There are persistant reports here that some equipment buried at Maralinga
[British A-bomb tests] found its way to the surplus market [ie Waltham Trading
in Rundle Street, for those who are local. When I was at school I used to have
a part time job there in the mid '60s.].
John K
Australia
----- Original Message -----
From: John Rehwinkel
To: neonixie-l@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2017 11:22 PM
Subject: Re: [neonixie-l] Radioactive Nixies - Study
a geiger counter will do nothing to reduce your nervousness, in fact it
might even make it worse, for no real good reason.
Quite true. I have a Geiger counter, and was working on a difficult project
at work and kept getting interrupted. I brought my counter into work and just
left it on my desk, clicking at the usual background radiation. It made people
really nervous and they pretty much left me alone.
One time, I was taking a trip to Mexico to do some shopping, and brought it
with me, just in case there might still be some Fiesta ware out there. TSA
searched my luggage every single time while it was there.
As for radioactive equipment, I used to work for a firm that built monitoring
gear for nuclear testing. In one test, the tunnel collapsed, crushing our
equipment enclosure. A couple of years later, we got a call, saying our gear
had been excavated, but it was full of probably-radioactive dust and partly
crushed, asking if we still wanted it. We declined, but I assume some gear
like that surfaces at equipment auctions occasionally. Maybe I should bring my
counter to hamfests?
I had a pet that was treated with iodine-131 for hyperthyroidism once. I was
told to discard any bedding after a week, because it would "become
radioactive". I-131 is a beta emitter, and beta rays (which are just
electrons) can't make things radioactive, it takes neutrons to do that. The
only real dangers are excreted I-131 and, if the betas are energetic enough,
and I use materials of high atomic weight as bedding, they could produce X rays.
Welcome to the fascinating world of radiation, known by little and feared
by most, for no good reason. More people have been killed by fear of radiation
than by radiation itself.
Truth.
- John
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