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A comment on Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsule Smaller Than a Penny. Parent comment

Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by genmon on Sunday January 29, 2023 @10:35AM (#34569006)
Because it’s enormously dangerous to stand a meter from, and people near it won’t even know (eg it could have been picked up in a tyre tread so someone is carrying it around), but radiation and therefore ability detect drops according to the inverse square law so it will be hard to find from much further away. And Australia is big.
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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by JoeAltmaier on Sunday January 29, 2023 @12:28PM (#34570362)
Again, hyperbole.

   "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour"
People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job. An x-ray is a fraction of a year's natural exposure from the sun. Airline pilots experience this radiation in a few months at work.

The numbers matter. This instance, the device hardly matters. Not as much as a national news report anyway. We'd be better off reading about pay disparity or access to health care.

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by dalmo3 on Sunday January 29, 2023 @02:23PM (#34571694)
> People routinely get exposed to that during their normal job.

What jobs you're referring to? Your examples cite years and months but the quoted sentence states "in an hour."

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by roywiggins on Sunday January 29, 2023 @02:57PM (#34572024)
It's all sort-of fine until someone brings it home and sticks it on a shelf and thereby kills their entire family. Walking around with this in your pocket will kill you eventually.

This sort of thing has happened before with loose radioactive sources.

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by testplzignore on Sunday January 29, 2023 @03:41PM (#34572504)
To back up your point: If "X-ray" is a chest x-ray, then per https://xkcd.com/radiation/ this would be equivalent to one-tenth of a head CT scan, which are routinely done without consideration to any increased risk of cancer.

If the goal is to minimize loss of life, I think there are far better things that time could be spent on than looking for this thing. People are bad at thinking about opportunity cost.

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by tialaramex on Sunday January 29, 2023 @06:24PM (#34573889)
You're bad at arithmetic, that's 100 boxes on the XKCD chart, so it's one-hundredth of a head CT scan, and the medics might not tell you they considered increased risk, but if they actually didn't consider it they're incompetent, that's a non-trivial effect.
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