The search operation that led to the disappearance of a radioactive capsule in Australia

Sydney:

The task was daunting: sometime in January a tiny radioactive capsule was dropped off a truck in the vast outback of Western Australia. It was described by media and officials alike as finding a proverbial needle in a haystack, but experts involved in the hunt were upbeat about their prospects.

“A lot of people would have expected it to be an impossible task, but every single one of us, we had confidence in our abilities to find it,” Bronte Sial, an expert in radiological safety, told Reuters in an interview.

Sial, who works for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, was part of one of six teams scouring the 1,400 km (870 mi) road between Perth and the state’s far north for cesium-137 capsules – only 6 mm in diameter and 8 mm in length or about the size of a Tic-Tac sweet.

The cars traveled at a maximum speed of 70 km/h with the sensors hanging from the windows. Radiation detection equipment fitted inside the vehicles, including the Australian-designed CORIS360, scanned the environment. They said they were looking for the distinctive signature of cesium-137 against a background of radioactive chatter.

Western Australia is buzzing with low-level rays thanks to a $230 billion ($160 billion) mining industry. Nothing to worry about, Sial added with a laugh.

Sial and his collaborator, 90s rock band, Stone Temple Pilots, played softly in the background. She said that the electronic music would have made the instrument difficult to hear.

“It wasn’t too boring and no matter what, we love playing with our instruments, they’re wonderful. I can’t get over their ticking sounds,” she said.

The saga of the capsule – part of the gauge used at Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Dari iron ore mine – began on January 12 when it left the mine site. Its damage – caused by a gauge collapse on the way – was noticed only two weeks later in Perth, which triggered a major search involving 100 people from at least five government agencies.

A separate team found the capsule on Wednesday morning and it is now in storage at an undisclosed facility in Perth.

Each morning, teams were handed packed sandwiches and told by the Western Australia Department of Fire and Emergency Services where to look. Come evening, they’ll move into accommodation booked ahead of time.

The main danger, Sial said, was the passing of trucks, not radiation. Road trains – trucks pulling multiple trailers that can stretch the length of two basketball courts – barrel across Western Australia, a sparsely populated state seven times larger than Germany.

Fire trucks pulled cars and scientists out of traffic as they went out to investigate the road.

“You don’t want people roaming the road when there are big trucks around,” she says.

Social media users celebrated the unexpected find, with one Twitter user calling the finders: “Australia Hide and Go Seek Champions 2023”.

Sial said their success proved Australian nuclear scientists were capable of standing on their own.

“We’ve been practicing for this sort of thing. It’s fantastic that we can finally show that Australia is capable of more, although we don’t have that many reactors.”

Loss or theft of radioactive material occurs from time to time in Australia, which has 50,000 licensed radiation users.

The Australian Radiation Incident Register reported six incidents of material being found, lost or stolen in 2019. According to police reports, a radioactive gauge was stolen in the state of Queensland that year.

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