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.
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.
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.
Spiegel International I believe has the best coverage of European affairs and The Atlantic the best of US affairs. The New Yorker will, on occasion, have bar none the best investigative journalism around, but at the cost of the coverage being too spotty to use as a primary news source. Recently Spiegel International has mostly become that for me. (I live in Germany, and actually the fact that they only publish 3-4 articles per day in English I find quite nice since it tends to reduce the noise and just publish the most important stuff – usually in long-ish format.)
An interesting tidbit on Spiegel – despite being (in print format) a German language magazine, if I remember correctly, the only news magazines with larger circulation in the world are Time, Newsweek and The Economist and it reportedly has the largest fact-checking department in the world.
It's a weekly, and I find 2/4 issues will have nothing to read, 1/4 something decent, and 1/4 so outstanding I literally want to dance for happiness. The two I enjoyed most recently were:
1) An article on Fukushima about how the japanese government structured incentives for nuclear power safety and proliferation.
2) An article on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping whistleblower Thomas Drake (a spectacular example of terrible management's attempt to organize a software project)
Unfortunately, those articles aren't easy to search up because they're buried in my iPad somewhere. Here is a link to a wired story about #2, although it makes the story sound less interesting.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/new-yorker-on-thoma...
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.
This one reads like it was padded with descriptions of how well the container was passed from port-to-port and so on.
I actually found that part pretty interesting, but admittedly it depends on what you already know and what you were hoping to get out of this article. To me, the radiation-disposal incident served as a nice set-up to explain the interlocking networks of containerized shipping and security, which aren't normally on my radar (I know all that exists, I just know nothing about it). I'll admit that if you approach it as a pure whodunnit, it's got a ton of padding and could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
> 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.
I suppose they didn't want to hold off on publishing it for another several months until the investigators in Leipzig came to a conclusion as to its origin and reason for being in that container.
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...
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
Oh, thanks for that. Its not the length, its the writing. Stephenson can do reportage, Mr Curry is letting us see the joins a little I think.
Web application: if anyone is looking for a Web application idea, how about something like readability that can spit out web pages as PDF files formatted to A6 with no margin and a choice of font size? Ideal for book readers.
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).
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.
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 :)
my assessment has no implications, unfortunately. Movie reference is used only as a funny humorous illustration. My assessment is based on my knowledge and experience with real government screwedups even here in the US, like county office messing up real estate ownership info. Compare to that, planting the tracer into the container that will most probably be checked is hardly a screwedup.
If would find the implications of this being a test run disturbing. Luckily, we can dismiss it.
Unless, of course, we start considering what else came through that port while so much attention and resources were focused on one very radioactive container.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Surprisingly it's hard to track down. The Wiki article linked abode has one or two mentions of a "Mexico incident", but that's it. Here are some others:
"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."
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
I dunno what he's thinking, but I agree with him because of the airport security passes. They should have held him unless he had a damn good reason for security passes to three different airports.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
anyway, back to the original question, you can't have two containers with the same owner code, same container ID and made unique through the size and type codes
the problem is solved because the large shipping firms (ie. the 5 or 6 that control the industry) each have dozens of manufacturing codes. see my answer in the other part of this thread
Hmm, I maintained software dealing with shipping containers for the trucking industry and occasionally there where identical boxes that had different size and type codes. Granted they could have been data entry errors, but the software used the size and type codes to uniquely identify things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Hospitals tend to notice clusters of people dying of radiation poisoning - at least in places with hospitals.
In places without hospitals - I'm sure the contents of a lot of these machines end up being dumped in the 3rd world, to be 'recycled' like most toxic waste
Only if it is acute poisoning and only if they cluster in time and space. Devices as nasty as this, of course, would be detected, but less deadly materials would easily go undetected until someone, 50 years later, notices something like leukemia being 20% more deadly in a given region than the surrounding areas.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.”
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...
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.
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!
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?
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...
"The team then brought in one of the most sensitive portable detectors on the market, an $80,000 Ortec HPGe Detective DX-100T. Inside the unit, a 1.65-pound chunk of germanium..."
I have no idea if this is a reasonable price, but the mentioned product is a self-contained measurement system in a ruggedized enclosure with built in computer and software that identifies isotopes automatically. It is marketed to "homeland security" type agencies, so expect it to have quite a sales-margin :-)
If you'd want to be on the cheap side, there's a used Ge on eBay for $3k right now, add a HV supply anda suitable ADC card for your PC and you can go recording γ-spectra in no time, possibly on a $5k budget.
Not sure if there are more robust bits of hardware about, but my experience of radiation detectors is that they are very sensitive and have to be very carefully handled. And docks tend to be fairly rough environments.
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.
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.
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?'
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.
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.