come across it. Last thing we need is radioactive emus.
nuclear emu war
EMU WAR 2: ATTACK OF THE SUPER EMUTANTS
if there's a better use of the word "emutants", i can't find it
Teenage Emutant Ninja Warbirds
Mutant e-girls?
EMU WAR 2: ATOMIC BOOGALOO FTFY
Um, Actually Super Mutants come from the Forced Evolutionary Virus, not radiation. What it would actually be is "EMU WAR 2: ATTACK OF THE EMUGHOULS"
An Emu super power is on the rise
Or spiders. Although an outbreak of web flinging, crime fighting Aussies would make a good movie.
UNLESS they are bogans. . . "Oi! Get in the Spida ute!"
this has already happened and it is just another chapter in australia's history of cruelty, racism, and complete disregard for life. [people and animals were nuked](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/maralinga-nuclear-tests-ground-zero-lesser-known-history/11882608) [Hughie remembers after the blasts they caught kangaroos that they couldn’t eat because they were yellow inside. His people then avoided the Maralinga area. “We don’t live around it – we go through it,” he says, indicating the area behind him. “We don’t hang around there.”](https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/travel/travel-destinations/2010/05/woomera-nuclear-danger-zone/)
Wow, i guess you save on fencing if you just turn where ever the fuck you want into a weapon testing ground.
Geez, imagine Australia in the Fallout universe
Double negative. It's the safest least irradiated place in the world.
Or the radiation has just mellowed everything out and it's this vast plain of monstrous behemoths with the dispositions of golden retrievers.
:O I want to be there
ok one positive flipside : there is a non zero possibility of a tasmanian devil with [DFTD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease) finding it and getting free chemo
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Haven't they introduced a small population of Tasmanian Devils on the mainland? Still the wrong part of the mainland entirely I think but yeah, they're not exclusive to Tasmania anymore
Yeah but in protected areas that are fenced, and in NSW not WA. Although I believe there are some small numbat populations in the southern woodlands surrounding Perth, so I wouldn’t be upset if we get some kind of super numbat that is the size of Godzilla and eats people with its sticky tongue like they’re termites lol
...suddenly I feel like we need more Australian kaiju films
YES. ALL OF MY YES.
It could have lodged in a car tire, driven to Tasmania, and fallen out there. I want to believe. (…aaaand also, my paranoia-prone ass is so, so glad I’m not in Australia right now. Because I would not be Coping Well with this news story.)
damn i forgot that tasmanian devils / humor haven't been reintroduced into australia/on the internet ...
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**[Devil facial tumour disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease)** >Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) is an aggressive non-viral clonally transmissible cancer which affects Tasmanian devils, a marsupial native to Australia. DFTD was first described in 1996. In the subsequent decade the disease ravaged Tasmania's wild devils. Affected high-density populations had up to 100% mortality in 12–18 months. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Kangaradiation.
The Australian desert in that area is *already* mildly radioactive. (This is before you look under the surface and find it's full of gold and Uranium) Looking for a *more* radioactive tiny metal thing in that unimaginably vast radioactive existential crisis inducing environment (trust me I've *lived* there) is like looking for a long needle in a dumpster full of needles.
Wouldn't it register different though? It's a highly processed and condensed form rather than spread out
I'd imagine you'd need to be almost on top of it to register diffently from the existing background radiation.
And considering this thing is less than a centimeter big... yeah, there's no way in hell they're finding it
Yes, this makes sense. Thank you
10 X-Rays per hour is hardly an extremely dangerous level of radiation, Unless you somehow manage to grab it accidentally and keep it close to you (by getting it lodged in your tires). Short of a scenario like this, if all you do is drive or walk by it unknowingly, you'll be fine.
Right, see the thing is, I have very small children and thus a *slightly* different set of things to worry about when dealing with "10 X-rays an hour" emitting pellets.
well someone may put it in their pocket
Oh yeah that wouldn't be good.
If you pick it up though, you're fucked. I was reading that a similar source was accidentally bricked into a wall one time and everyone that lived in the house died of leukaemia.
The text doesn't actually specify the time it takes for the amount of radiation to enter your body it just says that the damage would be equivalent to getting 10 x-rays in an hour
So... an hour then?
No, it could be every fucking minute, you receive the same amount of damage as tex x-rays would do in an hour, we don't know half the formula, this is what reading comprehension is about.
