How'd they do that?

[TedTheLed]

I understand that there is a pager sized unit that contains a radiation detector, gps and cell phone transmitter. these are distributed to hundreds (thousands?) of govt employees in a city. they are constantly on the move scanning and transmitting the locations of what they find ...

 

[AlphaTea]

:tinfoil: <--Tin Foil Hat.
Folks, do not worry, all is well.
I work in an industry that does in fact have such instruments in use all of the time. Electronic Dosimeters (E.D.'s) come in many shapes and sizes. Many of them are the size of a pager and some as small as a Postage Stamp. Some are more sensitive than others. The types of detectors in them range from GM tubes to scintillators to Silicon Pin Diodes and others.
Many LEO's carry them now as part of Homeland Security.
Usually, persons who undergo a stress test or some kind of radio-therapy (where radioactive isotopes are injected or implanted in the body), are told NOT TO ride on mass transit. This is only one of the reasons, but you see why.
I had a cardiac stress test a couple of years ago. I got about 30 mCi of Tc-99m. I was emitting about 85 mR/hr contact with my chest 30 minutes after the test. Tc-99m has a t1/2 of about 6 hrs. Two weeks after the test I was still setting off monitors at work. Not so much because I had a lot of radioactive stuff left in me, but that those instruments are so sensitive.
We do live in interesting times, dont we.

 

[changsn]

I was on a tour trolley in Washington DC with my parents a few weeks ago, and 2 Secret Service agents in disguise as bike riders came aboard the trolley, announced who they were, and said that the trolley was emitting radiation. They later found out that one of the people in the tour was going through chemotherapy. How in the world did they detect the radiation? By some radar like device? to detect radiation over such a wide area is quite an amazing thing to me.

Hey, it says the person was undergoing chemotherapy - not radiation therapy. I realize that often the two therapies are used together, but not always. So if the person didn't undergo radiation therapy, where's the radiation coming from? Did I miss something?
Sam

 

[tvodrd]

From the cold war there has been a scenario of a "smuggler's war," where the attacking nation smuggles small portable nukes into the major cities of the victim nation. Small nuclear weapons, not "dirty bombs." Small nuclear weapons are inefficient and pretty dirty to start with! The US military had "nuclear demolitions" portable by 3 guys on foot and had a proto tactical weapon with a 6" diameter warhead. The Soviets were rumored to have "suitcase nukes," of which many are rumored to be "missing" after the Soviet Union's collapse.

The "dirty bomb" threat is real. Collect the H3 from 10K Luminox watches, react it with oxygen (veery carefully) and spray the resultant (few grams) water from a high rise window......

I think this is a case of our tax dollars being wisely spent!

Larry (Hoping some wannabe terriorist reads this, blows $1M to maybe induce a couple cancers. <-tongue in cheek!)

 

[PhotonWrangler]

...False alarms can be caused by ceramics, fertilizers, bananas...

BANANAS?! oo: Are we ingesting something that we shouldn't be?

 

[AJ_Dual]

Bananas?

I'm guessing it's the naturaly ocurring potassium isotopes. Either that, or other isotopes picked up from countries that grow them in volcanic soils.

Potassium Chloride salt substitute you can get at the supermarket will make a geiger counter chirp away quite hapilly...

 

[Kristofg]

BANANAS?! oo: Are we ingesting something that we shouldn't be?

I think it's a monkey-complot. One day, the monkeys will have superpowers

 

[BobVA]

I once visited a steel plant in Southern Ontario, Canada that processed scrap iron and steel in arc furnaces into high-quality steel.

They had radioactivity detectors (geiger counters?) mounted on poles at the entrance to the plant. If anything were detected aboard incoming truck loads, it would set an alarm off. You never know what you'll get in a scrap shipment, I guess.

There's a classic atomic horror story involving an inadvertently scrapped radiothearpy machine (Cobalt 60 :duck, a truck with a load of "hot" table bases contaminated with said Co-60 and a VERY fortunate wrong turn by the truck driver.

http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html

Cheers,
Bob

 

[Arkayne]

Bob, wow. What a story! On a smaller scale, that story reminds me of when a news team tracked cross-contamination of raw chicken throughout the kitchen. Yipes.

 

[Coop]

...and said that the trolley was emitting radiation...

And you immediately thought they were coming for the tritium vial om your flashlight