Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1

by there • 15 years ago

419 119 15 years ago

Thank you for posting the "entire article as one page". It's appreciated.

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

While reading this I was thinking it would be interesting to see an infographic which showed the relative size/mass you would need of various isotopes to detect, say, 500 msv/hr in open air at a fixed distance. Since most people never see radioactive substances, it could be interesting to compare them visually.

bh42222• 15 years ago

If you enjoy reading long prose articles, with plenty of human content, do not let the following tl;dr: spoil this article for you:

tl;dr:

A cylinder of cobalt, probably used in a medical instrument. Things like that are understandably very expensive to properly and legally dispose of. Somehow it ended up in a heap of scrap copper.

js2• 15 years ago

Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

markbao2• 15 years ago

> very expensive to properly and legally dispose of

How expensive? From the article: $700,000 expensive. For a "pencil-like cylinder 9 inches long and a third of an inch in diameter." Wow.

EDIT: ah, I was mistaken. See child comment. My error.

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

The $700k was for the city and port to dispose of the contaminated container since no one was going to do it for them. The cost of a medical facility properly disposing of the original cobalt has to be a fraction of that (but, to the point, not free).

w1ntermute2• 15 years ago

> If you enjoy reading long prose articles

Well-written, long form articles are increasingly difficult to find in this day & age of Twitter-sized sound bites, even off the internet. It's nice to see that a publication billed as a sci/tech magazine is taking the time and effort to write them.

jseliger• 15 years ago

Not really: they're just as easy to find as ever if you subscribe to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Both are, as far as I know, on more-or-less the same publication schedule they've always used, since the 1920s and 1850s, respectively. If you like long-form stuff, there's also the NYRB, Harper's, and a bunch more in that general class; I just happen to like the first two the best.

"Give Me Something to Read" is a pretty good online aggregator: http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ .

ashbrahma• 15 years ago

Also, try http://www.longform.org - Good collection of long form articles.

carbon8• 15 years ago

Also http://byliner.com/, focused on narrative long form non-fiction.

ascuttlefish2• 15 years ago

Also http://thebrowser.com/

ticks2• 15 years ago

It was far too verbose and meandering. I like long articles provided there's plenty "meat" to justify the whole. This one reads like it was padded with descriptions of how well the container was passed from port-to-port and so on.

It also starts with an intriguing hook but ends like a damp squid. I looked at the bottom thinking "oh great I have another three more pages to endure before finding out why the rod was there" and then realised that was it.

brazzy3• 15 years ago

Except this one was anything but well-written.

Apparently the guy who wrote it wants to be the next James Joyce but couldn't get his crap published, so now he has to work as a journalist to make a living and experiments with nonlinear reporting...

nobody3110• 15 years ago

The best long (56page) wired article is the famous Neal Stephenson piece on fibre optic cables http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

lgv2• 15 years ago

I like http://longreads.com/ for my long articles. Right now, my favorite setup for reading long articles from the web is:

Nook Color + CM7.1 + InstaFetch Pro + Instapaper + Longreads.

The Longreads website integrates with instapaper, and the instafetch client will cache articles to the nook, so I don't have to be online to read. I haven't gotten around to playing with it, but I'm sure iPad + instapaper client would work well

VladRussian3• 15 years ago

originating in Saudi Arabia, the whole story sounds like a test run, done either by Al Qaeda or US DHS/CIA/etc.... (with neither coming out when the tab grew to $700K :)

rbanffy8• 15 years ago

If they really wanted to test something, they would use a much less powerful source hidden in a container that wouldn't normally be scanned.

rbanffy8• 15 years ago

I imagine whoever dismantled the medical device must have a very peculiar medical record.

pdenya• 15 years ago

Thanks for this. I appreciate both the warning and the tl;dr. It's interesting and well written but I don't have the time right now to make my way through it.

rsanchez13• 15 years ago

Oh yes, I did enjoy reading that article. It was refreshing in today's world of 24-hour bite-sized news. All that trouble from such a little piece of radioactive cobalt. Imagine if some mad man decides to attach something like that to a cab in NYC. Just as stated in the article, it would cause a huge panic.

marshray2• 15 years ago

Radioactive stuff gets flagged all the time in major ports. As the article mentioned, kitty litter, and other natural things can set off the detectors.

As a general rule, a incident you read about in Wired is probably not the first or last of its kind. It seems pretty plausible that old medical stuff gets thrown in with scrap metal all the time.

