Posted on 11/18/2006 6:57:25 PM PST by melt
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (CNN) -- About 500 people were evacuated from the New Mexico State Fairgrounds Expo as a precaution Saturday evening after low levels of radiation were detected, police said.
A Geiger counter registered the presence of radiation after two objects were discovered at the 236-acre fairgrounds in the heart of Albuquerque, said Lt. Juan Martinez, a spokesman for New Mexico state police.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
LOL! :-)
What range do you look for? What type of geiger counter do you use to make informal surveys? What do you check - Metal or Dirt or pots and pans made in China?
No one talks about the amount of radioactive scrap metal that is being processed in China and turned into rebar, pots and pans and thousands of common items.
The one that really knocked the sox off folks was when I volunteered to participate in a nuclear cell survival study back in my AF days. We were injected with 51Cr and then tested for 30 days as the Chrome decayed. (The Cr bound to the red blood cells). I could run my hand next to a CD type Geiger counter and it would scream. My entire blood supply was so hot (gamma) the CDV-700 counter maxed out on the highest setting. LOL!
Freaked folks out. hehehe
Cool beans! BTW, hope your stress test went well!
For just a quick and dirty (pun intended) test for gamma/beta, a CDV-700 works nicely. If you are worried about a more intense environment, you need to abandon the Geiger counter and switch to an ionization counter. The scintillators are extremely sensitive instruments for initial surveys. Dosimeters come in two basic flavors these days. 0-200 milliroentgens and 0-200 Roentgens. There are others that read 0-20 or 0-100 etc, but these are the two main types readily available.
I check all types of stuff. Fun to see what is mildly radioactive.
I've been to the Trinity site, and around the Nevada test site. The Sedan crater at the NTS is particularly overwhelming. If you've never seen a man-made dry hole in the ground a half-mile wide and a quarter-mile deep, well, you should.
In both cases, I had an escort, and trying to take a little something home wouldn't be worth the risk to my life, career and criminal record. I didn't spend a lot of time in the Boy Scouts, but I was there long enough to learn one adage I still like a lot: Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints. That I did.
They said I was about a quart low. Thankfully Lurker Jr is around to keep me topped off.
I would caution anyone who owns one of those old Civil Defense units to spend the dough to make sure it's properly calibrated.
It should be done fairly regularly and it should be done by someone certified in the process.
And of course we should all be aware that the old units of REM and RAD have been replaced by the new Gy unit. I'm not sure why, but apparently REM and RAD were nearing mandatory retirement age and the Law is the Law so it's off to Boca Raton with them.
L
LOL! Sound like you are ok. Good to hear!
Boca Raton? ROTFLMAO!
Trinitite - the greenish glass made from the first nudet, is pretty cool stuff to see. However, it is still mildly (not much above the background count now) hot even after 60 years.
It's good to know I didn't waste my time getting that Radiological Hazardous Response Certificate.
Now it's back to the other 'puter where I'm deeply engaged in a fascinating class on the data inputs of the LANDFIRE Vegetation Modeling software and how the pixels are geospatially coordinated to take into account the Potential Vegetation vs the Actual Vegetation in each Biophysical system type.......
head smacks into desk while drool seeps from the corner of my mouth...
Take care. I hope you find that Quasar you're looking for. Or was it the Higgs Boson?
Perhaps if all those 19th century Boson hunters hadn't slaughtered them willy nilly across the great plains things would be different.
But alas...
L
And yet you turned out to be fairly close to normal.
In fact, I carry a small geiger counter and dosimeter in the Vette at all times.
Um, scratch the above.
Maybe it's just me, but when the folks who have the tools to detect the nasty stuff also happen to have really fast vehicles to get away from the nasty stuff in a hurry, I have to wonder what I'm not being told.
I love your humor. I need to get back to work as well. LOL!
You take care my friend. :-)
LOLOLOL! I just like stopping the Vette when I travel cross-country and see if anything is hot. Especially yellow outcrops on the Rockies, SD, Texas, etc. :-)
They used to be in my Jeep; however, the Vette is more fun to drive. I just cannot take it off road. Tradeoffs darnit – always them dang tradeoffs.
I hate to leave a such a scintillerating conversation but duty calls.
Take care,
L
I saw it at the site, in pellets about the size of rabbit droppings (which were also abundant), and was tempted to try to palm a little, but I thought better of it. The mass of it had been bulldozed away, though there was a part of the original crater preserved behind plexiglass.
I had more license to wander around than the typical tourist, and near one of the instrument bunkers I found a metal can, the size and shape of a 12-oz. beer or soda can, half-buried in the sand.
Any labels and markings were long gone, but it had two church-key holes in the top, which meant it wasn't recent. Pull-tabs are older than I am, so this can probably was, too.
What amazed me about the test sites out west is how much stuff, large and small, was just left where it fell. It wasn't in anyone's way, and in controlled areas there was no one around to mess with it, so it just sat. When I picked up that can, I was probably the first person to hold it since the guy who drank from it, and he was older than my grandfather. It was just sitting there.
A less ominous explanation might be that the material is some contaminated scrap from Sandia National Lab, which is just a few blocks down the way. Perhaps scrap, perhaps some old specimens used in training people to use radiation monitors. The labeling would make more sense then.
Earlier this year when I was renewing my RWII qualification for work out at Sandia the guy treaching the class was demonstrating the technique for "frisking" to detect personal contamination when leaving a work area and his hand came up "hot" (a bit above background). We sleuthed around the building and finally located a contaminated urinal flush handle. Someone had had a mediacal procedure involving some isotope and the teacher had flushed the same urinal, contaminating himself.
RA, liked your description of the detectors. I use an old homebuilt NaI detector on a heavily modified Norelco 150kV CXR for some transport code verification and XRD calibration. Although I did get to use an Ortec HpGe detector a bit too... talk about a difference!
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