Better on east coast

I don't believe that adding additional units of measure to the puzzle will do much to improve public awareness of radiation issues. For example, in the article: announcing that it is raining 250 Million bananas/hr is not an improvement over 25 Sieverts/hr. It might also raise awkward questions, such as: - What is a banana per hr in dietary calories? - What do bananas have to do with a nuclear power plant? - Does the banana equivalent dose include the banana peels? - Can I purchase a radiation dosimeter calibrated in bananas/hr? - Will 250 million bananas create a critical mass causing Fukushima to disappear in a nuclear mushroom cloud? - What is the correct ratio of bananas to mushrooms in an omelet? - Is this message the result of an overdose of radiation or bananas? As you can hopefully see, introducing bananas into the units of measure puzzle doesn't make understanding radiation topics any easier.

--
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

:P

-Lasse

You should 'freelance' an article for the media! They pay pittance, but money is money and facts are always welcome. Well, maybe not today.

I can add a 4th problem especially when dealing with safety issues. (I deal with RF exposure, where the hype and misinformation are similar to the ionizing radiation exposure). It's very easy to prove that something is NOT safe. All that's required are one or two examples of detrimental effects and the courts will immediately declare that something is unsafe. Never mind the low probability and incidence rate[1].

It is almost impossible to prove that something is safe. One could demonstrate that millions of people are living safely in areas saturated with low levels of radiation, but only a few anecdotal detrimental incidents will allegedly "prove" that the entire safety record is worthless. We have minimum exposure standards, but those have become a moving target as new "research" reveals that almost everything we do is in some way unsafe.

If you write a book on radiation, you would have no problem claiming that ionizing radiation is dangerous. If you write a book on radiation which claims that ionizing radiation can be used safely, you will have a difficult time both proving your point, and convincing your prospective readership.

As I mumbled further upthread, understanding the issues surrounding Fukushima will probably require some mass education of the general public, which isn't happening. A modest example was when I had a radioactive thallium (actually Technetium Tc99m) stress test. I brought with me my ancient Victoreen CD V-700 Geiger counter. After the treadmill test, I went to my car and found the meter pinned at the highest scale and earphone clicking furiously. I drove to a nearby electronics store and showed the Geiger counter to some friends and random customers. I later did the same thing around my office building. I noticed an odd thing. Those over about 55 years old jumped back at the clicking sound and asked if it was dangerous. Those under 55 heard the clicks and asked "what's that noise"? The problem was that anyone over 55 had been though the cold war, when radiation topics were common in the press and skools. Anyone younger didn't get any of this in skool and probably had never even seen a Geiger counter.

Incidentally, several people later asked "Why do I have a Geiger counter"? It took me several days to decode the question. They were wondering if I was doing dangerous radioactive experiments at home.

If a book is too much work and too little profit, I suggest a simple Flash based web page for the GUM (great unwashed masses). Show a

1950's Gieger counter and various radiation sources ranging from cosmic background radiation to inside Fukushima. Have the meter show what reading would be expected, and what sounds should be heard out of the speaker. If you want to add alpha and beta emitters, a scintillation counter might be included. Maybe offer some other detectors from gold leaf electroscopes to cheap PIN diode gamma detectors. In other words, covert the abstract reality of the various units of measure into something the GUM can understand. [1] Incidence of new cases of brain and CNS cancers have been essentially flat since 1975:

--
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

Very cute, but not really a solution for radiation related units of measure. The problem is that for the other units (money, distance, volume, time, etc) we can easily relate to something physical. When someone mentions a liter of water, we are hard wired to relate that to something we know contains a liter of liquid, such as a 1 liter soda bottle. However, we can't do that with radiation. You can't see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, or easily measure it. Anyone not accustomed to dealing with abstractions will try to make a connection with something real, and usually fail. That's why atomic bomb energy releases were initially measured in tons of TNT, assuming that the reader had seen a ton of TNT exploding. That metaphor became useless as nuclear weapons grew in size, and WWII was buried in history, resulting in comparisons with the Hiroshima bomb. Everyone had seen the mess that the bomb did to Hiroshima, which provided the physical reality needed for the metaphor to be understandable.

The closest approximation to something physical and radioactive is the clicking of the Geiger counter. That's something that the GUM (great unwashed masses) can understand. Never mind the subtleties of energy levels, alpha/beta/gamma, time lag, etc. More counts mean that something is more dangerous. Too bad that few of the common units of measure can be related to counts per minute.

Doing the same thing with bananas isn't going to work because nobody perceives bananas as dangerous or can visualize 250 million bananas per hour. What's needed are not more units of measure, but rather better ways to relate the existing units of measure with something that anyone can visualize and understand the relative magnitudes.

--
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

Excess cancer deaths?