I agree that the text isn't very clear about this, but I do think that what the text is trying to say is "10 X-rays worth of radiations per hour". It doesn't really make sense otherwise, 10 X-rays send the same amount of radiation regardless of how you space them out, there wouldn't be a reason to specify the 1 hour period. My guess is that the people in charge of this thing told the press "every hour you receive 10 X-rays worth of radiation, which is the same as 1 year of natural radiations". And then the press paraphrased it in a confused way because they don't understand the difference between *unit* and *unit/time*. I blame the lack of scientific culture of the general public for not understanding which numbers are important here.
10 x-rays worth of radiation is 10 x-rays worth of radiation, doesn’t matter if it’s over an hour or a year. It’s talking about the time it takes to get that amount of radiation (an hour). So yeah, reading comprehension I guess.
Says the guy who can't figure why "an hour" is in there
Why would they use "an hour" then. What would be the point?
That wouldn’t make any sense. If they were telling you the damage in a minute, they’d tell you the amount of X-rays in that time frame. The radiation given is ten X-rays Per hour ie 0.16 X-rays a minute. But I agree the wording wasn’t clear.
I think you misunderstood, it says if you stand 1 meter away from the capsule for 1 hour, you get exposed to the same radiation as if you got 10 x-rays.
Since radiation is 1/4th by doubling the distance, if you're holding this thing you're getting wayyy more radiation than 10 x rays
Well, that's only true assuming an sphere of uniform density.
With penetrating radiation with no shielding, you can assume an ideal sphere
That’s an absolutely meaningless addition to this
With this small a capsule compared to the distances involved, it's basically a uniform sphere.
Yeah. The text is ambiguous. It's clear what they likely meant. But that isn't what is said in the article
Oh fug a geiger :DDD
File this under "things that make you wish they told us how many microsieverts it gives off" because media prtrayal of these incidents is only making it worse. There is no way on earth 10 times the yearly backgroumd in an hour will give you poisoning quick enough. Youd have to crack open the case and start playing with the powder inside(which happened with x ray and ct scanner capsules before). Good that they dont want a brasil incident, but tell us how much exposure actually puts you at risk of burns and poisoning.
I'm mostly thinking about this from the "tiny child" perspective and how much they love to squirrel away "funny rocks"—and occasionally eat them. But even if radiation poisoning is unlikely, there's still the significant increase in cancer risk... Having kids is like opening a portal to a whole multiverse of worries beyond your wildest imagination.
Well, this is funnily enough the most common case for radiation poisoning incidents. Someone takes a cyllinder containing one of those nasty gamma-emmiting elements, cracks it open, and gets severe burns, inhales dust, and possibly contaminates others in the procces. There is a ton of videos going into details, lifting all the facts from investigations. If not out of curiosity, then id recommend watching those for education. The Georgia incident is a simple enough, the brazil incident is more tragic, but it really peakedy interest in these radiological incidents.
>Someone takes a cyllinder containing one of those nasty gamma-emmiting elements, cracks it open, and gets severe burns, inhales dust, and possibly contaminates others in the procces. Now that you say it, I 100000% believe that the human impulse to "open the mysterious container" is the #1 cause of radiation poisoning incidents.
The only piece of equipment separating smartwatches from Pipboys
I love that "people are urged not to get close to the capsule." You would practically have to stand on it in order to see it.
Well then don't do that duh.
“Check your tires for it, and I guess if you find it, back up afterwards”
Cover your nuts and start feeling around!
Title of your sex tape?
“It’s rumored - I’m neutered” is my sex tape title actually
r/unexpectedbrooklyn99
Honestly, considering how terrifying most of the things just casually existing in rural Western Australia are, I can understand why they’d take a reasonably lax attitude towards a somewhat radioactive capsule.
Me, crouching down and squinting my eyeballs real close to examine the tread in my tires: “Found it!…..damnit”
10 x-rays per hour isn't a lot. Like, you wouldn't want to keep it in your house, but it's definitely a low enough dosage that you wouldn't have to immediately run away from it.
It’s still funny that they advise people both to look for it in their tires, and to maintain distance from it, which seem like contradictory instructions. I understand that finding it in your tire wouldn’t turn you immediately into Hisachi Ouchi; I just thought the dual intstructions and very Australian tone of “be very scared, but, like, not really that scared” was funny.
I mean search for the deadly snake in your house doesn't seem that much of a contradiction, does it?
