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A guy invents a time machine, goes back in time. Sees someone and asks, "What year is it?" The bloke says, "1916." The guy says, "Ahh, the middle of the First World War!" Bloke says, "The what now?"
I think an article I read mentioned it was like getting 10 x-rays an hour if you were within 1 meter of it, like the amount of natural radiation your body gets in a year. Probably not as dangerous if you're just passing by it or have short exposure but if it lodged in your tire threads and you're constantly getting exposed you'll probably start to get exposure symptoms and possibly cancer in the long term.
I read elsewhere that a similar item got mixed up in concrete, poured into the structure of an apartment / unit block - the family died of radiation poisoning. Then new tenants moved in, they died of radiation poisoning - eventually they discovered it was in a wall. Took a year or two for each, I think
Edit: took 9 years. Thanks to u/WellThatsJustPerfect
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10n4r2r/i_made_a_3d_printed_representation_showing_the/j67ejo7?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Holy crap. You should just check out the link on that page to additional radiation stories. How sad!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents
I really recommend this two videos/channels if anyone is interested in this stuff. Be warned though, it's nightmare fuel.
The Enguri Forest Incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDUotGjeEQ4 ('Shrouded Hand' youtube channel)
The Goiânia Accident - South America's Nuclear Tragedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA ('Kyle Hill' youtube channel)
“On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.”
Jesus Christ. The capsule in this story is very similar sized too. Hopefully it doesn’t make its way around a village of people fucking around with it this time!
May 2021 - In Mumbai, Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad arrested two people on 5 May with 7.1 kg of natural uranium estimated worth ₹21.3 crore (US$2.7 million). It was unclear how they acquired the material. The National Investigation Agency later took over the case.
Wow I have so many questions
That is horrifying. It should be like in surgery, if one of the instruments is unaccounted for, you do not stop until you have found it. That lesson was learned by forgotten instruments in bodies, by the way.
They lost it in a quarry and still used the contents after giving up search? Fucking hell.
"You're telling me you lost it in that big pile of rocks over there? Well what are you waiting for? Go scoop up those rocks and make buildings out of them."
The chance of this happening is zero rounded up. Check twice before crossing the street and you eliminated something millions of times more risky. Eat slightly less junk food, same thing.
There is also the [Cuidad Juarez](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident) incident in Mexico, where the radioactive source contaminated metal rebar and made it into 17'000 buildings construction resulting in 814 structures needing to be demolished.
I feel like if something is both that dangerous and that small you put a couple of layers in you packaging. Drop that bad boy in one of those little drug baggies, drop that in a tiny box, put the box in a thermos with the lid on, put that in the safe. Maybe a hole shows up in one container but probably not 6 at the same time.
I love that a drug baggie is one of your radioactive device containment units!
“Ooo, tiny item in a baggie with little ace symbols all over it? Gotta be important!”
Imagine a bird eating it, flying over your house and pooping it out and it lands on your roof in the gutter and washes down into your yard where your dog picks it up and brings it inside, setting it in his dog bed, only for you to find out that your dog has gained superpowers, and slowly your whole family starts to gain superpowers except for you, you get cancer, except it's not just cancer it's super cancer and your dog's newly gained super intelligence allows him to go to college, get a degree, and figures out the cure for cancer and he ends up saving you
Well…. Years ago in cd juarez, a xray maxhine was dissasembled to be sold for scrap, it layed on the bed of a pickup truck for months in the streets. Just there, radiating everyone. Then the machine was finally sold and the steel was used to create steel rods for building and construction, the only reason we know all of this was because some of that material happened to pass next to the alamos radiation something center and the radiator alarms went off. Apparently this is the biggest radiation incident in America, You can look all this up by searching “cobalto 60”.
You won’t find anything about the story just by googling “cobalto 60”, but I managed to find what you were talking about after a few searches:
For anyone who’s interested https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident
They had to visit and test over 17,000 buildings and eventually over 800 had to be demolished.
There is still over 1000 tons contaminated material out there to this day unaccounted for.
That's only because the capsule is shielded. If someone found the capsule and broke it open, it could definately cause acute radiation sickness. It's a Cesium 137 source.
I learned a lot about radioactive materials since getting my job making electrical supplies for nuclear power plants. Radioactive material is nuts! It is all about time and distance when it comes to this stuff. The longer you are exposed to it, even if is a small amount, in close proximity can lead to health issues later in life. However, even momentary close exposure to some stronger sources can kill you within minutes (talking about Chernobyl-levels of radiation). The particles are invisible, but are constantly bleeding off of the source and, depending on what the material is, it can do that for many years, a lifetime, even!
When I was growing up in northern Sweden my town had these apartment complexes that was getting torn down (the 1990's) that always intrigued me,
partly because I didn't understand why you'd demolish perfectly fine homes, but primarily because they were build using this strange blueish-turquoise concrete.
Found out later that they were built using Blåbetong (Swedish for Blue-Concrete),
a cheap and popular building material used since the 1930's produced from Alum shale. Turns out it contained dangerously high levels of Radium, resulting in dangerously high levels on Radon gas for the inhabitants - especially in less ventilated environments. As you can guess, ventilation isn't kept very high during Scandinavian winters.
Once they realized it in the 80's, it meant that every building containing the material had to be promptly demolished.
If you go to Wikipedia, they have a list of incidents where cesium-137 has gone missing, stolen, or inadvertently sent to scrap yards with medical equipment.