--

John Devereux

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Jan 2014 12:25:54 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

I am not sure it is useful to try to satisfy the big masses perception. those are being played by politics, and as puppets dance to the current hit tunes.

I have heard people say really funny things about satellite dishes for example and have given (what I thought) were equals (but true) funny answers.

I do the same with electronics, I try to avoid in such conversations that I know bit about it :-) Only at some point will the science loving part in me start up... To correct too much nonsense perhaps. Banana dose for the masses who actually _have_ a Geiger counter of sorts is not a bad unit, they have seen a slight increase perhaps, and can relate to hundred times more etc. Main thing is bring it to the supermarket (the Geiger counter) and check if food is contaminated, for example Japanese rice, or East European mushrooms or whatever[1]. If it changes from ticking to peeep you should really try to shop elsewhere.

[1] There are or were great stories in the Geiger counter google group, and gamma spectrometer group, for example somebody got an alarm in the supermarket from some paper cards that turned out to be radiating, somebody got an alarm driving past an old mil airplane dump, radium dials.... I have some uranium glass marbles, thorium welding rods, we had uranium glass table ware in my youth! I mean dishes and vases. I always got this strange feeling in my fingers when I touched it. I do think it is possible to sense that radiation.

Motivating politicians is an exercise in lobbying, not education. I doubt if facts have any relevance in politics. At lease with the GUM (great unwashed masses) there is some vague hope than an informed populace will elects a better class of politician. The scary part is that we tend to elect "leaders" who claim to have the answers. This is backwards. I want a politician that will do what I want done, not a politician that tells me what is good for me.

I do much the same. Correct answers are boring. Almost believable answers are much more entertaining.

Wrong. The average Geiger counter will NOT detect K40 in any reasonable amount of time. 15 Bq/banana is not going to be easy to see with commonly available hardware. This video explains the problem: Incidentally, the other videos by antiproton are worth viewing.

You won't see anything that way. In order to get anything useful, you'll need a controlled background radiation location (shielding), a gamma ray spectrometer, a method of removing the background radiation from the graph, and a good clue of exactly what you're trying to see. A quick pass with a GM tube is not going to find anything. You will see a little more with a pancake GM tube and much more with a scintillation counter, but still not enough for a quick pass.

Just after Chernobyl, when the hysteria was at it's peak, I dragged my Victoreen (Lionel) Geiger counter to the local supermarket and pretended to check out the produce. I caused a small riot as I was surrounded by curious and worried shoppers. I knew the manager, so there were no problems with simply leaving my Geiger counter in the car, and finishing my shopping without it. The local press found me a few days later, and asked some of the dumbest questions about radiation I had ever heard. Fortunately, they didn't print any of my answers as I was just learning the stuff at the time.

I found some uranium glass at a local thrift shop. I got lazy and bought some radiation sources on eBay. My Geiger counter included a test source, which has slowly decayed since the counter was manufactured in the 1950's.

Since this is a design group, it's quite easy to build a gamma ray detector, without the GM tube and associated high voltage circuitry. Finding an optimum PIN diode, dealing with high input impedances, and keeping the noise level reasonable, are the major challenges.

--
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

I tried that years ago. No luck. I also bought a 2lb bag on eBay. My Geiger counter wouldn't detect anything unless I integrated the reading over at least 8 hours. Even then, the change was barely noticeable. The problem is the KCl is only 0.0118% K40. Also, K40 emits about 90% beta and 10% gamma. My Geiger counter is quite sensitive to gamma, but doesn't do well with beta. To give you an idea of how bad it is, my background level is about 20 counts/minute, which is awful. I've been lusting after a more sensitive pancake probe, or better yet, a scintillation head, but haven't found the justification or the cash. I did once buy an unusually cheap scintillation head but discovered that the seller had stupidly exposed the crystal to bright sunlight and killed it.

As of last year, I'm casually tinkering with painting various phosphors onto PIN diode photon detectors in the hope of building a cheap but sensitive scintillator. I mixed a batch of silver doped ZnS but am having problems depositing a thin enough coating where the surface flashes can be seen by the PIN diode on the other side of the coating. When I compare an open lens photo of the surface scintillations, with the count produced by the PIN diode photon detector, I would estimate that I'm losing about 80% of the flashes.

Also, Sr90. As it happens, I heat with firewood, so I have plenty of wood ash. I save some for soap making, but have never checked for radioactivity. I just tried it with my Geiger counter. Nothing spectacular.

Thanks much for a very clear explanation of what TEPCO is doing with Fukushima and why.

--
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

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Jan 2014 13:57:54 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Yes, nice video.