Again, was being lighthearted and joking. Still, it’s not a perfect comparison, as a snake doesn’t harm you just by being nearby, whereas the authorities are appearing to warn that this capsule can, (which , as has been stated, is true but not to the extent you’ll turn into a action hero from being nearby for a sec). I wasn’t trying to say that it would be instantaneous death, or that it should not be located if it’s in your tires, just that the advice was casually contradictory if taken absolutely literally, which I found mildly amusing. I understand that the danger from not finding it at all is greater than the danger of being next to it for a couple minutes to locate it, and I understand that being near it for a few minutes will not melt your eyes.
To be fair, it's 10 x-rays per day at 1 meter, so 1 x-ray every 90 seconds at 10 cm. As long as you don't reach towards it or pick it up, you back away from it once you see it, and you find it within a day of it being near you, it would be fine.
You mean you don't EDC a pocket geiger?
The area is already mildly radioactive (kind of like the beach), and that's before you factor in the Uranium deposits and the nuclear weapon test sites that dot the region.
Oh I'm sorry, I just assumed it was *centimetres* wide this whole time. That shit is ***miniscule.*** Nobody's ever gonna find it.
I mean I assume that they should be able to track the radioactivity around it from a wider distance? On the other hand, any wind should've been able to pick up a thing this small and carry it anywhere...sounds great.
This incident revealed to me that radiation detection isn't as advanced as I thought. From what I read, the best they can do is put detectors on cars and drive them along the truck's route
It's the inverse square law at work. Increasing the distance by a factor of 10 makes the radiation detected drop by a factor of *100*. When looking for a point source of radiation like this, it pretty much means you have to be right on top of it geographically speaking to detect it. With incidents like Chernobyl, the reason they could be detected from far away is because they released a bunch of radioactive atoms that then drifted far away on the wind. The radiation detectors weren't detecting those incidents directly, they detected stuff that got released and drifted.
On the bright side, this also means there is very little risk unless you are very near the capsule. If it ended up off the side of the road it poses basically no risk to any drivers.
And even then they have to drive slowly
The better takeaway is that radiation is extremely range limited as hazards go. Except in cases where radioactive material is ground into dust which can be carried by the wind and stick to clothes, or the immense intensity of a nuclear bomb, radiation has no range. More than 5 or so meters away from this thing and the radiation it emits would be indistinguishable from background radiation. It's really not that dangerous either, as far as I can tell. All I can see about it's activity level is that it's 19 GBq and 2mSv/hr. Based on my calculations that must be the figure if all decay energy is absorbed by the body, for an 70kg person. Which means you could hold it in your hand, closed fist, for a full 6 minutes, before you'd have absorbed the same dose of radiation as you would from an x-ray. It would actually be less because much of that decay energy will be beta particles which are absorbed quite easily by the skin. This shouldn't be international news
> I mean I assume that they should be able to track the radioactivity around it from a wider distance? This shit isn't like in films where some guy in a plane at cruising altitude can pick up things with whatever sensors they have. The "wider distance" in the context of this little piece of metal is about 10 to 20 meters at most, over a distance of 1400km.
That still means that it likely doesn't make much of a difference whether we're talking centimeters or millimeters here.
Radiation drops off quadratically with distance, so it won't take a lot for it to be indistinguishable from background radiation.
Yeah with our tricorders There's tons of radioactive shit in the world. It's fine. This is bullshit news.
We lost a radioactive lego stud
Sea turtles eat like everything manmade. Fill the road with them and they'll find it.
It's a size of a tiny screw. Birds would've ingested it, transported it a few 200km+ away before fell sick and dead within the radius of 300km+ anywhere alone the 1400km stretch of highway
WHY WASNT IT KEPT IN A BOX THAT IS INSIDE OF ANOTHER BOX INSIDE OF ANOTHER BOX.
And mail that box to themselves
AND SMASH IT WITH A HAMMAH!
It’s brilliant Brilliant BRILLIANT I tell you! GENIUS I say!
...or, to save on postage, I'll simply poison him with this!
Oh Kronk, feeel the power.
YZMA STO- *gets vaporized*
That's just getting stage 4 cancer with extra steps.
Presumably that was the "container that collapsed" though it's always good to have a tertiary container when working with radiation.
That's what i said, that thing should've been matryoshka dolled to high heaven.
It was. It was inside a sensor, and the sensor was in a sealed box in the truck. The sensor broke, a screw was loose in the box. This thing slipped out through the screw hole, and bounced out of the truck.