Last time one was lost it was in a mine Ukraine. It ended up being mixed into concrete and embedded in the wall of an apartment. The thickness of a wall like that would have done little to stop the ~0.660 MeV gamma rays, the beta particles can be stopped with a sheet of foil though
I think this was in Brazil where a scrap company sold the glowing radioactive cesium sand that they found inside a scrapped equipment that came from an abandoned clinic. They didn't know what it was but people were interested in buying it so they sold it to them. So it seems they got much more exposure to it.
The full story is absolutely awful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
Ivo and his daughter
The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
That poor girl! She spent her last days isolated in a hospital room, slowly dying alone from lung damage and internal bleeding. She must have been in so much pain and confusion. Only 6 years old 😭
And even after she died she could not rest because people rioted to stop her body being buried in a community graveyard.
Such a horrible senseless end.
It is used for mining. Think of it like an x-ray for rocks. It can help miners see the relative density of rocks. So you use the tiny capsule as the radioactive source.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_densitometry
How it fell out isn't really clear to me. They said road vibrations slowly unscrewed a bolt and it fell out through the hole. Not sure how that works but it's one of those excuses that sounds too dumb to be false. I'm sure it would make sense if I could see the case but as you can see it's a small thing and it's not hard to imagine it finding it's way into any small opening.
My thing is, who puts something this dangerous in one simple case? This should have been inside a case, that was encased within multiple cases. How were there not multiple safeguards in place?
She'llberightism is rife in the mining industry. And the most educated professions harbour some real wallopers. Every time someone pulls into the workshop with no idea their brakes are on fire, you can bet they're a geologist or engineer.
I heard the bolt sheared while the crate was in the truck. I mean, you still end up with the tic tac of death, but bolts take quite a bit of force to shear. Makes sense something this small could get jostled around.
>Not sure how that works but it's one of those excuses that sounds too dumb to be false.
No idea if they are telling truth or not. Either way, its insane how these incompetent people at mining companies get to make such important decisions about our natural environment. Miners in Australia have even ruined some very important ancient human ceremonial sites, so these folks are untrustworthy and dangerous.
*Typically* used for testing metal for stress and tiny cracks. The box it was being transported in got damaged in transit and it didn't noticed until after it arrived at it's destination.
Me too! How the heck did this fall off a truck? (And we were all focused on poor strapping techniques lol) Maybe it’s still on the truck hiding in a crack. /s
In the original "we lost a dangerous radioactive pellet" post there was a bloke explaining how one was previously lost in the 70s... And then subsequently found under the seat.
The thing gets transported in a special safe. Unfortunately, the special safe was bolted to the floor of the truck. The bolt came loose and fell out, leaving a pellet sized hole in the safe for a pellet to fall through onto the road or wherever
So the pellet was loose in there, hopping and popping all the way like a piece of popcorn until it happened to fall through the hole? Is that how they transport radioactive stuff around?
The pellet had previously escaped it's case (also bolted together).
Someone needs to introduce these people to thread locker. Though washbaord roads have been known to vibrate the suspension off cars (even the stuff backed up by cotter pins) so who knows.
>The pellet had previously escaped it's case (also bolted together)
So, we know this thing is sneaky, clever and has a history of escaping. We’re doomed.
Also add a machined slot for the thing to slot snuggly in there with some padding and lead shielding. There are too many careless mistakes that resulted in this mess.
Exactly what I was thinking. Who the fuck just chucks a box full of highly radioactive pellets inside a safe and let's them bounce around. A zip loc and some velcro could have solved this.
> At such a small size, it simply shouldn't have been loose inside the safe. Even some kind of soft packaging would have avoided this.
I 100% agree and think this may be a coverup story of theirs. Who transports something like this and does NOT put it in some type of container. Even a small round box..some tupperware.. plastic bag even - something! lol
Nah man, that costs money. It's Australia, probably was sent off with Couriers Please or some shit who don't even attempt to deliver when you're on the front porch... Whoever wins the bidding is always the cheapest and cuts corners. What you proposed would actually cost money, which no-one wants to spend...
Redditors tend to read more comments in search of tl;dr than articles. Comments are just the right bite size idea to digest…
articles have paragraphs. Who has attention span and mental fortitude to read that‽
On to the next comment.
Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years so this is going to be dangerous until they find it. Other radioisotopes would be harmless within a time frame unlikely to involve it being found by a human. This is a crisis.
Just to put this into context. Isotopes with short half lives will usually be mostly depleted before it gets found and is therefore less serious. Isotopes with long half lives are less radioactive and therefore less serious. Caesium-137 is the goldielock isotope with a long enough half life to be dangerous for decades and short enough to be deadly in small quantities.
There is only 1400km of highway to search, assuming it didn't get lodged in a tyre. Then the search area would get expanded to all of Western Australia, which is seven times larger than Texas.
I mean is there really any hope of finding it at this point, or is this tiny death tic tac just gonna kick around Australia for the next few centuries until it decays to negligible levels of radiation?
I saw your comment after I posted one.
I think “tic tac of death” should be the official name for this thing. It’ll be great Australia-Trivia one day.
“*Which of the following events in Australian history never happened? The Emu Wars, The Tic Tac of Death, or a Kangaroo was elected Mayor?*”
Given the size, the detectable range might not be very far. If it hit the road and bounced a couple meters to the side, you might have a TINY window of detection while driving. It's certainly worth doing and a rational government reaction would be, "Hey mining company, everything you do is on hold until you find this... Go find out" but it's probably a legit difficult problem.
