Okay, I'm going to really handwave here. There's a ubiquitous product, probably 100+ million instances currently operational just in the USA. This product cost

Okay, I'm going to really handwave here. There's a ubiquitous product, probably 100+ million instances currently operational just in the USA. This product costs about $10 to make. It has both a radioactive source and a way to (indirectly) detect alpha particles.[1] Yes it's not a perfect analogy. But surely there's a way to build a much cheaper alpha detector? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Ionization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Ionization