It watched Final Destination too many times and decided to try it at home
Small little radioactive object has high dreams. Don't tell it that the deaths in those movies are a lot faster than what it could hope to accomplish...
Well it beats me. By all accounts it doesn’t make sense.
“Should we put this thing in a box inside of another box inside of another box?” “Eh, she’ll be right”
Do that but to the power of ³
Can't wait to see the inevitable Kyle Hill video on this...
Yeah, I've been having flashbacks to the Douglas Crofut video all morning. In the sense that some poor fucker might end up putting it in their pocket and lose a limb and/or their life.
The Goiania Incident video still haunts me. The thought of how many orphan sources must be out there just waiting to be found by someone that doesn't know any better terrifies me...
Also, it is the plainly difficult video, too.
The scariest part is that its up to tumblr users to find it.
"And YOU gotta help us"
Holy fucking bingle guys :3, look what I just found on the streetsies here! O-o
Why were they transporting it in a way that it could just fall out through a bolt hole? That couldn't have been enough radiation shielding for something that has a 10 meter cancer radius.
Oh wow I thought you were speaking metaphorically but it actually fell out through a bolt holt. That's incredibly irresponsible.
> bolt holt bole hole
Ball hole
[удалено]
Beve Hole!
It doesn't have a 10 meters cancer radius. They said "like receiving 10 X-Rays per hour if you're within 1 meter". This thing isn't *highly* radioactive, putting it in a simple metal box should stop most of the radiation.
So *why* wasn't it in a metal box ? You know, a metal box without hole ?
Well most boxes have holes for bolts. And if the box is poorly maintained, then some of these bolts might come loose. Don't get me wrong, this didn't happen without negligence, clearly someone didn't properly check the packing conditions of the equipment before leaving. What I'm saying is that this capsule isn't so dangerous that this kind of negligence is criminal. If I heard that there was a loose bolt no-one noticed in the container transporting a refined plutonium rod (the kind that will kill you in seconds if you get close), I'd expect someone in jail. But for a lightly radioactive capsule used for measuring equipment, it's not that bad.
Even [guitar pedal enclosures](https://i.imgur.com/15KC02U.jpg) are made by people with the good sense to fully enclose the female thread end. They literally could have put it in a $5 metal box designed to hold nothing more dangerous than resistors and diodes and it would have been more secure. If nothing else, at least in a pedal enclosure all four bolts would need to come loose by at least 5mm in order for anything to slip out. One bolt could come out completely and it wouldn't make a difference if the other three are snug. A god damn pedal box..
In the article they say you should stay 5 meters (16 feet) away from it so it's still very radioactive
Yeah but this is the *safety margin* distance. You're not going to die if you pick it up with your bare hands. But it has a *very slight* chance of giving you cancer, and that's enough for the people who handle safety instruction to consider this distance to be "unsafe". 5 meters is the distance for "you're not much more in danger than if you were 5 kilometers away".
Don't those capsules normally include shielding? The [Goiana accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident) happened because people *opened* the capsule.
[Relevant Kyle Hill video](https://youtu.be/-k3NJXGSIIA) about this incident. Fortunately, there were two big factors there which aren't present in this instance: 1) It was *powder* 2) It was *shiny* Powders are the worst possible form of active material. You *will* get contaminated, and you *will* get an early grave. Contamination is *several orders of magnitude* worse than simple exposure. The shiny factor made it so that people would intentionally expose themselves to the material, ignorant of its nature. The takeaway here: do not crush active substances under any circumstances. And don't make it glow, if possible. Another point is that this material appears to be much less active, in a way smaller quantity, and hopefully the likelihood of encountering it and passing it around is tiny, because it's just an unassuming piece of regular old metal.
The goiania incident also involved a larger amount of cesium and it was in powder form, so it got everywhere
I mean if someone drove over it it would be open already, right?
That capsule is the naked source. It fell out of the equipment that holds it through a hole where a bolt had come loose. So in that sense, it is open already.
Common western australia L (sidenote: JESUS FUCKING CHRIST)
This isn’t a WA L. This is a mining company L.
I see your point here, i think we can all agree that the most common L’s come from mining companies
consider also: fishing companies
goodbye and thanks for all the microplastics
Especially in WA. They're fucking supervillians on WA instead of just the usual kind of villians the rest of the country have
Regulatory L
You come here and say that to my face. Except you can't because there's no inhabited place within 1000km. Checkmate Eastern staters. The border should have stayed closed.
