My apologies if there’s a thread on this already. I looked but didn’t find one.
I’ve been hearing about this recently on the news and talk shows.
1.) There are lots of jokes, but they’re way too obvious, starting with “it fell off the truck.” Anyone from New Jersey knows about things that “fell off the truck”
2.) How the Hell did this happen? You’d think a Cs-137 source, which emits dangerous amounts of radiation, would not only be packed in a heavy lead container, but would be in a series of packages, like a radioactive matryushka doll.
3.) The finders said it was “like finding a needle in a haystack”. But they found it using a radiation detector, so it was like finding a brightly glowing needle in a dark haystack. Incidentally, when I was a kid, you used to be able to write to laboratories and get a radioactive pin. I had a handout that told you how to build your own Cloud Chamber using a block of dry ice, a towel, and a jar. If you got the radioactive pin you could watch particle tracks form.
Undoubtedly. Those radioactive pins (actually, only the head was radioactive) wre alpha emitters. Cs137 is a gamma emitter. The Goiânia accident of 1987 was a terrible tragedy in which a junked Cs137 source was scavenged, and resulted in four deaths and a huge number of irradiations. Sadly, there have been several similar incidents involving highly radioactive sources. I’m glad they found this one but even more incensed that it was ever lost.
There was a mention of this in the Omnibus Stupid MFers in the news thread in the pit. Not sure exactly why it was mentioned there, but that’s the dope for you.
I will predict that future shipments of these devices will require monitoring by onboard radiation detectors to positively confirm the material is still where it should be. I’m a bit surprised that wasn’t already being done, it’s seems like an obvious thing to do.
Uses Peltier coolers (solid-state cooling device) instead of dry ice, so no trip to the grocery store needed.
The dense, radial tracks are alpha particles from the two elements in there extracted from smoke detectors. The occasional curved/zig-zag oddball track is from a cosmic ray.
The little elements contain Americium-241, which shoot off alpha particles (ionized helium atoms). They’re pretty heavy as radiation goes, and so they go in straight lines before stopping.
The cloud chamber contains supercooled alcohol vapor (methanol, though it doesn’t matter much what kind). That is, it’s cool below the point where it wants to condense into a droplet, but it can’t because there’s nothing to condense onto (it could if there were a lot of dust in the air).
The particle can induce the condensation, though, basically by bumping into all those vapor particles in the way. So what you’re seeing are little droplets of alcohol that condensed from the surrounding vapor–a cloud, in fact. And in the shape of the path that the radiation particle took, which might take weird turns, or travel on a curve if there’s a magnet nearby.
A typical cloud chamber uses dry ice to get to the requisite temperature. My unit uses a stack of semiconductor coolers to get to the right temperature (it works best below -40 C). Inside the box is a computer power supply and a water cooler to keep the hot side of the Peltier coolers down. Like all cooling devices, they are a kind of heat pump that transfers heat from one side to the other–so if there’s a cold side, there must also be a hot side. Gotta keep the hot side from getting too hot, else it’ll stop working or break.
Nothing like that is done in the common daily shipment of radioactive materials all over the world. We routinely carry boxes of mildly radioactive stuff on passenger airliners.
As I understand it, this wasn’t mildly radioactive, hence the major concern when it went missing. Also, such a monitoring system wouldn’t be a huge burden, I think something like a detector, a Bluetooth radio, a GPS, a data recording system, and perhaps some sort of communication ability like texts or phone calls would work. Everything but the detector is something everyone carries around everyday. It can be an industry specific Tile tracker or Airtag.
Agree completely the missing capsule was strongly radioactive and promptly dangerous. How it got out of whatever shielded packaging it was supposed to be inside of will be an interesting story in itself. If that’s ever revealed to the public.
I guess my bottom line is that when existing procedures are not followed with due care in one instance, the best solution is not to invent another set of suspenders to add to the 4 belts already in place. The solution is to identify why the existing procedures were not followed correctly in this instance and fix that.
The shortcomings are usually either individual, as in a crappy don’t-care worker, or they’re organizational, as in crappy don’t-care management. Both of those things can be remedied much more quickly and with less disruption to the industry than inventing a widespread mandate for new equipment and procedures.
To be sure, if a trend develops that these things are going missing at an excessive rate, then that is evidence the existing procedures are fundamentally inadequate versus the people & equipment out there in service. Then it is time to rework the procedures and equipment, add more oversight, etc.
But let’s tackle the low-hanging fruit first. After of course spending the effort to fully understand what really happened, and more importantly, why.
Right now everyone, including me, is just guessing.
When I first heard the story, I assumed that it would both be easier and harder to find. I figured it was in either a case or a piece of equipment that had fallen off the truck. Which would mean that it would be easier to see, but harder to detect since it should be shielded.
How an individual capsule found itself naked in a truck in the first place is what I’d want to focus on. I can’t see any reason that should ever happen in the first place.
AGreed. The whole process from end to end needs to be audited. To see both what the correct procedures were, and what was done rightly and, more importantly, wrongly versus those procedures.
From what we can see so far this event has a Keystone Kops or illiterate third world sort of character to it. Which was corrected for by the aggressive high-quality response.
A cescium-137 capsule like that is not “mildly” radioactive. It puts out a substantial amount of gamma rays which are hard to block, and in sufficient quantities that merely picking up the capsule with your bare hands can cause tissue damage and burns.
This is the result of a gentleman in Brazil handling a small quantity of cesium-137 found in a junkyard, after the injuries have healed up as much as they ever will:
Cesium is much more dangerous than, say, the americium found in smoke detectors, which emit alpha radiation that is much easier to block. In fact, the outer layer of your skin does a good job of protecting your insides from it. (Just don’t eat, drink, or inhale the dust, once it gets inside you you’re in trouble.)
So, sure, there are a lot of mildly radioactive devices out there, This one was not in that category.
To be fair, in that case, they had broken the capsule open, and were playing with the radioactive contents.
Inside the capsule it’s not nearly as dangerous. Still not great to handle without proper protection, but it’s not going to cause much damage with casual handling.
Right, which is what happened with the “Radioactive Boy Scout.” He removed the Americium from a bunch of smoke detectors, and was not careful with it.
It’s still not what actually killed him, though. Just gave him sores and lesions.
He did much more than that. He sought out old clocks with radium dials. He found a bottle of radium paint inside one of them. Radium is much more dangerous than Americium – it’s a gamma emitter. It’s probably why Marie Curie died, as well as all those “radium girls” who painted the glowing clock arms.
I had a nuclear engineering class in college, and at one point we reviewed a collection of radiation accidents. One involved a janitor who picked up an errant pellet of metal on the floor, not knowing that it was a radioactive source for a pipeline inspection gauge or something. He stashed it in the back pocket of his pants, and by the time he removed it, it had caused so much tissue damage that doctors had to excise most of the buttock on which that pocket was located.
Granted. The Australian thing was a prompt active hazard to nearby people. Unlike the many boxes of radiopharmaceuticals we transport every day.
My point was that we can manage to transport thousands of much less dangerous things with correct protocols & paperwork. I have to believe that in a fully advanced country such as Australia the processes for transporting more hazardous stuff are even more rigorous and thorough.
Despite the fact that something went badly wrong with how this shipment was done, inventing further procedures and installing “Did it get unexpectedly lost?” monitoring equipment is probably not the best way to ensure that what did happen doesn’t happen again.
The monitoring equipment would be simple and especially useful for land transport. Simply logging the time and GPS coordinates when a detector records a change in radiation levels isn’t rocket science. Beats the hell out of searching 800 miles of roadway.
