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[Phys-L] Re: Radioactive Bananas



Brian said:

I abstracted this from the
article by Biever on p30 on, NewScientist, Oct 22 2005.

"It can happen at the port of NY, dozens of suspect
freight containers may be opened only to reveal cat-litter,
ceramic tiles or bananas." [in a day]

I think it can happen, but they are generally not looking at beta
emissions because those don't make it out of the container. They are
looking at gammas with arrays of large NaI detectors. These might be 3"
or 4" or even larger crystals. For a period of time I was working on
new detector ideas that, if they panned out, could be used for such
searches and also for things such as preventing nuclear proliferation.
I have not been involved in that for years, but I have a friend who
worked in this area for a long time until he recently retired. A lot of
the info on how they detect stuff and what levels can be detected is
classified.

When I worked at Los Alamos Nat. Lab I sometimes when out to the LAMPF
site. There were detectors to watch for radioactive materials going in
or out of the site. I remember it was fortuitous that a truck driver
carrying steel (from Mexico) that had been contaminated with 60Co from a
discarded medical irradiation instrument, *accidentally* drove into the
LAMPF site and set of the alarms. He did not stop, and there was often
no guard at the gate, but a camera took a picture of the truck and he
was later "apprehended." If were not for a accidental wrong turn into
that facility, the radioactive steel might not have been detected until
it was distributed all over the USA. I was always amazed that the
detectors detected that.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu