Western Australia authorities announce missing radioactive capsule found - ABC Australia

[TexasTowelie]

A tiny but potentially deadly radioactive capsule has been found in WA’s outback, after it sparked a frantic search and unprecedented public health warning spanning hundreds of kilometres.

[royable]

1. Easy peasy. Just drive around until you find a glowing hole in the ground by the side of the road.

All kidding aside, I think of the gamma radiation kill zone in the forest in Brookhaven National Labs on Long Island

https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3732/ajb.0800418

although that outback in Australia is probably pretty devoid of trees as it is.

[NNadir]

3. Kill zone?

Brookhaven National Lab has operated since the 1950's, going on nearly 3/4 of a century. I grew up on Long Island.

I'm sure, given the antinuke ignorance sold by Newsday over the years, if someone actually died from exposure to gamma rays on Long Island, there would have been a huge series of front page accounts of it, "investigative journalism" from people whose contempt for science is only exceeded by their lack of knowledge of it.

If I were concerned about "kill zones" I might consider a plant that has almost certainly caused deaths from something called "air pollution," something that kills seven million people per year, some of them in Australia, a coal burning hell hole.

Like this plant for instance, which bills itself as "renewable energy." Covanta Resource Recovery Plant.

When I was a kid, ash from a LILCO plant that operated on the same "resource," garbage - there's lots of that on Long Island - used to fall on cars and dissolve the paint.

[FailureToCommunicate]

2. Good news, BUT now Aussies have to worry of giant mutated lizards and spiders...as if there

aren't already so many deadly critters in that land down under.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. Finally got chance to see what this whole thing was about

and it's interesting what those are used for - basically (in simplistic terms) like using a "beam" to "shine through" a pipe and its contents to facilitate measuring the flow through those pipes in mines.

Based on however they calibrate these, values for and a change in the intensity detected on the opposite side from where the little pellet emitter is located, can be plotted and used to correspond to a flow rate. Sortof reminds me of how pulse oximeters probably work.