Re: taking apart smoke detectors

[Mark Sylvester <msylvest@SPIN.IT>]

At 15:08 21/04/99 -0500, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
> > .... How do you reliably assure parents that their kids are not
> > getting more radiation than allowed?  Like I mentioned earlier,
> > all you need is one parent with a little bit of misunderstood
> > or misinterpreted information to cause a major pain in the ass. ...
>
> You can avoid this by using radioactivity (Rn and its daughters
> from air) collected from the screen of a common TV or computer
> screen. Details were discussed here about two years ago. The name
> of the thread was "radioactivity from air" or something like this.

It's the daughters with half-life round 30 minutes, rather than the radon
itself, which is presumably not ionised having taken a long time to diffuse
out of the earth into your lab. And it's a mix of beta emitters. I now use
the measurement of the decay as a regular feature in our lab program. I
find that the stuff seems strongly associated with dust, whether from a
dusty monitor screen or a dusty carpet.

But looking at the nature of the concerns expressed, I wonder if it makes
any difference whether one uses a natural source or not. Wouldn't you be
just as likely to get sued?

Mark


Mark Sylvester
United World College of the Adriatic
34013 Duino TS
Italy.
msylvest@spin.it
tel: +39 040 3739 255