FWIW, I use tritium-illuminated sights on my compound bow.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 17:48:58 -0500
From: jedrothw...@gmail.com
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Subject: [Vo]:The biological effects of radiation are difficult to quantify
Mary Yugo wrote:
And by the way, it's expensive.
It is much cheaper than inadvertently irradiating
hundreds of thousands of people.
What's wrong with ordinary radiation detectors?
You can measure radioactivity with instruments but you cannot
predict what effect it will have on different species. Different
power levels, the overall dose, and different types of radioactivity
have different effects. You have to first measure the radioactivity
a cold fusion reactor produces (if any) and then subject various
species to that level and type of radiation for extended periods.
Just knowing how much there is does not give you an accurate picture
of how much risk it presents. Unless the dose is so high it causes
immediate damage or death, it is hard to estimate how much damage it
will cause. Biology is complex and unpredictable.
Or do you think animals are used to verify that
conventional nuclear power plants are safe? Maybe they use
canaries?
They use a variety of species. I doubt that includes canaries.
The standards for things like a safe level of human exposure are
mostly educated guesses. Actual ill health varies a great deal from
one person to another. Some people can be exposed to high levels
without ill effects. Children are much more vulnerable than adults.
There are exact levels of allowed radiation written into laws, but
the science is murky. The standards had to be raised in Japan in
response to Fukushima disaster. Otherwise they would not run out of
skilled workers to fix the reactor.
There has been a great deal of coverage of this in the Japanese
press, and I discussed it with some Japanese scientists.
At the National Plasma Fusion Science Lab in Nagoya, they exposed
fish and other species to tritium at levels much higher than
national standards allows. (Standards in Japan, the U.S. and Europe
are pretty much the same, I gather.) They saw no ill effects.
Tritium is a lot safer than people think. That's good because I
believe tritium is the most common radioactive product from cold
fusion, and it is difficult to contain.
- Jed