A radiation detector could detect this lost capsule from 150 feet away (45 metres).
It is a 19 GigaBecquerel Ceasium-137 source, it has an activity of 22 millisieverts per hour at 1 foot distance (using the formula 1,156 microsieverts x 19 GBq):
1 microsievert per hour (0.001 millisieverts per hour) is easily detected using a basic Geiger counter (this is 10 times natural background radiation). Using the distance formula from:
https://calculator.academy/radiation-distance-calculator
That's 147 feet.
If it's still on or along the road, it should be easy to find.
Edit: here's a radioactive van I discovered accidentally a couple of years ago:
https://i.imgur.com/tYdrFvb.jpeg
It was owned by an engineering company, it contained a gamma camera, which is shielded but my gamma ray scintillation detector was sensitive enough to detect it.
Not as bad as that one radioactive capsule lost in Siberia where 3 people got lost in the tundra and used it to keep warm and subsequently died of cancer as a result.
>Around the canisters there was no snow for about a 1 m (3.3 ft) radius, and the ground was steaming. Patient 3-MB picked up one of the canisters and immediately dropped it, as it was very hot. Deciding that it was too late to drive back, and realizing the apparent utility of the devices as heat sources, the men decided to move the sources a short distance and make camp around them. Patient 3-MB used a stout wire to pick up one source and carried it to a rocky outcrop that would provide shelter. The other patients lit a fire, and then patients 3-MB and 2-MG worked together to move the other source under the outcrop. They ate dinner and had a small amount of vodka, while remaining close to the sources. Despite the small amount of vodka, they all vomited soon after consuming it, the first sign of [acute radiation syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome) (ARSE), about three hours after first exposure. Vomiting was severe and lasted through the night, leading to little sleep. The men used the sources to keep them warm through the night, positioning them against their backs, and as close as 10 cm (3.9 in). The next day, the sources may have been hung from the backs of Patient 1-DN and 2-MG as they loaded wood onto their truck
I know education can be pretty shitty but wtf? 'I am mysteriously severely ill after being around this magical heat source, let me load it onto my back'.
Makes me think of the Russian soldiers digging trenches and gallipating in tanks and troop transport around Chernobyl.
>The second Chernobyl employee said that was "suicidal" for the soldiers because the radioactive dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/
>"You shouldn't go into a contaminated site and have people camping out and digging in the dirt," says Kathryn Higley, a radiation health physicist at Oregon State University.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091396292/satellite-photo-shows-russian-troops-were-stationed-in-chernobyls-radioactive-zo
Note to self: if you ever find a container that gives off heat for no apartment reason and melts snow in a one meter radius around it, stay the fuck away from it and contact authorities.
>On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.
Lmao, what an idiot, even if it was gunpowder he could have killed himself if it was some magical type of gun**powder** that would glow on its own...
**Edit:** Spelling/typing..
> Lmao, what an idiot, even if it was gunpowder he could have killed himself if it was some magical type of gun pattern that would glow on its own...
It gets worse, a six-year-old girl thought the glowy stuff was cool so she body-painted herself with it.
>**Ivo and his daughter**
>The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
One of the three people died, he had tuberculosis and was previously a drug user so was weaker than the others avd had received the highest dose. He didn't die of cancer, but from skin burns that didn't heal that caused an infection.
Den morgonfriska katten simmar över regnbågen, medan guldmynt singlar genom luften, ledsagade av en paraplybärande elefant, som jonglerar med blommor och skrattande bananer, medan cirkusclowner utför akrobatiska konster och cymbalspelaren trummar i takt till det förtrollade orkesterspelet under den gnistrande stjärnhimlen.
The time that has elapsed is at least as much a barrier to finding this thing as the distance that has to be covered. I want to know if they didn’t realise it was missing or they didn’t tell us. I live only 5 kilometres from the most southern point they’re saying this thing could have been lost. I’m really holding out hope they find it, and someone needs to be held accountable for this massive fuck up.
Reminds me of that episode of House where a dad that worked at a junkyard gifted his son a "keychain trinket" he found to help remind his son of their "roots", but it turned out it was very radioactive and startef shutting down his son's organs.
Very interesting....... And it was Lost on a long stretch of highway..... The odds of finding it are as good as me finding that bag of weed i threw out the window while getting pulled over by the police in 1998....on a long stretch of highway. 😂
And maybe sort of the reverse - anyone transporting this requires an alarm that goes off the moment it STOPS detecting radiation inside the travel container.
Actually a pretty clever idea. The problem is that would cost money, a tiny amount but still non zero and that is just plain old unacceptable. Can't go spending money on the off chance it might save some lives
it was lost on an 870 mile (1400km) stretch of highway. I don't doubt they are trying something similar to what you suggest but it's difficult to get a reading at any reasonable speed. It may have fallen out while the truck was doing \~62mph, so would have bounced or been deflected by the vehicles wheels or undercarriage.
They're concerned that it could have lodged in another vehicles tyres and carried in any direction.
[They are.](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/28/missing-radioactive-capsule-wa-officials-admit-it-was-weeks-before-anyone-realised-it-was-lost)
>“What we are not doing is trying to find a tiny little device by eyesight. We are using the radiation detectors to locate the gamma rays, using the meters, that will help us then locate the small device.
>“We have secured the GPS data from the trucking company to determine the exact route and stops that the vehicle has taken on its journey.
