How Much Radioactive Material is Missing in New Jersey?

Bottom Line Up Front: Imagine a hardware store with a large-ish display of smoke detectors on a shelf, somewhere around fifteen hundred of them.  That's ballpark what was lost.  (And no, positrons are not alphas, and the shelf of smoke detectors would be a distributed source and not a small point-like source, but close enough for this grapefruits-to-tangerines comparison to give some idea of the magnitude involved here.)  It's enough to warrant some paperwork, but not any cause for real concern.

Finally, no, you're not going to spot it from a flock of drones flying randomly around NJ airspace.

Links:

• NJ mayor links drone sightings to missing radioactive material  And mayor's off the cuff remarks link him to missing cranial material.  Still, the article does give the name of the radioactive source:
• General Electric Medical Source HEGL-0132 (inset pic), a 55MBq calibration device.  What's a MBq?  How does this compare with a smoke detector's source?  How's it work?
• Becquerel, the SI unit of radioactivity, article a Wikipedia.
• A smoke detector has about 37kBq, according to this source.  (a surprisingly difficult number to find in a pile of "This Is Completely Safe!!!  Do Not Ask Further!!!" search results)  55x10^6/37x10^3 = 1486.  Think of it as a 12 wide by 11 high by 11 deep display stack of smoke alarms.
• How Germanium-68/Gallium-68 generators work, also at you-know-where.
• Just for completeness, here's the NRC's "uh, we lost something" paperwork on the incident.
• Finally, a J-school article Missing Radioactive Material in New Jersey Not as Bad as It Sounds.

Were I going to New Jersey, I'd worry more about New Jersey than I'd worry about this radioactive source.