I wonder if "new money" places like the petrodollar kingdoms and emirates might have the money to purchase and operate advanced medical machines but not necessarily the regulatory maturity to track the whole lifecycle through decommission and safe disposal.

gravitronic2• 15 years ago

100 million dollars in US $100 bills have been shot with 9 slugs of cesium?

bitmage• 15 years ago

Thinking the same thing, right out of Spook Country.

tallanvor• 15 years ago

Read that a year or two ago, but I only started Reading Pattern Recognition a week ago (not sure how I ended up reading them out of order).

mindcrime• 15 years ago

Don't feel bad, I did as well. Or maybe "am as well" would be more apt, since I read Spook Country, then Zero History, and haven't started Pattern Recognition yet.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

what is this referencing?

helipad• 15 years ago

I love the bureaucracy. Not a plight against Italians, most would be the same, but "Woah, this is more radioactive than Fukushima and none of us will go within 250 yards of it!" - 12 months, $700,000 later, government and port authority decide it's probably worth opening up. Good job, everyone!

nobody3110• 15 years ago

Very sound engineering attitude.

This container is emitting X, as long as we put Y tons of shielding around it and stay Z meters away it's safe.

Or we could just immediately rip it open and see what happens.

rbanffy8• 15 years ago

> this is more radioactive than Fukushima

... and is contained in a steel box. This gave them time to decide what would be the proper course of action.

nobody3110• 15 years ago

And there is more than one of these in every hospital radiotherapy machine, in every machine for sterilizing surgical instruments or medical supplies and even in machines for preserving seeds.

Amazing this sort of thing doesn't happen more often

dbbo• 15 years ago

My first thought was of the prologue level of Modern Warfare 1.

nicwest• 15 years ago

I was sad to see that 307703 was ripped to pieces and scrapped, it's like the companion cube all over again :(

CurtHagenlocher• 15 years ago

How can the number "307703" uniquely identify a container owned by a company that "owns more than 2.4 million boxes just like it"? (SSCC-18 codes are all-numeric.)

ejames• 15 years ago

By having a 7-digit serial and omitting leading zeroes, perhaps?

nobody3110• 15 years ago

No - spec calls for 6 digits.

cshesse• 15 years ago

Well as long as they add more digits for longer numbers, I foresee no problems.

nobody3110• 15 years ago

200 million container movements across 100 countries - all computerized, all labelled with a fixed format ID.

And you don't see the problem with expanding a serial number field in the middle of the code?

nobody3110• 15 years ago

You only strictly need to use code for transhipping containers on another carrier - if you own the container and the ship you don't need to label it - although it causes no end of problems if you don't!

What tends to happen is that an 'owner' will have multiple owner codes for different subsidiaries or companies they have taken over/merged.

The containers also have a lifetime of 10-20years so presumably you can reuse numbers of containers that have been lost or scrapped.

rbanffy8• 15 years ago

They can have more than one company ID

Retric3• 15 years ago

They might own 2.4 million boxes but they don't own 2.4 million "22G1" aka unventilated, 20-foot-long dry shipping container boxes.

Worst case they just add another company code to handel the next million unventilated, 20-foot-long dry shipping container boxes.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

The '22G1' isn't part of the ISO 6346 code that is used to identify containers

defectivemonk• 15 years ago

There's a four digit alpha prefix. For this container it's TGHU.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

Like with barcodes, they just allocate more top-level identifiers as part of the company G1 code. For eg. Textainer are also CLHU, AMFU, GAEU, WCIU, XINU, AMZU, GATU, etc. amongst many others.

That is why they also color-code the containers and put their logos on them.

The code is ISO 6346[1] and was defined a long, long time ago and didn't scale very well (or you could say that is scaled perfectly well - nobody imagined that 5-6 companies would control most of shipping). The container ID part, ie. the '22G1', that the article mentions actually isn't part of the ISO code and is usually printed below the ISO code. So the container needs to be identified between the top-level company ID and the 6-digit container ID, hence lots of top-level ID's for the big companies.

The whole topic of containerization and how the world came to agree on standards is interesting and has a parallel in web standards[3]. You can ship a container from Canada to Niger and know that when it gets off a ship they will have a crane to pick it up, a barcode to scan and lookup its contents, the right power plugs to power it if it is refrigerated, a way to identify the destination, owner, etc. Fascinating stuff.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346

[2] http://www.containerking.co.uk/buy-cabins/images/Shipping%20... <- see the '22G1' is printed below the ID

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

Why don't they just attach a radiation detector to each crane or something?

nobody3110• 15 years ago

Because if it's sensitive enough to detect a bomb it will be set off by marble, bananas or a dozen other things.

So the port only checks containers likely to have radioactive contamination, like scrap metal, which they did and they found this - system worked precisely as it should.

You could have monitors on the cranes to detect very high levels of radiation, so high you don't even want to check it manual - as in this case, But these happen so rarely it's not worth it. And with 250 Million container movements a year what sort of error rate would you need to achieve?

maaku3• 15 years ago

And, as is mentioned in the article, pretty pointless. A bomb can be shielded to the point of giving off less radiation than normal cargo.

