At Sue Schmidt’s gas station and roadhouse off a remote highway in the Australian Outback, employees are usually on the lookout for snakes when they’re out. But this week, they were looking for something else: a tiny capsule of radioactive material that started searching About 900 miles of road.
The capsule, used for mining equipment, went missing on its way to a Rio Tinto Plc Mines for Perth, the state capital of Western Australia. As the search dragged on over the past week, Ms. Schmidt and her staff became careful to clear away the bottle caps and coins they usually find outside the roadhouse, fearing that any shiny objects might be capsules. Which can kill them dangerously. radiation dose.