The radioactive capsule lost in Australia has been found. “The emergency services have literally found the needle in the haystack,” said the authorities who have been engaged in a gigantic search in the desert for days.
The tiny but potentially lethal object had been lost while being transported by lorry along a 1,400 km route on a remote road in the west of the country.
The search for the radioactive capsule in Australia
For the accident, which occurred a few weeks ago, the mining giant Rio Tinto, which had contracted the transport of the material to a certified external company, has apologized and announced an internal investigation to shed light on the dynamics of the facts.
The capsule, which measures just 8 by 6 millimeters but contains enough cesium-137 to make a human very ill or even killed, is part of a mechanism used in mining to measure the density of iron ore.
According to the authorities, people must stay at least 5 meters from the capsule, which emits beta and gamma rays with a level of radiation equivalent to that affecting a person who undergoes 10 x-rays every hour.
The meter was originally picked up on Jan. 12 from the Gudai-Darri iron ore mine near Newman and delivered to the Perth suburb of Malaga on Jan. 16, Rio Tinto said. But the package wasn’t opened until January 25 when the tool was found “broken” with the radioactive capsule missing.
Today the news of the find: an almost impossible mission given the size of the object and the vastness of the area to be searched, an immense, desert and desolate territory, typical of the bush, the Australian outback.
Technicians located it using Geiger counters.