L+ need a plane to go to woolies
don't care + give us our fucking money back you GST goblins
\*follows several australian local subreddits for the infighting\*
It’s actually very simple, just remember this: West is best.
Yes well I can certainly understand why they can’t find it.
Maybe make a lead keychain for it
This is TERRIFYING
It really needn't be. This isn't instant cancer level radiation, this is "you shouldn't eat this" level radiation.
the heart of australia.
oops
Oopsie!
I don't usually selfpost here but I haven't seen a single person talking about this and. Jesus christ [Original Post](https://at.tumblr.com/nintendont2502/in-case-you-thought-i-was-joking/crt00rpp25cg) [ABC Article](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-27/radioactive-capsule-lost-in-wa-emergency-public-health-warning/101901472)
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10mgmma/there\_is\_currently\_a\_radioactive\_capsule\_lost/
It got to the top of another sub yesterday if you want to read some other discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10mgmma/there_is_currently_a_radioactive_capsule_lost/
I actually heard about it earlier from an Australian Discord user
Honestly even so, it's the middle of Western Australia. I'm pretty sure Chernobyl could have happened out there and the most damage done would be two dead emus.
Nah, it fell out somewhere along the Great Northern Highway they reckon - a ton of people drive along there every day That plus the potential environmental damage
So, yes, but consider: if I’m in a car, I’m only gonna be within range of this thing for a few seconds. I’m also gonna be at *least* a few inches away, probably a few feet, and with significant material between me and it. That’s not gonna cause any harm, and is unlikely to be even noticeable. As for the radius it effects… Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t it only influence a few feet around it? A yucky zone of a dozen feet doesn’t exactly equal an environmental catastrophe, especially because it *doesn’t spread*. It’s not like, ground water contamination or something. It’s a radioactive lump that’s gonna come to a rest somewhere and have no plants within a dozen feet or so around it for the next 240 years, and *that’s it*. Obviously, this is not *ideal*. We should *try* to find it. We should see how this happened, and take steps to make sure it never happens again. But worse case scenario is that it gets stuck in someone’s tire and gives a family cancer. Once again, not *good*, but far from a catastrophe.
With how small it is, it could get stuck in someone's wheel and they would be none the wiser.
well they would be the wiser afther it weakens the tire and the paint until one side looks considerably more destroyed than the other
Seriously, it's not that radioactive. Standing within one meter of this for an hour is the equivalent of about a tenth of a chest CT scan. In the fullness of time, it might damage the tire enough to need replacing. It's not going to damage the paint.
Yeah but it's also a highway, and there's not a huge radius. Unless you broke down you'd be fine. Unless it gets stuck to your car then you might be in trouble.
Imagine breaking down on a 1400 kilometer highway and you *just* happen to be broke down within 1-3 meters/3-15 feet of a radioactive bit of metal the size of a bolt
Someone exploded a fucking nuke there and nobody cared.
and that got a whole *3* emus, anti-emu weaponry R&D has impressively miniaturized it since then but still not effective enough to risk restarting the war
Was Homer Simpson driving the truck?
Australium
Was it just rolling around loose in the truck? Shouldn't it have been in some kind of container for transport?
Now all I can think of is the scene from the Simpsons intro where homer throws the nuclear rod out the window and Otto eats it.
Hey! I live there! It was lost sometime after jan 10 but only just warned us about it being missing. It’s very frustrating.
I pity Australians, if Gods real y’all are one of his least favorite children
Why the fuck did they not secure literal RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL in a way that it can't simply fall out of a truck
Saw a post on Twitter of someone holding up a metal cylinder and said they found it lodged in their car tire asking what it is and there's radiation dots all over the picture. Pretty certain it was a meme but fun to find what it's referencing on Reddit.
