[HN Gopher] Nu-Klear Fallout Detector (ca. 1962-1968)
___________________________________________________________________
Nu-Klear Fallout Detector (ca. 1962-1968)
Author : cryptoz
Score : 69 points
Date : 2024-08-15 01:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.orau.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.orau.org)
| cryptoz wrote:
| We had one of these in the house when I was a kid in the 90s.
| Seriously wild to learn what it was when I was like 12, after
| some years of not understanding ha. Never really was sure if it
| would work or not.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Sadly the article doesn't say if they actually work or whether
| they are snake oil.
| maxbond wrote:
| Poking around I found this video, where a university
| professor demonstrates the principle with a snow globe
| (containing virtually the same beads) and a strontium 90
| source.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kHfXntPMoI
|
| I think they would work as advertised. I'm not sure that
| makes them entirely _not_ snake oil, though.
| ggm wrote:
| There's a short fictional account of a science teacher
| constructing a gold leaf electroscope using stuff in the school,
| and plaster dug out of the wall of the classroom to help map
| radioactivity after a limited-strike nuclear war, in "Warday" by
| Whitley Strieber & James Kunetka. (at least one of these authors
| has a bit of a nutty back-story, It's important to remember the
| book lies solidly in the realms of fiction)
|
| I always thought it was somewhat fantastical. I'm rather
| delighted they could have beaded some polystyrene and stuck it in
| a cup for much the same effect.
|
| Several SF novels mention using scintillation plastic. Is that
| also simply fantasy, or are there passive scintillation meters
| which could in fact detect levels of radioactivity? The 1900s
| models demanded 20 minutes of acclimatisation inside a dark
| chamber and were notoriously hard to use. Rutherford refused to
| use a counter while he could show his trained workers (women
| mainly) were as accurate. Those counters were photomultiplier
| tubes. I think quite a lot of the tech here was a precursor to
| TV, and ultimately the CCD in some ways.
|
| Filmstrip exposure would tell you about a lethal dose, after the
| event. Helpful for budding scientists if they have enough lab
| rats to send out with a chunk of film in a wrapper.
| prpl wrote:
| Polyvinyl toluene is scintillation plastic.
| jprd wrote:
| Not the same thing, but had me remembering the "official" way
| of disposing of toluene after Chemistry lab in my US High
| School.
|
| Carefully carry it to the window overlooking the lower roof.
| Toss it on the roof. Let it evaporate.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| We poured ours down the drain.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Sounds like youre looking for the Kearny Fallout Meter:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kearny_fallout_meter
| labcomputer wrote:
| Scintillation plastic is very much a thing. Big accelerators,
| like CERN or Fermilab, used to use long, floppy strips of
| plastic attached to a photomultiplier tube, which goes to the
| counters. I believe they still use scintillator detectors
| farther from the collision region, but the trend has been to
| move towards silicon pixel detectors closer in.
|
| One thing with scintillators though: You're typically detecting
| a few photons at a time, so a photomultiplier tube (PMT) is
| really required for any kind of reasonable SNR with any kind of
| reasonable temporal resolution.
|
| > Those counters were photomultiplier tubes.
|
| A PMT is actually not a counter (but they are normally used
| _with_ a counter). It 's just a transducer that produces
| electrical charge at the output in response to photons at the
| input.
|
| Normally the PMT is connected to a "discriminator" (very fast
| voltage threshold detector, with adjustable threshold(s)) which
| takes the very narrow pulses (~2-3 ns) from the PMT and
| stretches them into pulses with fixed rise time, width and
| voltage. Those pulses are then counted using whatever hardware
| you can dream up.
|
| A PMT is really just an electron multiplier with a photocathode
| in front, so you have all the same issues as you do with
| electron multipliers and thus use a discriminator for all the
| same reasons (mainly to remove "runt pulses" that didn't
| originate from a photon at the input window). Normally you'd
| use a single level discriminator, but "multi-channel" ones
| exist also.
|
| Having an adjustable threshold on the discriminator is
| important to maximize SNR because the electron multiplier
| within the PMT will wear out and produce smaller pulses, and
| there can be significant variation in pulse size across serial
| numbers.
|
| > Rutherford refused to use a counter while he could show his
| trained workers (women mainly) were as accurate.
|
| I'm skeptical of this account, and the only thing I can find
| with a quick Google is that Rutherford hired women to count
| scintillation events because he could pay them less than
| men(-counters).
| zombot wrote:
| I once built an advertising efficacy detector. It was a voltmeter
| connected to a solar cell. The more light there was in a shop
| window, the stronger its advertising effect.
|
| Does this detector work equally well?
| Firerouge wrote:
| Accounting for inflation, the advertised price for one of these
| would of been roughly $240!
| wibbily wrote:
| Theodore Gray has one of these in his periodic table. This quote
| stood out to me:
|
| "I've held this thing up to the strongest sources of radiation I
| have and the balls don't budge... I think it's safe to say that
| if you do ever see the balls drop, you should run, not walk, to
| wherever you think there might be less radiation around."
|
| https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Samples/094.4/index.s...
| maxbond wrote:
| This website design is absurd and I love it. It works really
| well as a document but the skeumorph of it being a physical
| periodic table with samples that's also a wooden desk gets so
| disconnected from a physical metaphor as you drill in. Like, my
| desk has a zoom control?
|
| It has that feeling of hand spun websites from the aughts
| maintained with such care, like a curio cabinet. It's been a
| long time since I just clicked around one of these. There's a
| lot to be said for the simple and minimalistic designs that are
| more conventional today, and I'm going to continue laying out
| my HTML that way, but in comparison they're woefully lacking in
| character.
| anovikov wrote:
| Why not buy a normal radiometer? They are so cheap and mass
| produced.
|
| These days digital integrating radiometers are able to not just
| integrate dose over time, but also adjust for dose rate effects
| (i.e. same amount radiation absorbed over shorter time is more
| harmful), and ratio of beta, gamma, and neutrons. And they cost
| in the range of $200. I still keep my CD V-715 somewhere in the
| closet, though.
| xattt wrote:
| The "prepper" mindset was rampant in the 1960s because of
| uncertainty and fear around nuclear war. Radiation detectors
| would have been still costly for the average Joe, and this
| allowed people to feel _some_ level of preparedness.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > and this allowed people to feel some level of preparedness.
|
| I can imagine it now:
|
| "I can now afford to buy a device that will inform me if I'm
| about to die"
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's hideous but it's a sort of psychology that makes sense
| to me. You're faced with this overwhelming existential
| threat you can't really understand. And here's a cute
| consumer device marketed to you to that promises to give
| you some idea what might be happening. It's a way of
| establishing the feeling of control, even if it doesn't
| work very well.
| anovikov wrote:
| No, having some radiation indicating device is a lot better
| than not having one. It at least shows when it's safe to
| leave your basement for a short while or not.
| pnw wrote:
| I managed to find two of the missing patents mentioned on that
| page, because there's a picture of a device with four patent
| numbers on it.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US3093737A/en?oq=3093737
|
| According to the patent Walter Shriner was based in Springfield,
| Illinois, which was mentioned as "ground zero" for these devices.
|
| Shriners patent references the older 568 patent by Failla, who
| assigned it to the Atomic Energy Commission.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US2731568A/en?oq=2731568
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-17 23:01 UTC)