Better on east coast

The Thompson family is a bit odd... early heart attacks... my father had his first at age 39... died at 90. Throughout the family most attacks at ~55... mine was at 58... minimum terminal age 84, with some spikes... my great-aunt Matilda Bland was 107 when she died... fascinating gal, she was 8 when Lincoln came thru on the campaign train and could recount every minutiae, but couldn't remember which of Lester's sons my father was, when we'd visit, for more than 5 minutes, then she'd ask again. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142   Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

IIRC, the French are using glass.

So there are some folks here that know radiation and Geiger counters. I have a question. I have an old but working CD style Geiger counter from the 60's. It picks up the background level of 6 to 20 or so clicks per minute. It has a check source which read about 40x that value. My question....everything i read says you CANNOT use a Geiger counter to de tect radon and i want to understand why not. I think i understand that the radon itself creates alpha particles and the GC is not very good at detecting alpha. Ok fine. But what about the radon progeny which will also be present. These create beta which the GC can de tect. So is it simply an academic statement that the GC cannot detect rado n itself but that the fact is that if radon is present it will cause a det ectable increase of the background on a GC? Thanks Mark

detect radon and i want to understand why not.

e GC is not very good at detecting alpha. Ok fine. But what about the rad on progeny which will also be present. These create beta which the GC can detect. So is it simply an academic statement that the GC cannot detect ra don itself but that the fact is that if radon is present it will cause a d etectable increase of the background on a GC?

Because the counts due to radon progeny are negligible to the background. Most of them go into the peak at 609.3 keV; here is a screenshot of a background spectrum taken with a shielded detector, I have put the red X marker on top of the

609.3 keV peak (in the upper window): .

With the GM counter you will know only the entire area; you want only that of the peak at 609.3... And you will not be shielded (this detector in its shield gets about 1-2 counts per second (gross), non-shielded it goes in the hundreds). IOW, your noise level is way way too high relative to your signal.

I am not at all familiar with radon measurements, I think they use adsorption filters etc. thing. I am just pointing the fundamental limitation because of which you can't just put a GM counter in a room and measure the level of radon. Above a certain level it should obviously show up but this level must be way above the "home radon" range of interest.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI

------------------------------------------------------

That didn't work too well sealing the crumbling concrete and steel "sarcophagus" at Chernobyl. Granted, it was done in a hurry under adverse conditions. Maybe the replacement will do better.

Vitrification works. The vitrified French nuclear waste is being reprocessed in Germany:

The US EPA doesn't seem to consider glass to be adequate to properly contain the lead in CRT's. Their logic is that if you finely grind up the glass, and pass it through a mild acid bath (PH=5.0), the lead will leach out and into the environment. Therefore, the leaded CRT glass must be properly disposed through a ritual beginning with a small tax. If the handling of lead encased in glass is any prediction of EPA policy, I doubt if nuclear materials encased in glass will be treated any better. Some stuff I wrote on lead in 2006:

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Sorry. I should have called it the alleged limited shelf life. The article mentions that shelf life extension is possible. Since the drug manufacturer has no control over the storage environment, I suspect that they would be reluctant to approve an extension without a careful inspection and voluminous records.

Also, would you take a drug that is marked on the package as post expiration? You may believe it will last forever, but do you really want to take the chance? I wouldn't.

This allegedly explains how the FDA determines shelf life. I don't understand any of it, except the abstract: "Since the true shelf-life of a drug product is typically unknown, it has to be estimated based on assay results of the drug characteristic from a stability study usually conducted during the process of drug development. Furthermore, the FDA requires that the estimated shelf-life be so constructed that it is statistically evident that the estimated shelf-life is less than the true shelf-life, i.e., the estimated shelf-life should be a conservative (negatively biased) estimator." In other words, a drug doesn't get approved by the FDA without the manufacturers shelf-life estimate, and that estimate is required to be highly conservative. Better safe than sorry and such.

Also, compounds have different rules than the original ingredients: I don't think potassium iodide falls into this category.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Fair enough that the FDA constructs a shelf life for a given drug.

The point I was getting at is that when people start talking about radioactivity, we all know that there are half-lives involved, and since in this discussion radioactive iodine was mentioned, its just too easy to give the impression that that is what the FDA is talking about.

A case of talking about one thing but possibly leading to a totally different, and very wrong, conclusion.

There is already far too much nonsense talked about radioactivity that nobody needs to add further to the confusion and scare-mongering.

