Australia finds the tiny and dangerous radioactive capsule that fell from a truck

It took almost two weeks for them to realize that the truck that arrived in Perth on January 16 had lost a radioactive capsule smaller than a penny.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 February 2023 Wednesday 13:36
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Australia finds the tiny and dangerous radioactive capsule that fell from a truck

It took almost two weeks for them to realize that the truck that arrived in Perth on January 16 had lost a radioactive capsule smaller than a penny. In six days, the emergency services found this tiny piece in the ditch of the Great Northern Highway, in Western Australia.

The capsule, six millimeters in diameter and eight in height, was lost between days 11 and 16, when it was packed at Rio Tinto's Gudai-Darri mine in the Pilbara region. This Wednesday afternoon, the authorities announced that a team made up of members of the Fire and Emergency Services and the Australian Organization for Nuclear Science and Technology had found it around eleven in the morning, 74 km south of Newman. “They have found the needle in the haystack,” Western Australia Emergency Service Minister Stephen Dawson said, “I think Westaustralians can sleep easy tonight.” The capsule was found thanks to a vehicle equipped with radioactivity detectors that recognized the gamma rays after six days following the GPS route and the stops the driver made on a trip equivalent to going from Brussels to Barcelona.

An exclusion zone of 20 meters in diameter has been decreed, but it is "very difficult" for it to have had any kind of leak, as confirmed by Darren Klemm, commissioner of the Australian Emergency Service.

The piece was placed in a safe place and tomorrow it will be transferred to government agencies for inspection. Inside there is radioactive metal Cesium-137, a product widely used in the gas and mining sector to measure the density of materials. Its useful life is 30 years. It emits gamma radiation equivalent to 10 X-rays and the radioactive dose is estimated to be 1,665 millisieverts per hour, when the normal dose for an Australian is 1.5 per year.

According to the authorities, the carrier arrived in Perth from the mine on January 16, but it was not until January 25 that during an inspection they realized that the capsule was missing. “It's a challenge,” Country North Fire and Emergency Superintendent David Gill said. “There are 1,400 kilometers between the mine, north of Newman, and Perth,” he commented. The first indications suggest that a poorly adjusted screw could have fallen from the box and that the radioactive capsule could have been lost due to the swaying of the vehicle. Under current legislation, the fine for losing radioactive material is $1,000 (about 650 euros).

Mining giant Rio Tinto, owner of the Gudai-Darri mine, with 45,450 employees, has advanced that they are willing to pay the costs of around 100 members of the search services. Simon Trott, managing director of Rio Tinto's iron division, has apologized to the people of Western Australia for an incident that has made headlines in non-Australian media. On Twitter, the image of Homer Simpson with a plutonium bar or the scene from The Simpsons in which the green bar rides in a convertible does not help the campaign of Rio Tinto, a company of Spanish origin founded in 1873, to whitewash its image.

In July, the mining giant agreed with traditional Puutu people Kunti Kurrama and the Pinikura Aboriginal Corporation that it would pay the costs of a foundation after it blew up the Juukan Gorge caves in 2020, with remains of human habitation dating back more than 46,000 years. In February 2022, a company report revealed that racism, harassment or misogyny were common in the mines, where employees fly for a few days to do their shift. According to this report, an employee reported that when she started work, she was given a list of “certain leaders” with whom she would not agree to have an early or late night meeting. The results showed that 28.2% of the female employees had suffered sexual harassment at work.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers reported that 39.8% of men had experienced racism, while among women it was 31.8. "I hear discriminatory comments regularly:" Let the coons do the rain dance' ”, picks up the text.

The details of how the capsule was lost are a mystery. The investigation, which will take weeks, could open a new front for Rio Tinto, even if the fine is $1,000.