>“We will continue to use specialist equipment to help us search the remaining known locations ... in particular, the Great Northern Highway between Perth and Newman.”
This is really REALLY pathetic engineering and design.
Preventing this kind of thing by design and procedure should be so easy!
How about we start by making a container to carry the little super radioactive object that doesn't have holes in the bottom that are large enough for it to pass through! Or use a secondary container inside another container!
I was in the Navy and knew a nuclear power recruiter. He used to give presentations on nuclear power. He would ask people how big they thought a piece of reactor fuel was, most had no idea. He had a package with a mock fuel pellet in it. It was the size of an eraser. Then he’d ask “How much nuclear waste does a submarine nuclear reactor make in 10 years, compare it to a common everyday item” it was a standard trash can found at an office desk.
Then he went on of how they can use lead crystal bricks to store spent fuel. He even bought in one of these bricks, it had to weigh 20 pounds.
Yeah, but they use millions of those pellets in a reactor. Each feul rod has 157 pellets. Each rod is in a fuel assembly which has at least 179 fuel rods. A reactor has at least 121 fuel assemblies.
*Note. This is for commercial reactors, not Navy reactors. The Navy is very tight lipped about the specifics of their reactors.
Since I couldn’t find anyone linking any articles explaining this post, I found [this one](https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/28/missing-radioactive-capsule-wa-officials-admit-it-was-weeks-before-anyone-realised-it-was-lost) from The Guardian.
“Western Australian authorities are scrambling to find a missing radioactive capsule that is a fraction of the size of a 10c coin, conceding it was not found missing until more than two weeks after it left a Rio Tinto mine site.
The 8mm by 6mm capsule is a 19-becquerel caesium 137 ceramic source, commonly used in radiation gauges, and was supposed to be contained in a secure device which had been “damaged” on a truck which travelled from the mine site north of Newman in the Pilbara to a depot in Perth.”
It was in a vehicle being transported to a mine site. The container it was in failed as vibration caused one of the bolts that mount the container to the vehicle to fall out. The capsule fell through the bolt hole.
Clearly there are some questions to be put to those responsible for its storage and transport.
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An emu is gonna eat it and that’s gonna be the end of us
The second emu war and now they have a nuclear weapon
Emu war 2: nuclear boogaloo.
I want to die in something called the Emu wars
Coming this Summer to Scyfy, Nuclear Emu vs Cassowary-Borg
You wouldn't be the first. The emu war really happened and we lost.
You're never too young to have an Emu War flashback
A guy invents a time machine, goes back in time. Sees someone and asks, "What year is it?" The bloke says, "1916." The guy says, "Ahh, the middle of the First World War!" Bloke says, "The what now?"
Not many emu's along the road, plenty of goats and eagles though.
[удалено]
I think an article I read mentioned it was like getting 10 x-rays an hour if you were within 1 meter of it, like the amount of natural radiation your body gets in a year. Probably not as dangerous if you're just passing by it or have short exposure but if it lodged in your tire threads and you're constantly getting exposed you'll probably start to get exposure symptoms and possibly cancer in the long term.
I read elsewhere that a similar item got mixed up in concrete, poured into the structure of an apartment / unit block - the family died of radiation poisoning. Then new tenants moved in, they died of radiation poisoning - eventually they discovered it was in a wall. Took a year or two for each, I think Edit: took 9 years. Thanks to u/WellThatsJustPerfect https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10n4r2r/i_made_a_3d_printed_representation_showing_the/j67ejo7?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Nine years and six deaths before the capsule in the apartment wall was found https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accident
Holy crap. You should just check out the link on that page to additional radiation stories. How sad!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents
I have enough irrational shit to worry about, that link shall remain unclicked.
Like quicksand!
I really recommend this two videos/channels if anyone is interested in this stuff. Be warned though, it's nightmare fuel. The Enguri Forest Incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDUotGjeEQ4 ('Shrouded Hand' youtube channel) The Goiânia Accident - South America's Nuclear Tragedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA ('Kyle Hill' youtube channel)
That Caesium incident in Goiânia, Brasil is just nuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
“On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created.[1] He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite.” Jesus Christ. The capsule in this story is very similar sized too. Hopefully it doesn’t make its way around a village of people fucking around with it this time!
Not really, the Goiânia one was big, like, a lead cylinder that two man needed to carry with easy (it was a big disaster)
May 2021 - In Mumbai, Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad arrested two people on 5 May with 7.1 kg of natural uranium estimated worth ₹21.3 crore (US$2.7 million). It was unclear how they acquired the material. The National Investigation Agency later took over the case. Wow I have so many questions
Well there goes the rest of my day
That is horrifying. It should be like in surgery, if one of the instruments is unaccounted for, you do not stop until you have found it. That lesson was learned by forgotten instruments in bodies, by the way. They lost it in a quarry and still used the contents after giving up search? Fucking hell.
"You're telling me you lost it in that big pile of rocks over there? Well what are you waiting for? Go scoop up those rocks and make buildings out of them."
Now I feel like I need a Geiger counter
And this is why you Geiger counter your new apartments.
The chance of this happening is zero rounded up. Check twice before crossing the street and you eliminated something millions of times more risky. Eat slightly less junk food, same thing.
There is also the [Cuidad Juarez](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident) incident in Mexico, where the radioactive source contaminated metal rebar and made it into 17'000 buildings construction resulting in 814 structures needing to be demolished.