--
Regards, 

Adrian Jansen           adrianjansen at internode dot on dot net 
Note reply address is invalid, convert address above to machine form.

Not exactly. The manufacturer produces the estimated shelf life. The FDA either approves or rejects the estimate.

I don't believe that there's any risk of the reader confusing half life with shelf life. However, I will admit that there are numerous other possible misinterpretations of the half-life:

I don't see how that can happen. Confusion between the expiration date on pills and radioactive decay is unlikely. Besides, I don't know any alternate terms for radioactive half-life. Perhaps if I used expiration date, instead of shelf-life? Oops. Someone might assume that radioactive particles expire after a specified period.

Quite the contrary. There's not enough public discussion about radioactivity. Those that know only a little about the topic (like me) can be fooled. For example, the famous and widely distributed JPG showing the alleged distribution of radioactive material across the Pacific from Japan, is actually the wave height distribution after the

2011 earthquake. If a little knowledge is dangerous, the solution is not less knowledge. For a topic that is certainly on the minds of every paranoid on the left coast of the USA, I've seen nothing in the way of government and educational institutions attempting to educate the GUM (great unwashed masses). Were the public able to understand the bare minimum, such as the units of measure involved, I suspect that the confusion and scare-mongering would be greatly reduced by the simple knowledge of the realtive magnitudes of the measurements and predictions. It's like the sign: "Danger. One Million Ohms". If one didn't know what is an ohm, one would be predictably fearful.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Bogus alert: The JPG is not the distribution of radioactive material over the Pacific Ocean. It's a NOAA wave height map made after the 2011 earthquake. If you zoom in on the legend, it shows colors from zero to 240 cm. Last time I checked, radioactivity is not measured in centimeters.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Blech! It sucks that that is the best case approach to the problem.

What does this have to do with Fukushima ?

The isotope I-131 that those pills are supposed to protect against have a half life of only 8 days and there are now years since the chain reactions in Fukushima was stopped.

How about webcomic authors?

This was made in late March, 2011.

Matt Roberds

On a sunny day (Thu, 02 Jan 2014 20:31:54 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

:-)

Yea, those high impedances cause lots of problems.

Ohm, pronounced in Dutch as 'oom', stands for 'uncle', a million is a lot.

Scaring people could be the precursor to new taxes (radiation tax), like environmental taxes. Global warming did not work so well lately, CO2 is good for you.

What ever way, I have worked in a radiation environment, and then left for some other project. About 4 years after I left that whole place needed to be decontaminated, people were careless, 'just a bit of radiation' was OK. BTW that was right in the center of a big city. I did read in the paper that the on site cat gave birth to a bunch of malformed kittens. YMMV.

The biggest mistake you can make is walking with eyes closed and trust the government, people in Japan have found out, radiation doses were hundreds if not thousands times higher than 'officially' stated. People made their own radiation monitoring network.

Anyways, you are not going to live forever, west coast radioactive, middle US polluted ground water by fracking and underground nuke testing, east coast south oil spills, big comets are coming too, guaranteed, was it not 2028? 0bama may start ww3, there was 9/11, how they used that scare to up industrial production.. amazing, more cameras and scanning equipment sold than ever before, but humanity is still around... Fear sells. And we need somebody to sell to, so there is balance somewhere, a Nobel in economics for the one who finds the formula.

On a sunny day (Fri, 03 Jan 2014 09:16:17 +1000) it happened Adrian Jansen wrote in :

Yes, because that is over simplified. The cosmic rays (and I see them here too) especially when passing through, do likely little damage. But for example inhaled particles of plutonium do, stay in one place and can start a cancer. To reduce the cosmic ray and other background you need thick lead screening around your setup. GM tubes come in many different sensitivities, so I think you cannot look a the count of one 50 years ago compared to the count of one today without specifying the tube type. I had army dump counter that had 2 tube types with a factor 10 difference. You need some known calibration source to get a fix. Cosmic ray intensity varies over time I think: From:

quote: " In the past, it was believed that the cosmic ray flux remained fairly constant over time. However, recent research suggests 1.5 to 2-fold millennium-timescale changes in the cosmic ray flux in the past forty thousand years. "

It is interesting stuff, and I am learning.

