Personal Radiation Detector

Today's article was taken from Yahoo's news page.

As everyone probably knows there was a huge earthquake off the coast of Japan on March 11th, 2011. That earthquake damaged one of Japan's nuclear power plants which is located in Fukushima. The power plant started going though a shutdown using generators because outside power was cut off. Not long after the earthquake a title wave hit the power plant, destroying the generators and shutting off the water cooling system for the nuclear fuel. That, of course, (as it does) lead to a partial melt down and several radiation leaks.

That happened 2 months ago today. At that time a lot of people that live in the Northern part of Japan were worried about an increase in the normal background radiation because of the nuclear melt down. It was a very real fear for those that lived near the crippled nuclear power plant, but the problem was the people that lived far away from the plant and were panicking because of a little extra radiation. The fact is that no one knows what a little extra radiation does to the human body, but the chances of it resulting in cancer is low.

This brings us to the article I linked to above. It seems a company called RAE Systems has made and started marketing a personal radiation dosage detector. You can see the detector along with its USB stand in the picture below.

RAE Systems's DoseRAE

For those of you that might be interested, here are so specs:
   Can be programmed to take a data point at any time between 30 seconds to 3600 seconds.
   Can measure data ranges from 0.01 mSv/h to 10Sv/h.
   Data can be transferred to a computer and it can be charged by means of USB.
   Comes at an alarm (vibration or LED lights) that can be set using a computer (XP or Vista).
   Current radiation dosages can be displayed on a computer when in a USB dock.
   MSRP: 79800 yen

It is a little pricey, but for those that are truly worried about their radiation dose (those that live close to the power plant or those that have to work at it), it might be a good buy. Other than that, I would say it is a geek's must buy fashion accessory because it comes with a nice plastic clip that can be used to clip it firmly in place in the front pocket. Very sexy.

There is one drawback though, the device uses thin film technology (instead of the same technology as a Geiger counter) so it will only truly detect X-rays and gamma rays. It can not really be used to detect the radiation caused by alpha particles or beta particles. It is not an all around detector, but and all around detector would be much bigger and cost a whole lot more.

It is now time for the word of the day. Today's word is 放射線(ほうしゃせん). It is pronounced hoshasen and it means radiation. I know that radiation can be scary because it is something that we can't see, but hey if it gets bad enough maybe we will all end up like the hulk or spider man.

See you next time at JJNN!

JJNN 41 July 5th, 2008

Welcome again to JJNN for Saturday July 5th, 2008. Today I will open the "oopps" file.

The original news story is given here. There are few different places and times you never want to hear a person say "oopps." A good example is during a major surgery or from piano movers when they have the piano hanging a couple of stories off the ground. Another time you never want to hear "oopps" is when people are dealing with radioactive materials. Depending on the material, radioactive materials stored in the wrong place can cause a lot of damage depending on the amount of the material.

Before getting into the story I want to talk about the different types of radioactive materials. A radioactive material is a material with an unstable nucleus that goes about loosing energy by emitting either energy or particles in the process of radioactive decay. There are many different ways for a material to go about radioactive decay. The first one is alpha decay. In alpha decay an alpha particle (2 neutrons and 2 protons: the nucleus of a helium atom) is ejected from the nucleus of the decaying atom. This actually changes the decaying atom into a different type of atom. The next mode of decay is called beta decay. In this form of decay the nucleus releases an electron (which is an negatively charged particle). And than there is gamma decay in which the nucleus releases a high energy photon. There are more ways for a nucleus to undergo decay, but these are the basic ones. Different materials go though different types of radioactive decay.

Radiation can be used for both "good" and "evil." Other blogs and text books have gone into all that before so I don't really want to talk about that. I will get back into the news story. It seems that on Friday some workers in Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science found 10 grams of uranium oxide in an envelope that no one knew about. Uranium oxide releases gamma rays.

The uranium oxide was found in a cardboard box surrounded by a lot of different papers. The paper and the box actually blocked the gamma rays so they envelope was never found. But, when the office that contained the box was cleaned and the envelope taken out of the box it had a reading of .8 micro-sieverts, not a whole lot of radiation.

You may be wondering how the radioactive material got into the box in the first place. Well it turns out that when a professor that worked in Nagoya University retired he moved to Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science. The professor retired in 1964 and his stuff was moved in 1997. Apparently he never bothered to open that box because there was the uranium oxide waiting for someone to find it. It is only 10 grams, but still that is a huge "oopps.

Any way, it is now time for the word of the day. Today's word is 放射性物質(ほうしゃせいぶっしつ). It is pronounced houshasei-busshitsu and means radioactive material. You may not know it from my writing on nuclear topics, but I got my degree in physics with a focus in nuclear physics. I only really studied naturally forming radioactive sources, so I never studied things like nuclear weapons or things like that, but I don't see the use in studying about stuff like that any way.

That's it for today. See you next time at JJNN.