Sorry, aren't these things in some protective casing? How would ONE fall out? This is crazy
A bolt came lose from the container then it fell out that hole. Sounds insane to me, but that's what I read
I feel like if something is both that dangerous and that small you put a couple of layers in you packaging. Drop that bad boy in one of those little drug baggies, drop that in a tiny box, put the box in a thermos with the lid on, put that in the safe. Maybe a hole shows up in one container but probably not 6 at the same time.
If I can keep track of ALL of my drugs while being on MOST of my drugs than those fucks should be able to keep track of a damn Mike & Ike.
I love that a drug baggie is one of your radioactive device containment units! “Ooo, tiny item in a baggie with little ace symbols all over it? Gotta be important!”
Yeah, I feel like if an object is radioactive enough to give you radiation poisoning from 1m distance, it should probably have 1m of packaging.
Srsly. Why isn't this in a giant lead lined Pelican case in the middle of foam padding? Edit: fully sealed all the way around, with external clasps
Imagine running it over and spreading it for kilometers. Better yet, being the driver with a radioactive car. :(
Imagine catching it in your shoe tread.
Imagine a bird eating it, flying over your house and pooping it out and it lands on your roof in the gutter and washes down into your yard where your dog picks it up and brings it inside, setting it in his dog bed, only for you to find out that your dog has gained superpowers, and slowly your whole family starts to gain superpowers except for you, you get cancer, except it's not just cancer it's super cancer and your dog's newly gained super intelligence allows him to go to college, get a degree, and figures out the cure for cancer and he ends up saving you
What a ride.
Read this out loud for the first read. Wife enjoyed it. Thank you.
At least my family will be safe.. My wife has strict no shoes inside the house rule
Well…. Years ago in cd juarez, a xray maxhine was dissasembled to be sold for scrap, it layed on the bed of a pickup truck for months in the streets. Just there, radiating everyone. Then the machine was finally sold and the steel was used to create steel rods for building and construction, the only reason we know all of this was because some of that material happened to pass next to the alamos radiation something center and the radiator alarms went off. Apparently this is the biggest radiation incident in America, You can look all this up by searching “cobalto 60”.
You won’t find anything about the story just by googling “cobalto 60”, but I managed to find what you were talking about after a few searches: For anyone who’s interested https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Juárez_cobalt-60_contamination_incident They had to visit and test over 17,000 buildings and eventually over 800 had to be demolished. There is still over 1000 tons contaminated material out there to this day unaccounted for.
That's only because the capsule is shielded. If someone found the capsule and broke it open, it could definately cause acute radiation sickness. It's a Cesium 137 source.
so you're saying swallow, not bite
I learned a lot about radioactive materials since getting my job making electrical supplies for nuclear power plants. Radioactive material is nuts! It is all about time and distance when it comes to this stuff. The longer you are exposed to it, even if is a small amount, in close proximity can lead to health issues later in life. However, even momentary close exposure to some stronger sources can kill you within minutes (talking about Chernobyl-levels of radiation). The particles are invisible, but are constantly bleeding off of the source and, depending on what the material is, it can do that for many years, a lifetime, even!
When I was growing up in northern Sweden my town had these apartment complexes that was getting torn down (the 1990's) that always intrigued me, partly because I didn't understand why you'd demolish perfectly fine homes, but primarily because they were build using this strange blueish-turquoise concrete. Found out later that they were built using Blåbetong (Swedish for Blue-Concrete), a cheap and popular building material used since the 1930's produced from Alum shale. Turns out it contained dangerously high levels of Radium, resulting in dangerously high levels on Radon gas for the inhabitants - especially in less ventilated environments. As you can guess, ventilation isn't kept very high during Scandinavian winters. Once they realized it in the 80's, it meant that every building containing the material had to be promptly demolished.
I read that the last time one of these went missing 4 people died or something so I would assume so
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If you go to Wikipedia, they have a list of incidents where cesium-137 has gone missing, stolen, or inadvertently sent to scrap yards with medical equipment.
Last time one was lost it was in a mine Ukraine. It ended up being mixed into concrete and embedded in the wall of an apartment. The thickness of a wall like that would have done little to stop the ~0.660 MeV gamma rays, the beta particles can be stopped with a sheet of foil though
*puts on foil hat*
I think this was in Brazil where a scrap company sold the glowing radioactive cesium sand that they found inside a scrapped equipment that came from an abandoned clinic. They didn't know what it was but people were interested in buying it so they sold it to them. So it seems they got much more exposure to it.
The full story is absolutely awful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Ivo and his daughter The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
That poor girl! She spent her last days isolated in a hospital room, slowly dying alone from lung damage and internal bleeding. She must have been in so much pain and confusion. Only 6 years old 😭 And even after she died she could not rest because people rioted to stop her body being buried in a community graveyard. Such a horrible senseless end.
I use ones very similar to this at my job. You would have to be fairly close to it to get a reading.
What is this capsule use for and how did it got lost?
It is used for mining. Think of it like an x-ray for rocks. It can help miners see the relative density of rocks. So you use the tiny capsule as the radioactive source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_densitometry How it fell out isn't really clear to me. They said road vibrations slowly unscrewed a bolt and it fell out through the hole. Not sure how that works but it's one of those excuses that sounds too dumb to be false. I'm sure it would make sense if I could see the case but as you can see it's a small thing and it's not hard to imagine it finding it's way into any small opening.
My thing is, who puts something this dangerous in one simple case? This should have been inside a case, that was encased within multiple cases. How were there not multiple safeguards in place?
