Which all leads to the question, why was it not in its proper container?

Being so small you would not carry anything that size, radioactive or not, without something to put it in!

A good catch, finding that again. A danger with these radiation sources is that they tend to be shiny and people have been known to take them home & put them next to their bed, if they discover one.

One place that I worked had some pictures on the wall of someone who had found one of these and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt to take home. The subsequent radiation burns were quite severe.

IF as dangerous as stated then finding it was unlikely to be hard – just time consuming due to the area to be searched. I was involved in a similar incident in the Indian ocean in the 80s. Back ground radiation would be enough to frighten most people if they were aware of it ! Noel.

It was a 0.5 Curie (16 Gigabecquerel) gamma emitter so not too hard to find with the right kit. I have a gamma spectrometer with a 2 liter Sodium iodide (NaITl) detector which would do the job if carried on a car driving at around 30-40 MPH. That detector was surplus from the 2012 London Olympics where it was part of a portal detector.

The source that was lost was not the most hazardous type. Those are the ones used for industrial radiography (Xrays) and older medical radiotherapy devices. The lost source appears to have been part of a level or density gauge. Basically it is in a lead lined stell housing and project a beam of gamma rays across a container to a detector on the other side The signal strength indicates the density of the material between the source and detector.
The sources have shutters to turn off hte beam and these often get stuck of the housing get loose due to vibration. It seems likely that the cover(s) that allow replacement of the source came loose and the source fell out. The person who packaged it for shipping is likely at fault.

There were two worst case outcomes for this. First was someone picked it up and put it in their pocket causing radiation injury. Second, more likely and more costly is the capsule was breached by being run over and the contents (probably a ceramic compound) spread allong the road and on vehicles. This woul require extensive and expensive de-contamination. I note that none of the new releases mentioned the second case.

Robert G8RPI

The country it was lost in looked much the same as this. Not much out there. They drove along the road at 35mph with a detector and found it about 40 miles from the starting point.

I once lost a wheel trim on a similar car drive from Adelaide on the south coast to Alice Springs in the dead centre, about 1,000 miles. Kept an eye out for it on the way home three weeks later, and sure enough there it was in the scrub just off the side of the road. Stopped and put it back on, all good! There's nobody out there to pick stuff up.

The mining guys were very lucky in this instance that it did not fall off in town etc. But it turns out the fine for improperly storing or disposing of radioactive material is a whole $1,000 so no wonder they get careless. Of course the gumment is jumping up to "get tough" on it now.

It's so flat and empty out there the word scenic takes on a definition of its own: (That's the lookout, that gravel patch on the other side of the road!)

Edited By Hopper on 01/02/2023 23:11:32

Edited By Hopper on 01/02/2023 23:38:14

One can never be too careful with any radiation source. I found a Cyma WW2 military watch in a deceased watchmakers effects. This watch had Radium luminance and had been stopped for many years. What surprise me were the radiation "burns" clearly visible in the acrylic crystal where the hands had been "parked" for several years.

There has been various articles in horological magazines about the removal of radium from watches but no definitive procedure and particularly where it can bee safely disposed of.

Some horologists, believing the radium to be a "mild" source, have disposed of it in household waste assuming it would be quite safe in land fill. However doing this when increasing amounts of waste is going for incineration is very questionable if not illegal.

CS

They are now investigating how the radioactive capsule 6mm x 8mm fell out of the instrument and then fell out of the container it was in through a hole where a mounting bolt had fallen out due to vibration on the rough roads out bush. Talk about Murphy's Law, but also sounds like protocols may have not been followed. Link

Edited By Hopper on 02/02/2023 11:10:40

Robert

I'm sure there are numerous "Spitfire" and "Lancaster" aircraft instruments and particularly clocks sitting on collectors shelves. I'm not sure what level of radiation they emit and whether this would be harmful. One problem is knowing if an instrument/clock has radium or the later phosphorescent paint. Old radium watches may no longer emit light , not because the Radium is inactive but because the material used to convert the radium's radiation into light has been bombarded to death and usually goes black or dark brown.

CS

I'm not going to get into health effects vs dose. However there is one particular issue with Raduim luminised aircraft instruments. Radium decays to Radon, a gas, which accumulates in the case of the instrument. For pressure operated flight instruments like altimeters and airspeed indicators there is a strong temptation to blow or suck on the ports. This can result in a lungful of Radon. This in turn decays to Polonium which stays in the lungs and further decays into radioactive lead. Even worse you may inhale a particle of Radium.

Hard to identify a Radium luminised instrument for certain without a geiger counter or similar. However for most the paint is fairly thick and takes on a yellow/brown nicotine like colour that is a red flag.
It's not just instruments, some radio paenl markings used it and there are convoy and deck edge markers that contain large enough quanities theat even in WWII they had warnings on them.

Robert.

Edited By Robert Atkinson 2 on 02/02/2023 17:14:14

Apparently there were three buckets of uranium at the Grand Canyon visitor centre for years until somebody noticed

Links to https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/02/18/grand-canyon-tourists-exposed-radiation-safety-manager-says/2905358002/

Rob

That incident is very bizzare. Uranium is not much of a radiation hazard, it's toxcity as a heavy metal is as much of a concern. Some ore in a storeroom was unlikely to pose a hazard to visitors. The incident, which I'd heard of before, sounded like some kind of retaliation by an employee or at best over-zelous health and safety action.

In the UK there is no restriction on possession of up to 15kg of natural or depleted Uranium metal. I have a couple of samples including some rare pre-WWII Uranium oxide which is made from natural uranium. It's great for spectrographic calibration. All the modern Uranium chemicals are made from depleted Uranium which has different isotopic ratio and is less radioactive. As mentioned earlier it is actually used to shield the radiation from large gamma sources.
Also used for balance weights in aircraft flying controls. Early Boeing 747's had a load of it. There is still a weight somewhere in a field near Stansted from a 747 freighter that crshed in 1999 (Korean Air HL7451). See page 25/26 of this AAIB report. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422f0a5ed915d13710002fb/3-2003_HL-7451.pdf

Robert.