That said, the eventually used a much more precise germanium-based detector that was able to identify the radiation by source. Such a detector could distinguish the decay of shielded U-235 from a shipment of bananas. I wonder how much those detectors cost...

tomeast• 15 years ago

Someone needs to make a for-pay service that lets me submit quality long form articles like this and get back a (quality) audio file that I can listen to on my commute home.

rsanchez13• 15 years ago

With celebrity narrators! I can't decide if I would want Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, or that guy from the Mass Effect codex.

tsotha2• 15 years ago

Shatner.

thebigshane2• 15 years ago

They never mention the intended destination. I am sure the intended recipient was investigated and all but it's a curious detail to omit in an otherwise, very thorough article.

castewart• 15 years ago

It says it was headed to a scrap yard in Italy.

maaku3• 15 years ago

Yeah they did--a scrap recycler in Italy.

thebigshane2• 15 years ago

As maaku and castewart point out: I just missed it.

   307703’s load was bound for a foundry called Sigimet
   in the town of Pozzolo Formigaro, 40 miles north of Genoa.

I think I was thrown off with all of the talk about US policy, DHS, 9/11:

   So after 10 years and more than $1 billion spent on 
   scanners, radiation detectors, and beefed-up intelligence, 
   most US ports are still scanning containers onshore, after unloading.

I still don't get the connection here. It seems they are implying we need tighter security to avoid this happening in this US. Instead, I inferred that this container was heading here. Oops.

mikeash• 15 years ago

I think the connection is that one reason to scan containers for radiation is to prevent a nuclear bomb from being smuggled in. Detecting a nuclear bomb after it's already on the loading dock is too late. I assume they mentioned the US simply because Wired is US-centric.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

I know this article is long, but Wired writes such interesting and well-researched pieces. This story reads like an awesome thriller novel.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Really? I found the 20 or so times of "but that day wasn't an ordinary day for Montagna" phrases quite tiring, and the off-takes into background information too frequent, long and sometimes too unrelated. Sometimes less is more.

brazzy3• 15 years ago

Dunno, reads like someone desparately wanted to write a 4 page article but had only 1 page worth of story.

leanucci• 15 years ago

TL;DR

jakeonthemove• 15 years ago

How can someone just dump a highly radioactive (at short distances) source in a scrap yard? Gee, some people... I bet the guy who did it is dead now. This reminds me of this list: http://listverse.com/2011/08/07/10-more-cases-of-deadly-radi... and how most people should never be trusted with something that can affect thousands of other people...

ceejayoz2• 15 years ago

> How can someone just dump a highly radioactive (at short distances) source in a scrap yard?

"I could pay a few thousand dollars to properly dispose of this, or I could throw it over the fence of the local junkyard."

catch23• 15 years ago

although usually those who own the equipment containing the radioactive material usually have a financial incentive to dispose it properly. The doctors owning the medical device in the Goiania incident were essentially fined to bankruptcy for their mistake.

marshray2• 15 years ago

Or I can pick up the phone and have the yard pay me and send over guys who can't read long words like "radioactive" to pick it up.

jerrya• 15 years ago

Reminds me of a Daily Mail reports from February that an assistant port director in San Diego made a statement interpreted to mean that dirty bombs have been found shipped to, and within, the United States.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356645/A-weapon-mas...

clintboxe2• 15 years ago

I'm a BI Developer for a big logistics company and I immediately hit up our data warehouse to see if we had ever moved this container. Alas, we hadn't. Only it's near relatives. :)

tzs• 15 years ago

Assuming your username reflects your real name, did you take the job to fit in with your last name? If not, do people ever joke about the coincidence?

sbov• 15 years ago

Off topic but related anecdotes: - when my dad broke his hand his doctor was "dr. feely" - my girlfriend's gynecologist is "dr. beaver"

clintboxe2• 15 years ago

Not my last name. Boxe comes from Chute Boxe, a Brazilian mixed martial arts team.

charliesome• 15 years ago

I particularly enjoyed this part:

    bearing logos like Yang Ming, Hamburg S\0xFCd, ...

nobody3110• 15 years ago

Don't you just want to see this painted on a ship due to a small email screw-up

runningdogx• 15 years ago

The capsule could have been from some industrial entity that should have protected the capsule until it was handed off to a recycler (one who knew what they were getting), but didn't (maybe to cut disposal costs, or by accident/laziness). Someone could then have sold the capsule to a Saudi Arabian scrapyard, and they packed it into a container to be melted down in Italy.

