3 ms·
This all seems so silly and quaint, but this past weekend the family and I went to the open house at Argonne National Laboratory. They had big signs saying tha
by Kon-Peki 3y ago
This all seems so silly and quaint, but this past weekend the family and I went to the open house at Argonne National Laboratory. They had big signs saying that bringing sources of radiation onto the grounds was prohibited, and they were checking every single car - the line to get in was probably half a mile long by the time we left!
- retrac 3y agoWell, radiation sources are a little more common than one might think, even today. I have half a dozen in my home -- smoke detectors, tritium lights. That may be in things people don't even expect. Objects made out of uranium glass may set off a Geiger counter. A lot of watches have tritium dials, and older ones have radium dials (a serious risk, unlike tritium). Quite a few people have something radioactive in their jewellery or keepsake box somewhere. A relative gave me his old US Army compass, and one day while re-examining it I noticed the marking on the back: https://i.imgur.com/CLT98kI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/CLT98kI.jpg 130 millicuries of tritium at manufacture. And sure enough, the dial is still very faintly lit some decades later (tritium half-life is about 12 years), though it takes total darkness to see it at this point. Of course any ionizing radiation outside of the tritium-containing glass means something has gone terribly wrong. But when your experiments, and security precautions, are all sensitive to any sort of radiation, I can imagine wanting to keep it off-site.