pezdragon,
There will be very little radiation there below the beamline, at one of the interaction regions. Your L0D will be just fine for whoever finds it.
In point of fact, you simply CAN'T create ungodly radiation at the detector, because you would destroy it if you kept that up. You might think that the collisions there would be creating lots of radiation, but they aren't. That's why the beam lifetimes of the stored beams are measured in hours, not minutes. Massive radiation is created when you dump a stored beam, and if your L0D were lost at a beam dump, it would end up getting pretty hot after months and months of running.
Actually, funny story, one of my co-workers lost his radiation badge in the tunnel--dropped it on the floor, below the beamline (about 1.5 meters below it)--and didn't realize until he was back in the control room and the machine was running again! LOL! He figured it would show lots of radiation.
It didn't. Not even a mRem or two. Crazy, huh? It convinced him that the whole radiation badge thing was B.S. and a scam or something.
Not so, though, as I picked up some radiation when I was working in the converter cave, where CESR creates positrons (via Bremstrelaugn sp???)by slamming lots of electrons into a tungsten target. The cave is hot, and if you stood next to the converter for an hour, you'd pick up 50-100 mRem easy. I picked up 5 or 10 or something.
So, no the reason his badge didn't show lots of radiation is simply that the beams in an accelerator are very finely tuned and shaped and bunched and if you are below the orbit plane, and not near a beam dump, and especially if you are to the inside of the ring, you are unlikely to see much radiation. Strange but true. This is not always the case, of course, especially if the beam goes unstable or gets dumped, and I would damn well never want to test it personally by being in an accelerator when it was on--but if I did get trapped there, you'd find me on the floor, to the inside of the ring.
In CESR, and in all accelerators, there are stringent and nearly fool proof measures in place to ensure that no one is inside when they are turned on, however!
Anyway, I know it seems counter-intuitive that the interaction region, where collisions occur, wouldn't get ungodly radiation, but that's because collisions of a proton against a proton are very rare. Of the trillions of protons that pass through each other, one bunch going one way, the other bunch going the opposite way, a collision is rare. This is why the beams aren't continuous streams, but are formed into bunches, like cars in a train, and why they are squeezed down into dense clouds--all of it to increase the number of events per second in the detector.
Contrast this with a situation where you take trillions of high energy protons and slam them all into a bunch of water cooled metal. Now THAT's a lot of radiation!
OK. Cutting myself off.