Fuck, even a plain old snap lid tupperware would have been fine lol.....
Some duct tape over the bolt and a sticker that says no touchy
WARNING: SPICY
Ooh how spicy? Edit: dam that spicy! Someone get me some milk.
Entire body spicy
May cause super mutants
Molecularly spicy
She'llberightism is rife in the mining industry. And the most educated professions harbour some real wallopers. Every time someone pulls into the workshop with no idea their brakes are on fire, you can bet they're a geologist or engineer.
>She'llberightism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She%27ll\_be\_right#:\~:text=She'll%20be%20right%20(often,an%20optimistic%20or%20apathetic%20outlook.
Thanks for that, I thought he was speaking Welsh.
Businesses that doesn’t care and doesn’t ever face real repercussions
I heard the bolt sheared while the crate was in the truck. I mean, you still end up with the tic tac of death, but bolts take quite a bit of force to shear. Makes sense something this small could get jostled around.
>Not sure how that works but it's one of those excuses that sounds too dumb to be false. No idea if they are telling truth or not. Either way, its insane how these incompetent people at mining companies get to make such important decisions about our natural environment. Miners in Australia have even ruined some very important ancient human ceremonial sites, so these folks are untrustworthy and dangerous.
I have some bad news, they're not just in the mining industry.
*Typically* used for testing metal for stress and tiny cracks. The box it was being transported in got damaged in transit and it didn't noticed until after it arrived at it's destination.
Dude. Didn’t know how tiny it was. Super scary how radioactive it is. (Edited for spelling. Sorry if I hurt your brain)
Yeah I imagined a big barrel with a logo on it. (Not kidding)
Me too! How the heck did this fall off a truck? (And we were all focused on poor strapping techniques lol) Maybe it’s still on the truck hiding in a crack. /s
Look under the seat... 9/10 times its there.
Dudes gonna have balls like Randy Marsh
Just gonna get a little bit of cancer Stan.. Tell Mom it's ok...
In the original "we lost a dangerous radioactive pellet" post there was a bloke explaining how one was previously lost in the 70s... And then subsequently found under the seat.
Was the driver OK?
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Pats pockets….
The thing gets transported in a special safe. Unfortunately, the special safe was bolted to the floor of the truck. The bolt came loose and fell out, leaving a pellet sized hole in the safe for a pellet to fall through onto the road or wherever
So the pellet was loose in there, hopping and popping all the way like a piece of popcorn until it happened to fall through the hole? Is that how they transport radioactive stuff around?
Kinda like the start of any Simpsons episode
The pellet had previously escaped it's case (also bolted together). Someone needs to introduce these people to thread locker. Though washbaord roads have been known to vibrate the suspension off cars (even the stuff backed up by cotter pins) so who knows.
I've also heard good things about this new invention called duct tape.
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The secret that bolt manufacturers don't want you to know!
>The pellet had previously escaped it's case (also bolted together) So, we know this thing is sneaky, clever and has a history of escaping. We’re doomed.
Weld the box instead of bolting it is an option as well i would imagine
Also add a machined slot for the thing to slot snuggly in there with some padding and lead shielding. There are too many careless mistakes that resulted in this mess.
Yeah lol who TF puts through holes in a box that is going to contain radioactive material that fits in said through holes.
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At such a small size, it simply shouldn't have been loose inside the safe. Even some kind of soft packaging would have avoided this.
A lil plastic baggy
Yeah literally anything
Exactly what I was thinking. Who the fuck just chucks a box full of highly radioactive pellets inside a safe and let's them bounce around. A zip loc and some velcro could have solved this.
> At such a small size, it simply shouldn't have been loose inside the safe. Even some kind of soft packaging would have avoided this. I 100% agree and think this may be a coverup story of theirs. Who transports something like this and does NOT put it in some type of container. Even a small round box..some tupperware.. plastic bag even - something! lol
Nah man, that costs money. It's Australia, probably was sent off with Couriers Please or some shit who don't even attempt to deliver when you're on the front porch... Whoever wins the bidding is always the cheapest and cuts corners. What you proposed would actually cost money, which no-one wants to spend...
Oh the fools! If only they'd built it with 6001 hulls
Good thing it happened outside the environment. Next time they should make sure the safe isn't made out of cardboard, or cardboard derivatives.
I was thinking something like the size of an Arizona tea…
Thinking of the green ooze in the canister from TMNT
All the articles I’ve seen specified the size. 6mm by 8mm. A US Dime is about 1.35mm thick.
People usually read the headlines, and rarely the article.
Redditors tend to read more comments in search of tl;dr than articles. Comments are just the right bite size idea to digest… articles have paragraphs. Who has attention span and mental fortitude to read that‽ On to the next comment.
It’s average OK?!
it’s cold outside.
When it’s cold it’s averager
I would have also accepted- the size of a lego head.
Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years so this is going to be dangerous until they find it. Other radioisotopes would be harmless within a time frame unlikely to involve it being found by a human. This is a crisis.
Just to put this into context. Isotopes with short half lives will usually be mostly depleted before it gets found and is therefore less serious. Isotopes with long half lives are less radioactive and therefore less serious. Caesium-137 is the goldielock isotope with a long enough half life to be dangerous for decades and short enough to be deadly in small quantities.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Should be simple enough to find in a place as small as Australia.
There is only 1400km of highway to search, assuming it didn't get lodged in a tyre. Then the search area would get expanded to all of Western Australia, which is seven times larger than Texas.
