WilderKWight: On Reddit someone 3D printed a replica of it to illustrate the size. It's tiny. It's a cylinder a wee bit smaller than a single piece of Cap'n Crunch cereal. And I mean the yellow-orange crunch bits, not crunchberries. It's small enough to get stuck in tire treads, or big boot treads. It's small enough for a songbird or mouse to eat it whole. You could have it stuck in your front tire tread, slowly irradiating you and giving you cancer, and you'd never know it.

A similar piece like this was lost in cement in Ukraine (during the SSR days) and built into a wall of an apartment building. It killed four people (leukemia) and made 17 others very ill before the source was finally tracked down after a decade.

This is VERY bad for Australia, and the company securing it needs to be sued out of existence. They just had these capsules hanging around loose in a safe, and they lost one because a securing bolt shook loose in the safe, and the capsule was small enough to fall through the hole. They should have been within a container inside that safe.

We shall be lucky if nobody dies on account of this accident.

optikeye: akallen404: optikeye: How radio active, are we talking Smoke Alarm or Mid 20th century glow wrist watch. Or a bag of used gloves from hospital cancer ward?

It's the kind of thing that, if you put it in your pocket and walked around with it, would give you a fatal radiation dose on about 12 hours (more or less; don't feel like doing math right now).

I'm fairly certain a smoke detector wouldn't give a fatal dose of radiation. if you held it for 12 hours.
Tho that would make a plot point for a "Murder She Wrote" episode.

Greymalkin: NkThrasher: Boomstickz: Since its a clean point source, if they are clever a nice filtered spectral scintillation counter (.6617kev) should be able to find it if they have a big enough crystal etc.

This feels like the kind of thing that's just limited by the number of "machines that will go bing if near this little plug of death metal" that can be transported in cars, and the speed those cars can travel at and still have a good chance of actually detecting it.

It feels like the kind of thing someone with knowledge of the detectors and this source should be able to math out the speed that a vehicle with a detector can travel and have some arbitrary level of confidence that they'll be able to measure it.

Then you have X amount of road, Y number of available vehicles, that can travel at speed Z, and you get an idea of how long it would take to find the thing if it's actually on the road still and not stuck in someone's tire or down a rain gutter or whatever.  Multiply X if the search radius means you need to be in different lanes to make sure you cover left and right side of the road, or whatever.

I'm sure someone actually involved with this is doing a similar process, and that they don't want those details public because it lets nerds argue with them about their approach.  Like, uh, can't imagine who might do things like that over coffee on a monday morning.  Nope.


Yeah all of this, even if it is still right next to the road that is 1,400kms of road to check.

And it being there would be luckier than winning the lotto twice.  Been missing for 2 weeks which means 2 weeks for it to be picked up in tires by someone not driving on only that road, blown off the road by a road-train going past at 110, some curious bird to have grabbed it and flown away, or plenty of other reasons it didn't just drop down flat to be recovered.

Also there was a little storm that just blew through today over a good chunk of where it might be which wouldn't help.

[Fark user image image 850x522]

I will be genuinely surprised if it is found anywhere near the road or anytime soon rather than in 2 years when someone bush bashing finds an unusual trail of dead animals.