Another historical radiation incident caused by failure to protect a radiation source from scrap thieves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident

If those thieves in the Goiania incident had just sold the the Cs source to a scrapyard immediately without breaking it open first, the two incidents might have been similar.

aristus2• 15 years ago

There was another incident 25-odd years ago near where I grew up on the US/Mexico border. Radioactive steel (with cesium or cobalt, from medical equipment, IIRC) was sold for scrap and turned into various things like restaurant tables. It was only discovered when a geiger counter was turned on by a bored geologist waiting for food.

abbasmehdi• 15 years ago

Wow, anything written on the subject?

nrser• 15 years ago

best thing about that incident: it all goes terribly wrong when the security guard skips work to watch Herbie Goes Bananas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiania_accident#Theft_of_the_s...

tectonic• 15 years ago

"It was hardly the first fishy shipment to pass through Gioia Tauro. Famously, just six weeks after 9/11, workers there heard noises coming from inside a container being transshipped to Nova Scotia via Rotterdam. Inside, police found an Egyptian-born Canadian carrying a Canadian passport, a satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, cameras, maps, and security passes to airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. The container’s interior was outfitted with a bed, a water supply, a heater, and a toilet. Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again."

rsanchez13• 15 years ago

A man like that shouldn't have just been let go without finding out exactly what he was doing.

brazzy3• 15 years ago

Really? Why do you think so?

Anti-Ratfish2• 15 years ago

Yeah. They should have extrodina rily rendered him and tortured the hell out of him. If they can do that to random innocents I'm sure someone as suspicious as this could even be interesting o interview

dspeyer• 15 years ago

Or injected with a very hard to find radio tracking tag, or audio bug if that's possible, and then led to think he escaped on his own.

Which might be what happened. We'll never know.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

The government doesn't have a right to know what everybody is doing all the time. He faces some minor charges and was released.

mmaunder• 15 years ago

4476 words. IMO this is badly written. The article stalls at "That mix of ubiquity and interchangeability makes the shipping container one of the most radical developments in global commerce since World War II. The first dedicated container ship was built in 1956, and virtually overnight the new logistical approach transformed the cargo business..."

I'd guess an intern took over at that point, fired up wikipedia and started filling in the other 4000 words.

westicle• 15 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I got a similar impression - lots of words, little pay-off.

jablan• 15 years ago

Not only that (it would be OK if it was the only problem): the article is in a form of a thriller-movie rather than a scientific (or popular science) article - too many interspersed digressions, you have to read it until the very end to get the basic facts (contrary to the "inverted pyramid" principle). I would expect such an article to be broken down, with trivia such as details about the container markings extracted to text boxes.

bandushrew• 15 years ago

I dont agree, I think that the discussion of the shipping container and the security issues it has created provided some very interesting (to me) context to the story. I particularly enjoyed the quick discussion of the round trip the DHS took on achieving 100% scanning of container ships - from there to 'oh, hey, we'll make sure they all get scanned before they leave the remote port, thats exactly the same thing right?'

yycom• 15 years ago

It seems to me stupendously incompetent to scan for radiation without a plan.

ars• 15 years ago

It's even more incompetent to not scan at all.

Better to do some than none.

c4urself• 15 years ago

This struck me as security which makes you feel safe aot security that makes you safe.

“The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems: They won’t find a nuclear bomb, they won’t find highly enriched uranium, and they won’t find a shielded dirty bomb,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and president of the Center for National Policy. “Other than that, they’re great pieces of equipment.”

FuzzyDunlop• 15 years ago

In comparison to their long form story on the Stuxnet virus, which was really boosted by the personal element, this one reads mostly as a tease with no satisfying pay-off.

As a story trying to build a narrative it frequently concerns itself too much with the technical detail, or 'setting the scene', with little to no consideration for closing the personal elements it opens up throughout. It's littered with incidental detail but not a great deal of substance.

For example: what happened to Montagna? He's the first person to be mentioned, is described as doing something pretty dangerous, and is forgotten about.

It then ends on such a note as to trivialise the entire article. All of this is only a problem because the article was written in such a way to make it one.

thewisedude• 15 years ago

I am sure this was an interesting article. But I did NOT read the whole article. Let me reason that in a fair way. The internet has a plethora of interesting information. the style used here makes me spend 20 minutes on this article without knowing if what I find in the end would be worth my time. I rather like a style where you get to the outcome soon( say in the first paragraph), and then get into more detail for those people who think that this article is relevant or interesting.

I remember reading an article on HN where there was a recommendation for a style of prose that might be useful in today's lifestyle. The author recommended summarizing everything in the first paragraph, then having having a more detailed middle section ( few paragraphs), and then having even more detailed paragraphs in the end. Depending on the interest level of the reader, if he stopped at the end of any paragraph, he would have still gotten the gist, only the finer details would be missing!

mariuolo• 15 years ago

I find a bit disturbing that the Italian press never mentioned the story. Anyway the 'ndrangheta explanation (cheap disposal of hospital waste) more credible than the international plot.

Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation?

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