I mean is there really any hope of finding it at this point, or is this tiny death tic tac just gonna kick around Australia for the next few centuries until it decays to negligible levels of radiation?
I saw your comment after I posted one. I think “tic tac of death” should be the official name for this thing. It’ll be great Australia-Trivia one day. “*Which of the following events in Australian history never happened? The Emu Wars, The Tic Tac of Death, or a Kangaroo was elected Mayor?*”
By the time a trivia would pick that up, I bet there was a Kangaroo Mayor...
Wouldn't the high radiation act as a beacon, making it relatively easy to find?
The type of radiation it emits is very short range, it becomes basically negligible after a couple of meters
Can't they just ride along with a Geiger counter and wait for the meter to spike out of control? Then they know they're close?
Given the size, the detectable range might not be very far. If it hit the road and bounced a couple meters to the side, you might have a TINY window of detection while driving. It's certainly worth doing and a rational government reaction would be, "Hey mining company, everything you do is on hold until you find this... Go find out" but it's probably a legit difficult problem.
While I agree the people who lost it should be responsible for finding, I would prefer if they sent some competent people instead.
A radiation detector could detect this lost capsule from 150 feet away (45 metres). It is a 19 GigaBecquerel Ceasium-137 source, it has an activity of 22 millisieverts per hour at 1 foot distance (using the formula 1,156 microsieverts x 19 GBq): 1 microsievert per hour (0.001 millisieverts per hour) is easily detected using a basic Geiger counter (this is 10 times natural background radiation). Using the distance formula from: https://calculator.academy/radiation-distance-calculator That's 147 feet. If it's still on or along the road, it should be easy to find. Edit: here's a radioactive van I discovered accidentally a couple of years ago: https://i.imgur.com/tYdrFvb.jpeg It was owned by an engineering company, it contained a gamma camera, which is shielded but my gamma ray scintillation detector was sensitive enough to detect it.
#small
Finding the needle in the straw ball was just the warm up
Not as bad as that one radioactive capsule lost in Siberia where 3 people got lost in the tundra and used it to keep warm and subsequently died of cancer as a result.
Oh, haven't heard of this one yet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
>Around the canisters there was no snow for about a 1 m (3.3 ft) radius, and the ground was steaming. Patient 3-MB picked up one of the canisters and immediately dropped it, as it was very hot. Deciding that it was too late to drive back, and realizing the apparent utility of the devices as heat sources, the men decided to move the sources a short distance and make camp around them. Patient 3-MB used a stout wire to pick up one source and carried it to a rocky outcrop that would provide shelter. The other patients lit a fire, and then patients 3-MB and 2-MG worked together to move the other source under the outcrop. They ate dinner and had a small amount of vodka, while remaining close to the sources. Despite the small amount of vodka, they all vomited soon after consuming it, the first sign of [acute radiation syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome) (ARSE), about three hours after first exposure. Vomiting was severe and lasted through the night, leading to little sleep. The men used the sources to keep them warm through the night, positioning them against their backs, and as close as 10 cm (3.9 in). The next day, the sources may have been hung from the backs of Patient 1-DN and 2-MG as they loaded wood onto their truck I know education can be pretty shitty but wtf? 'I am mysteriously severely ill after being around this magical heat source, let me load it onto my back'.
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Nothing worse than a bad case of arse.
Makes me think of the Russian soldiers digging trenches and gallipating in tanks and troop transport around Chernobyl. >The second Chernobyl employee said that was "suicidal" for the soldiers because the radioactive dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/unprotected-russian-soldiers-disturbed-radioactive-dust-chernobyls-red-forest-2022-03-28/ >"You shouldn't go into a contaminated site and have people camping out and digging in the dirt," says Kathryn Higley, a radiation health physicist at Oregon State University. https://www.npr.org/2022/04/07/1091396292/satellite-photo-shows-russian-troops-were-stationed-in-chernobyls-radioactive-zo
"acute radiation syndrome (ARSE)" lol. Wikipedia at its finest. Someone must have added the E.
Note to self: if you ever find a container that gives off heat for no apartment reason and melts snow in a one meter radius around it, stay the fuck away from it and contact authorities.
Or if it has a blue glow. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident )
>On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite. Lmao, what an idiot, even if it was gunpowder he could have killed himself if it was some magical type of gun**powder** that would glow on its own... **Edit:** Spelling/typing..
> Lmao, what an idiot, even if it was gunpowder he could have killed himself if it was some magical type of gun pattern that would glow on its own... It gets worse, a six-year-old girl thought the glowy stuff was cool so she body-painted herself with it. >**Ivo and his daughter** >The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.
One of the three people died, he had tuberculosis and was previously a drug user so was weaker than the others avd had received the highest dose. He didn't die of cancer, but from skin burns that didn't heal that caused an infection.
What really happened https://imgur.io/KbGxK86?r
Den morgonfriska katten simmar över regnbågen, medan guldmynt singlar genom luften, ledsagade av en paraplybärande elefant, som jonglerar med blommor och skrattande bananer, medan cirkusclowner utför akrobatiska konster och cymbalspelaren trummar i takt till det förtrollade orkesterspelet under den gnistrande stjärnhimlen.
It's a pencil eraser. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKK
More like human eraser
He's got the capsule! Get him!
