It sounded to me like a good chance to frolic with those dolphins at Monkey Mia and attract a bit of much-needed adulation... and enjoy lashings of wholesome food from a grateful mining company.
Rio must be all a-dither because I haven’t heard from it yet, despite my brave offer to put myself in the way of radioactive danger for the sake of society taking the canine social media world by storm.
Among the congratulatory letters and pats-on-the-back, so to speak, I have been besieged by questions about the technical aspects of my task, which is to unearth a six-by-eight millimetre object along a 1400km stretch of highway.
The most common query is along the lines of “General, what on earth is a gigabecquerel?” followed by “Please tell me what is a caesium-137 ceramic source?” and I have to patiently explain that a becquerel — named after Henri Becquerel, who shared the Nobel prize with Marie Curie after they discovered radiation — is a unit of radioactivity. And 19 gigabecquerels is a lot of them.
It is 19 gigabecquerels of caesium-137 ceramic source that has Rio Tinto in a frozen panic, unable to respond to my gracious offer and, in fact, unable to do anything much, including telling us what is going on. Although The Boss says they promptly apologised for not keeping an eye on it — they have had some practice at apologising lately, after all — and have promised to launch an investigation into the incident.
“We are taking this incident very seriously. We recognise this is clearly very concerning and are sorry for the alarm it has caused in the Western Australian community,” Rio Tinto iron ore division head Simon Trott said in a statement.
The lost capsule has the potential to cause radiation burns to anyone who comes in contact with it, which is why I thought I would point to it, while circling around it, rather than actually picking it up.
The capsule was part of a gauge used at Rio’s Gudai-Darri mine to measure the density of iron ore feed and was being transported to a Perth depot by “an expert radioactive materials handler”.
The capsules are typically transported in a highly protective casing that is subjected to rigorous testing for vibrations, heat and high impact. All of this clearly failed and The Boss fears the expert radioactive materials handler could be short of work for the foreseeable future.
Instead of engaging me, the authorities have emergency services people scouring the Great Northern Hwy with radiation detection devices, and the advice is to stay five metres from the capsule should anyone find it. But it was 15 days before they discovered it was missing, so it could have rolled well off the road, been picked up by a curious crow or be stuck in a camel’s foot by now.
They need me on the job to get even close.
In the realm of nastiness, though, the capsule hardly compares with the poisons Mr Putin favours for disposing of his critics, like the nerve agent novichok he tried out on the Skripals in London, or the dioxin dose he used on the Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko — or the fiercely radioactive polonium-210 his henchmen used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Toxicologists estimate a gram of that stuff would kill 50 million people — and make another 50 million crook. Not the sort of thing a sensible hound would go looking for... I’d have to send the New Boy in first. Woof!
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