Yea, well, as I mentioned one Geiger tube is not the same as the other, a factor 10 or maybe even 100 or more in sensitivity is possible. The needle from your 1950 counter meter is probably a bit heavy. Yes in the supermarket you need a small unit that beeps like a cellphone (level detector), else the 'masses' will panic, especially if it ticks (beware of LED displays, could be a bomb too). I have designed and build the gamma spectrometer, PMT type, wrote the soft to subtract background, added tables for all isotopes I could find data on, etc, and it is running now. Battery operated, 7 hours on rechargeable 2 AA, graphics LCD display. I have stopped collecting radiation sources a while ago, some of these can cause real problems. You can play down things, but should not. Inhaling uranium dust is not so good I think, I have often wondered about how in the African countries where for example France mines Uranium, the unprotected black workers are shoveling yellow-cake, but of course we need the stuff, but really I would not do that. Something for 0bama (to do something about)?

BTW that guy in the video with the uranium ore, he mentioned he needed cleaning the whole place. Smallest dust particle you could inhale, same for radium watches. You can use the spectrometer for prospecting, find some ore.

Gamma spectrometer project under construction (only needs the front labeling), also has RS232 to PC and remote control:

Geiger counter, connected the probe an PC:

This mil Geiger probe holds different sensitivity Geiger tubes: These are the less sensitive ones:

I have some more old mil stuff in the attic ...

And I have these pens:

These are ionisation type, you charge the pen, and it has a little cross-hair viewing window that shows exposure at the end of the [last] day, war detector., polonium too.

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Jan 2014 21:50:25 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

In the gamma spectrometer group some years ago somebody was selling cheap scintillation screens, I have 2. You will still need a PMT I think. I have no experience with PIN diodes in that setup as detector, but come to think of it !!!!!! have to test my Sony starlight camera as detector, now that would make cool video.

PS:

watch the youtube vieo, and the denial of your gvernment.

Hey!

More likely, they picked the 1% of the studies that might prove or disprove their point. By the time you'd chucked out all the studies that didn't have any control groups you'd have got rid of most of them, and insisting on them having quantified the radiation levels for both groups would have thrown out a lot more. By the time you've restricted yourself to comparable statistics between the studies I'm amazed that there were still 46 left.

They were probably counting the peer-reviewed medical literature as part of the scientific literature, which it rarely is.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

7 minutes of video and not once does he get down on his knees and try to determine if the radiation is coming from the sand or the air. He doesn't walk the water line to determine the extent of the contamination. He doesn't pickup a bucket of sand and walk it away from the beach to see if the sand is hot. He doesn't take a post hole digger and get a sample of deep sand to see if it's a recent contamination. The blurry video insures I can't read the units, which I assume are counts/min. At least, the links on the YouTube page are worth reading. (See my comments on radiation for the GUM (great unwashed masses)).

This looks more specific (and sane): (I haven't checked the numbers yet).

I didn't see any government "denial" in the article or the video.

5x normal background levels is not dangerous. It is worth investigating, but if you expect immediate government action (do something, even if it's wrong), then they would probably close the area, bring in a huge expensive research team, conduct a multi-year investigation, and produce a voluminous, unreadable, and inconclusive report that basically says "more research is necessary".

There are several underwater radiation sources off San Francisco Bay. Hot debris and contaminated sand have been found in the past. My guess(tm) this might be more of the same.

--
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

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Jan 2014 11:01:02 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Well, I do, maybe you should read it again.

It is a precursor, and interesting where the contamination is, and also has been verified by others with Geiger counters.

I think the guy did a great job reporting the alarm on his 565 $ USB counter (I could identify the type from just looking at the video, how cannot you read it????????)

It is lot of money, did not spend more than 20$ myself on my counter, but I did order this Geiger tube today: eBay item number: 190928106922 and will make a smaller portable Geiger counter, with RS232 :-)

This is going to be very hot, everybody in the bay area will want one. And that radiation will get much worse, Fuckupshima has been releasing 10,000 fold more polluted water recently that will arrive over the next few years. So, you can be in denial, sceptical, but there is big problem heading that way.

They [ will ] play the Japanese game, keep silent until the public toppels that. Mass panic, decrease of property value in google city, maybe even LA, consequences could be enormous.

In the end the stuff will also make it into the Atlantic ocean, and over here near where I live, If it has not already done so via the jet streams, I did have strange readings the last few month but attributed that to some sort of interference but have not been able to track down on that. (on the spectrometer BTW), so looks like some form of radiation in the atmosphere that comes and goes, it is not there when it storms??? well still logging..

It is interesting, fun, at least for me, I have many other interests and things going, so... and I do not live in google city *Frisco.

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Jan 2014 14:33:24 -0500) it happened Neon John wrote in :

John do not spoil the suspense.. These things need to be sold, everybody should have one. Like every body has a security camera, an airbag, and is scanned at each gate.

National product has to increase, and investors need volatility. Hedge against the world coming to an end tonight or tomorrow, Let the big and small boys play. And politicians should have something to do, anything that draws attention to them will help.