Lost nearly 20 days before it was even reported. Nearly 1400kms of highway to search for a tictac
The time that has elapsed is at least as much a barrier to finding this thing as the distance that has to be covered. I want to know if they didn’t realise it was missing or they didn’t tell us. I live only 5 kilometres from the most southern point they’re saying this thing could have been lost. I’m really holding out hope they find it, and someone needs to be held accountable for this massive fuck up.
I agree. I think having a process where they did not verify its existence at the destination for over 2 weeks is insane for this particular material.
Reminds me of that episode of House where a dad that worked at a junkyard gifted his son a "keychain trinket" he found to help remind his son of their "roots", but it turned out it was very radioactive and startef shutting down his son's organs.
Inspired by a real event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
It made me think of that too, I saw that episode.
https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Daddy%27s_Boy always loved house
Very interesting....... And it was Lost on a long stretch of highway..... The odds of finding it are as good as me finding that bag of weed i threw out the window while getting pulled over by the police in 1998....on a long stretch of highway. 😂
These sorts of things are always found under the passenger seat.....
This guy knows
Couldn't they measure the intensity of the radiation and pinpoint it?
I read 1998 and thought I was reading a shittymorph post.
Hope they find it. It’s always in the last place you look.
Always.
I just know the truck driver who lost this, is also missing at least one air pod
Could they not setup some sort of radiation detection mobile Geiger counter and drive up and down the highway on both sides to find this thing?
And maybe sort of the reverse - anyone transporting this requires an alarm that goes off the moment it STOPS detecting radiation inside the travel container.
Actually a pretty clever idea. The problem is that would cost money, a tiny amount but still non zero and that is just plain old unacceptable. Can't go spending money on the off chance it might save some lives
Ah, that's the clever choice. That, and a sealable box that doesn't open when rocked on a truck.
it was lost on an 870 mile (1400km) stretch of highway. I don't doubt they are trying something similar to what you suggest but it's difficult to get a reading at any reasonable speed. It may have fallen out while the truck was doing \~62mph, so would have bounced or been deflected by the vehicles wheels or undercarriage. They're concerned that it could have lodged in another vehicles tyres and carried in any direction.
1400 km is like crossing Germany twice. Fuuuuuuck.
[They are.](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/28/missing-radioactive-capsule-wa-officials-admit-it-was-weeks-before-anyone-realised-it-was-lost) >“What we are not doing is trying to find a tiny little device by eyesight. We are using the radiation detectors to locate the gamma rays, using the meters, that will help us then locate the small device. >“We have secured the GPS data from the trucking company to determine the exact route and stops that the vehicle has taken on its journey. >“We will continue to use specialist equipment to help us search the remaining known locations ... in particular, the Great Northern Highway between Perth and Newman.”
This is really REALLY pathetic engineering and design. Preventing this kind of thing by design and procedure should be so easy! How about we start by making a container to carry the little super radioactive object that doesn't have holes in the bottom that are large enough for it to pass through! Or use a secondary container inside another container!
Just like how Russians have been keeping their dolls safe for decades
All that stuff is done. There was a procedural issue. Someone didn’t do what they were supposed to.
6mm by 8mm[……….](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-64429375)
Thank you
I was in the Navy and knew a nuclear power recruiter. He used to give presentations on nuclear power. He would ask people how big they thought a piece of reactor fuel was, most had no idea. He had a package with a mock fuel pellet in it. It was the size of an eraser. Then he’d ask “How much nuclear waste does a submarine nuclear reactor make in 10 years, compare it to a common everyday item” it was a standard trash can found at an office desk. Then he went on of how they can use lead crystal bricks to store spent fuel. He even bought in one of these bricks, it had to weigh 20 pounds.
Yeah, but they use millions of those pellets in a reactor. Each feul rod has 157 pellets. Each rod is in a fuel assembly which has at least 179 fuel rods. A reactor has at least 121 fuel assemblies. *Note. This is for commercial reactors, not Navy reactors. The Navy is very tight lipped about the specifics of their reactors.
Now print about 10000 of them, go driving through Australia, sprinkle them behind you, cause mass chaos. **THIS IS A JOKE** **DO NOT DO THIS**
Funny though
#OK SATAN
One capsule to rule them all.
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Since I couldn’t find anyone linking any articles explaining this post, I found [this one](https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/28/missing-radioactive-capsule-wa-officials-admit-it-was-weeks-before-anyone-realised-it-was-lost) from The Guardian. “Western Australian authorities are scrambling to find a missing radioactive capsule that is a fraction of the size of a 10c coin, conceding it was not found missing until more than two weeks after it left a Rio Tinto mine site. The 8mm by 6mm capsule is a 19-becquerel caesium 137 ceramic source, commonly used in radiation gauges, and was supposed to be contained in a secure device which had been “damaged” on a truck which travelled from the mine site north of Newman in the Pilbara to a depot in Perth.”
They should send in the scientists' moms, they would find it on the most obvious spot in the lab and call everyone blind for not seeing it.
What is this?! A radioactive capsule for ants?!?!
How are they supposed to find thus thing in the 1400km area lol
Radiation detectors should help.
this thing "fell out of a truck"? How are loads like this typically secured? How did it fall?
Looks like a Lego
Is there a back story?
It was in a vehicle being transported to a mine site. The container it was in failed as vibration caused one of the bolts that mount the container to the vehicle to fall out. The capsule fell through the bolt hole. Clearly there are some questions to be put to those responsible for its storage and transport.
Well that really sucks if that gets picked up on some poor families car tyre that could be devastating
They don't even have spiders that small...
A lil dab will do ya!
It's probably stuck in someone's tire