At 10:32 AM 10/24/01 -0700, Tim May wrote: >On Wednesday, October 24, 2001, at 10:14 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > >> On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, David Honig wrote: >> >>> Enough rads to sterilize? Forget film. >> >> What do you suppose happens to disks and other magnetic media at these >> flux levels? > > >Nothing. Magnetic oxides and metallic thin films are not affected by >mere few tens of kilorads, or even by megarads. > >Ionizing radiation has no particular first order effect on such films. >
Um, Tim, I was talking about silver-halogen photographic 'films'. You do raise the question of what happens to 100-atom thick gate oxides... but that's not what *I* was writing about. Radiation can also change the color of gems --used to 'cheat' and make them more valuable--- but probably not a lot of diamonds go through the USPO, and I don't know what dosage is necessary to introduce the appropriate defect density.