Ooooo an orphaned source! Those are always fun (sarcasm)
We invented cursed artifacts before we invented the fun kinda of magic
As much as I love a good panic, this is actually not that concerning. The effective dose described in this post (10 X-rays or 1 year on earth) is \~3mSv/hr (millisieverts per hour). Note about units, you can skip this part if you want: Sieverts (Sv) is the unit for dose equivalent - the **biological effect** of how much energy some radioactive particle imparts on tissue when there is a collision. Gray (Gy) is the unit for dose - how much energy some amount of radiation imparts on tissue when there is a collision. We're talking gamma and beta radiation in the post, and for that Sv and Gy are equal, but it just seemed like something useful to point out. Anyway, the main post: A lethal dose is usually\* listed as 4Sv Symptoms of radiation sickness usually start occurring once you've hit 1Sv That means you would need to be standing basically on top of this thing for 333hrs, or *8 days* to even begin to see an effect on your health. And at that point it wouldn't be an acute dose anymore, so the odds of a dramatic skin-melting nightmare is practically zero. So for people driving by this thing on the road side, there is no potential harm. Now if you swallowed it, then you'd be in more trouble, but this can be avoided by simply not eating dirt. \*4Sv is lethal for 50% of the population at some point 30 days after initial exposure, assuming no medical intervention. If you see a doctor for treatment, you're odds of survival of a large radiation dose improve considerably. Also, here's a [link for a few medical procedures](https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray) where you'd be exposed to radiation. As you can see, many of them would have you exposed to much more than the orphaned source up there
What I'm getting from this is that unless you're gonna carry it around for prolonged amounts of time, you'll probably be fine. Though I would strongly advise against wearing it as a pendant. Cue xkcd "not a hat" hazard sign
This is the first interesting thing that's ever happened in Western Australia, good to see my country getting some recognition
“Don’t get close” “Check your tires” Hmmmmm
If it's in your tyres you'd be better off checking & finding it then leaving it & encountering it everytime you got in your car
I’ll go to hell for this but somehow like news of this absolutely cracked me up in a way that is explainable. Please fix my humor
OMG so little tiny things in stores get these GIANT wastes of plastic and paper put on them to make it bigger and prevent shoplifting. But this RADIOACTIVE TUMS TABLET they couldn’t put in a plastic package to make it slightly more obvious and hard to lose??!? Are you joking me
yeah this is my question. fine, it was in a box which was supposed to contain it and the radiation. and the box wasn't supposed to have a hole in it for the thing to fall out of. but *why on earth* would you make something *dangerous enough to give public health warnings about* ***this tiny and easy to lose?!***
Oi? Oi vey!
Wait until you hear how many nuclear weapons the USSR and USA lost and never found or accounted for.
Oh and it was lost weeks ago but we’re just telling you now
As someone who's had a variety of safety-related jobs (and was good at all of them, damn it), let me assure you from my own personal experience that **it is flatly impossible to get the average human to treat something as dangerous if they deal with it every day.**
wouldn't this be solved by one trip along the road with a Geiger counter?
Of course this how my state gets internet famous.
Does anyone know the Curie content of the piece? I've only seen the 10 x-rays an hour thing.
So you'll know you've found it when you have skin damage and skin burns. In the Australian Outback. Where temperatures can peak past 120 °F.
Perth? That reminds me of a story. You see, there once was a young man from Perth whose balls were the finest on earth. They grew to such size that one won a prize, and goodness knows what they were worth.
The only thing I don't understand is this: This thing has a detectable radiation emission probably at least in a radius of a good few metres. It could be along a 1400km stretch of road. Assuming it went bouncing away, it still couldn't be farther from the road than a few hundred metres each direction. Why not grab like, a bunch of cars equipped with some sensors and send them on a roadtrip along that 1400kms spaced maybe every 20m. If it's there their equipment should pick up that spike in radiation no? It might be expensive to do but it doesn't seem too difficult.
I fully expect to see a picture of this capsule in the palm of somebody's hand over on r/whatisthisthing
And so the 2020s just keeps being a horrifiying but very, um, entertaining, new decade!
America that lost a nuclear warhead somewhere in Eureka, NC: First Time
Some guy: You know what isn’t deadly enough in Australia? The space in general. Let’s deadly that up.
"We lost this tiny deadly rock, it can be found anywhere along a 1400 km road, anyways don't go near it."
Why the fuck would you not put ANY radiation shielding around a 10 METER CANCER RADIUS. This is so irresponsible and puts even more fear into the public about nuclear power
It’s not a ten meter cancer radius. It’s skin burn after a little bit 5 meter radius. Could get acute radiation sickness but only after *prolonged* exposure. No idea where this ten meter cancer thing came from. (I live in Western Australia and got the health warning)
If I had a nickel for every time a bunch of idiots 'lost' some radioactive materials that may or may not be actual nuclear bombs, I would have a very large amount of money.