At Sue Schmidt’s gas station and roadhouse off a remote highway in the Australian Outback, employees usually watch out for snakes when they are walking outside. But this week, they were looking for something else: A tiny capsule of radioactive material that sparked a search along a roughly 900-mile stretch of the road.
The capsule, used in mine equipment, went missing while in transit from a
PLC mine to Perth, Western Australia’s state capital. As the search dragged on over the past week, Ms. Schmidt and her employees grew wary of cleaning up the bottle caps and coins that they usually find outside the roadhouse, fearing that any shiny object could be the capsule that would hit them with a dangerous dose of radiation.
“We’re a little bit more careful about what we pick up,” Ms. Schmidt, who manages the BP-branded roadhouse in the small town of Wubin, said as the search continued. “You give it a good look before you go close to it.”
The gas station where Sue Schmidt works in the tiny Western Australia town of Wubin.
Photo:
Lisa Schmidt
Officials were preparing for the possibility of a long search, but there was a breakthrough after just seven days. On Wednesday morning, government teams using vehicle-mounted detectors got a hit while they were traveling on a stretch of road about 50 miles south of Newman, the closest large town to Rio Tinto’s mine. They then used portable detectors to locate the capsule, which was found lying in red desert dirt and surrounded by a few pebbles about 7 feet from the side of the road.
Authorities say they are now investigating how the capsule of radioactive material, transport for which is heavily regulated, went missing, and whether there were any issues in the packaging or trucking of the object. Professionals who work with these devices are puzzled how the capsule—just five-sixteenths of an inch long—could come loose and bounce out of a crate from the back of a truck.
A leading theory among authorities is that vibrations…
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