On a sunny day (Thu, 2 Jan 2014 18:49:59 -0800 (PST)) it happened dp wrote in :

Build your own:

Accessory

Thank you for some facts. Still, isn't there something that can be done? For examples, brain-storming on implementations, or personnel to make the efforts go faster, or materials supplied with helicopter fly-ins [if possible] etc etc? Even back up activities 'outside' the perimeter, just in case?

It just seems that a radioactive leak of this magnitude should have the full attention of all the entities impacted, which is ALL of us downstream. Plus IMO, a 'single' solution is fraught with peril and contains much wishful thinking. What with Murphy ruling things.

I was Googling for that, but couldn't find it. Thanks.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only chart that I've seen that even tries to explain radiation terminology in common terminology. However, the XKCD site targets geeks, not the general public. Googling for similar charts showing "ionizing radiation exposure", I get this mess: Perhaps 10 of the charts are relevant and half that are informative.

The author somewhat explains one unit of measure, the sievert, and ignores all the other terms, old and SI, found in the propaganda such as counts/min, rads, curies, bequerels, grays, rems, roentgens, coulombs/kg, etc. It doesn't take much in the way of units juggling to totally confuse the media, which sometimes has problems with orders of magnitude as well as units of measure. Considering the wide variety of devices and contrivances (ghost detectors, EMF meters, field strength meters, ionization chambers, PIN diode gamma detectors, dosimeters, geiger counters, gamma spectrometers, scintillatators, etc), lumped under the general classification of "radiation detector", I'm not surprised that the public might be confused. Cartoons and clever charts are probably a good start, but we have a long way to go.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

That was the first of three links that you posted. Ok, it fooled me until I read the Snopes disclosure. I should have notice the legend in cm, and that lack of well known north (CW) and south (CCW) equatorial circulating currents.

For the 2nd link: I noted that the government buys new replacement supplies of potassium iodide roughly every 5 to 7 years because of the expiration date.

I don't know what to do with your 3rd link: The page is very long. There may actually be some truth mixed in there. The method behind such long web pages is that the average reader never finishes reading the whole page. With links, my guess is that it would take me about 3 hours to slog through that page. Instead, most readers will skim the page, looking for buzzwords and catch phrases (conveniently highlights, underlined, italics, or bold) that agree with their position.

Nope. Big numbers are dangerous. When in doubt, avoid big numbers.

Would it help the Dutch if they used the "mho" (reciprocal of ohm) instead? All that would be necessary is to invert all your computations.

Generally, that's true. Some organization with an agenda convinces the government that "something must be done". Subsequent government action seems to be based on "do something, even if it's wrong". The important thing is that "something is being done" even if it's counterproductive. Since the only things that governments can actually do is spend your money and manufacture laws, "doing something" is invariably more laws and more taxes. I don't see any change in government methodology in the foreseeable future.

Yech. Not good. No radiation in my background, but plenty of chemical contamination, ingestion, and pollution issues. We learn from our mistakes and I seem to be at the forefront of the effort.

Unfortunately, trusting the government seems to be an incurable disease. Whenever something goes wrong, the press (in its manifestation at the voice of the people), immediately demands that the government "do something". If that's impractical, then perhaps the government can be blamed. Like "do something, even if it's wrong", I also don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future.

Paranoia and confusion sell very well. The general plan is for marketing to create the necessary problem or confusion, and for sales to arrive with a product or service that will solve the problem and alleviate the confusion. That works at all levels including international politics.

I live an a forest infested with 200ft tall redwood and fir trees. Due to clear cutting in 1906 and again in 1940's, the tree density is quite high. When they get old or rotten, the trees fall, usually destroying whatever happens to be in the way. Sleeping during a wind storm is an exercise in self control.

Many years ago, after a rather nasty wind storm, I was eating lunch at a local restaurant when I was approached by a radio reporter demanding an interview. The reporter asked if I was afraid of falling trees. I said no, and added that this was only a temporary situation. Most of the fir trees were 125 years old, which is about their average lifespan. When they die, they fall. Since the area had been clear cut, all the trees are roughly the same age. There will soon be a day when ALL the trees fall at once.

The reporter swallowed a little and the interview went out over the air. Fortunately, my name was not mentioned, although a few friends recognized my voice. It's been many years, but there are those that are still awaiting the day when all the trees fall at the same time.

Perhaps it would be helpful if you notice that the only business that has been continuously growing is the business of government. If the trend continuous, we'll soon all be working for the government. There's no balance required since governments only consume, not produce.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

how about this then: :)

-Lasse