Slashdot Mirror
Radioactive Tool Goes Missing In Texas
Hugh Pickens writes "Oil-field service companies lower radioactive units into wells to let workers identify places to break apart rock for a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which frees oil and natural gas. Now Bloomberg reports that Halliburton workers have discovered that a lock on the container used to transport one such device has gone missing, along with the unit, after employees drove a truck from a site near Peco to a well south of Odessa and while the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time, it has been years since a device with americium-241/beryllium, the material in Halliburton's device, was misplaced in Texas. NRC spokeswoman Maureen Conley says the material would have to be in someone's physical possession for several hours for it to be considered harmful as teams comb the route between the two wellsites searching for the seven-inch tube, which is clearly marked with the words 'DANGER RADIOACTIVE' as well as a radiation warning symbol, "Halliburton strongly cautions members of the public that if they locate this source, they should not touch or handle it, stay a minimum of 25 feet away," and contact local law enforcement or the company's emergency hotline if they find the cylinder, says the company which is also offering a reward for information about the tube's whereabouts."
Looking forward to seeing what the experts think it's worth on next week's Pawn Stars.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Such tools are routinely use to estimate density in pretty much all oilfield well logging.
If the finder does not contact law enforcement, then I feel this issue is best left up to natural selection. First to nominate for a Darwin award.
sudo make me a sandwich
Great Scott!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Wait. Who's saying that "the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time" in such a nonchalant way, like they're trying to convince the readers that it's no big deal? It's a big deal. You don't just lose stuff like that.. they're transported in large, heavy packages!
while the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time
This is a better link
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/
Its pretty interesting reading. I think I heard about it from RISKS digest maybe a decade ago. About a half dozen reports are filed every day. At least one will be interesting, or at least WTF worthy. The story about the weld radiographer getting the source stuck while he was up a ladder so he took the source out and wore it like a necklace as he went down the ladder a couple days ago is WTF worthy.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This sounds funny in a John de Lancie "Q" voice.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If it wasn't the insidious company in question, I wouldn't be nearly as skeptical and suspicious that there's something deeper and far more nefarious going on here...
I don't think the description of purpose is actually accurate. Pretty sure they're talking about a Radioactive Densometer used to measure fluid density, which is used at the surface and attached to pipes pumping fluid, and isn't lowered into a well or whatever. It's basically a section of pipe with a very small radioactive source on one side, and a detector across from it. The measured decay rate tells you the fluid density accurately (the denser the fluid, the more radiation is blocked). They're actually fairly harmless in terms of radiation levels, although it's still important to recover lost ones.
The nuclear density gauges are relatively common in civil engineering.Yeah, they go missing from time to time.
How they usually go missing--some joker steals a worker's truck on a job site. The idiot doesn't realize he has taken a van with a restricted device in the back. Then a world of hurt descends on the person when they are finally caught.
The person who was in charge of the gauge finds they are in trouble for leaving the vehicle unsecured.
This reminds me of the Goiania accident, a horrifying incident where someone stole the radiation source to a radiotherapy machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
A choice bit:
It glows, let's use it for makeup.
--
BMO
This is the same stuff that is used in smoke detectors. IIRC, it only emits alpha radiation which can be blocked by a sheet of paper.
I don't know about beryllium though.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Stake out the metal recycling places nearby
"NRC spokeswoman Maureen Conley says the material would have to be in someone's physical possession for several hours for it to be considered harmful"
So there is no problem handling it for a few minutes until you bring it to the nearest Halliburton site. Then employees can take turns handling the material for less than an hour and no one will be harmed.
See, no reason for panic.. just RTFA.
none
From the picture I would say that if you get close enough to read the "Danger Radioactive" you've already got problems.
...Homer Simpson!
I actually want to mod myself down for that one.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Down the back of Homer Simpsons rad suit yet?
They intentionally "lost" that tool in order to make the front page of Slashdot. ;-)
Halliburton: Endangering American Lives, With Taxpayer Dollars!
God, if there were ever a corporation that needed to be dissolved in a vat of acid and the remains scattered to the far corners of the earth, Halliburton is it. They are the epitome of casual, incompetent, expensive evil.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Americium-241 decays mostly by alpha emission, and is near harmless as long as it is not ingested or inhaled. It's in smoke detectors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_americium#Americium-241
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium#Isotopes
I propose a new term for this category of nuclear incident: Lost American
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What with the events in the Middle East these days, it's getting too dangerous to steal radioactive material from the Libyans.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Am-241 is an alpha emitter. It barely penetrates a sheet of paper. And it's used in virtually every smoke detector out there.
Now a seven inch rod of the stuff - yeah I can see why they'd want that one back.
Obviously they hand it out to incompetent fuckwits like Halliburton.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I guess you realize that the only reason Halliburton does some of these jobs is because THEY ARE THE ONLY ONES LEFT that do it? Next time, step away from the kool-aid.
