Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsule Smaller Than a Penny

Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by defrost on Sunday January 29, 2023 @07:04PM (#34574163)

You'd pretty much start with a local radiometric survey company (there are a few in Perth) using a 50 litre doped sodium iodide cyrstal pack (a bit heavy for a drone) and scintillation counters in a crop duster flying at 40 m ground clearence dead centre down the road at 70 m/sec for the full 1,400 km road length.

Post process the 256 value gamma spectrum, correcting for cosmic, aircraft signature, remove the mean average W.Australia backround signature, run a full rolling NASVD to peak sharpen and look for 32 and 662 kev twin peaks.

Then you'd start with the local area ground search.

Given the lapsed time already there's a good chance the slug in question was either magpie'd on site or has been picked up in a tire and gone off route.

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by sockaddr on Sunday January 29, 2023 @11:52PM (#34575879)

I was going to say that too.

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by POPOSYS on Monday January 30, 2023 @03:22AM (#34577185)

What literature would you recommend to better understand these procedures?

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by defrost on Monday January 30, 2023 @03:47AM (#34577341)

If you're interested:

Guidelines for radioelement mapping using gamma ray spectrometry data International Atomic Energy Agency (2003)

https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1363_web.p...

Or go full Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy

https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...

and read the three publications linked at bottom and get the high res A0 wall map for the dorm room !

( A GUIDE TO THE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS FOR AIRBORNE GAMMA-RAY SURVEYS Grasty + Minty

https://d28rz98at9flks.cloudfront.net/14861/Rec1995_060.pdf

and the other two )

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by POPOSYS on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:34AM (#34578021)

THANKS!

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Re:Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsul... by defrost on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:50AM (#34578130)

No wucking furries !!

If you read all that and still feel game for more there's some mad bastard willing to tolerate PhD candidates that want to mix geology and big radiometric data, he even reckons (and I quote):

    The integration of these different lines of research has the potential to improve greatly our ability to extract geological information from radiometric datasets for exploration purposes.

See: A Radiometric Renaissance

https://www.uwa.edu.au/Projects/A-radiometric-Renaissance

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