Go away and die, shill.
Indeed.
There is a slim chance that the device was left behind at the last well-head where it was used. That would explain both the radioactive source and the container padlock being missing. More distressing is the prospect that an outsider with ill intent wandered into the area of the well-head while the crew was on lunch break/siesta, broke into the container and stole it. That person should definitely be awarded a Darwin Award. That doesn't necessarily explain the missing padlock, as it is just something of little worth to carry off. But the most distressing prospect is that this was theft by an insider who knew the value of the device, and wished to conceal the fact that the padlock was not broken.
Regardless of whether the device was lost or stolen, the company that owned this radioactive source should be heavily fined, as well as suspended from any further ability to own/possess/use such devices. I would go so far as to propose criminal liability charges brought against this company. Err, wait. This was Halliburton. Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Would anyone care to bet against the prospect that the TSA will use this event to perform full body cavity searches everywhere they have now been deployed, far beyond the security lines at airports? I wouldn't.
The articles reference warnings to the public to "stay back" if you see it, but don’t seem to really describe what it looks like. It has been described as a rod, so it's a cylindrical shape, but what size? Would it be similar to a pencil, hot dog, can of soda, 5 gallon paint bucket, oil barrel, what? Is it in a container? If so, what size and color? Bigger than a bread box?, etc
Something consisting of Am and Be is going to be a neutron source, and be used to make the minerals exposed to it radioactive via neutron capture. Not long ago, nearly all neutron sources for this were "Active" in that they shot a beam of mixed DT against a target holding more D and T, on batteries. They're hot as hell, and like I said - make things around them radioactive. If you have this, and a gamma spectrometer down the same hole, by the resulting gamma spectrum, you can tell what's there. Am has only about a 6 mo half life, so if it's not found, it's getting weaker fast. I've made my ow such sources with the Am source from a staticmaster brush and some Be to convert the alpha hits to emitted neutrons. I use my source to test neutron detectors for my fusion device. I have to replace the Am fairly frequently to keep the source emitting enough neutrons for this - my homebrew source is very small and not a big risk to anybody - you can barely detect it against the neutrons made in cosmic ray showers. But I could be wrong too - there's not enough info to say.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
FYI: While the Americium-241 radioactive source is primarily an alpha emitter (with some considerably lesser amount of gamma particles), the device makes use of a beryllium window. Beryllium is a metal that readily emits a copious quantity of gamma radiation with exposure to any radiation, including alpha radiation.
While this is not on the scale of the Fukushima Dai-ichi by any stretch of the imagination, this is hardly an insignificant NRC nuclear event. OTOH, considering the government's penchant for trivializing the radioactive fallout from Fukushima by raising the permissible dosage levels of some radioactive isotope fallout by 1000x, the government will unlikely to even penalize the company involved (especially considering that company is Halliburton).
....Ready, set, lose your shit.
Aren't potentially dangerous tools supposed to be getting lost?
Poor old Uncle Choo-Choo. No love on /. for that radioactive tool.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Mathews and his crew track a stolen radioactive oil detector: http://www.hulu.com/watch/104147
Probably they didn't lose the tool itself, just the radioactive source. When I did geotech work, we kept the sources separate and in a lead pig in the back of the truck and only put them on the tool when we were about to do a run. I'll bet the tech got distracted (did things in a different order and missed a step, one of the well crew wanted to know what the results were, could've been many things) and failed to put the lock on the pig before pulling out. Without the lock shank in place the door can come open and the source can rattle it's way out. But even without losing the tool, the boss is going to rip the tech a new one because even though there's no real danger to the public (or at least the non-terminally-braindead members of the public) the boss now has to fill out far too much paperwork on the incident. Plus the tech may well lose his certificate over this, which may cost him his job (no safety cert means he can't use sources, and since it's his fault he lost his cert it's grounds to let him go for cause).
Be on the lookout for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu. Do not open the trunk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_(film)
"Did you look under the sofa cushions — in Hell?
clearly marked with the words 'DANGER RADIOACTIVE' as well as a radiation warning symbol,
So, everything's fine as long as Bart Simpson doesn't find it.
Did nobody notice that it was discovered missing on September 11th? Surely there is some crackpot reading this who should have come up with a terrorist or conspiracy theory to scare people with by now!
They fracked up!
That's mostly based on extrapolation of buying a needle source from somewhere like united nuclear. I suspect whoever carried out the poisoning had a more wholesale source for the material.
The radioactive tool's gone missing in Texas? Did they check his dad's compound in Kennebunkport?
...silver Delorean.
Finder of radioactive tool auditioning for role in a movie - Look out, Radioactive Man!
Director - Congratulations, you are our next Fallout Boy ... is what I'd be saying if you weren't lying on the floor vomiting blood from radiation poisoning.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)