[rerevisionist]

Added 23rd April 2013

News report that James McCormick, some sort of 'businessman', was found guilty of selling fake bomb, gas, and people detectors. His company was called ATSC. At the time of writing, no information was made available by the journalistic hacks as to how these devices were supposed to work, or even what their size and positioning when in use was. However, they were supposedly sold to many governments and official organisations. It's not clear from the badly-worded journalistic reports whether types of radiation were supposed to be detected.

There may have been bribery, fraud, collaboration so that bombs would remain undetected, and so on; but the lesson here must be that there is secrecy around the whole subject of metrology.

'Radiation' has been a public issue since about 1900 (radio waves, and X-rays) and more so since I suppose about 1920 (radium etc); there's been a further post-1945 boost with the use of microwaves, the discovery of such things as 'cosmic rays', and of course the 'nuclear weapons' and 'nuclear power' fallout mythology. The use of chemical warfare (Vietnam and Iraq etc) has added another layer of deception - the authorities prefer to allow blame for chemical damage to fall on radiation.
. It's as live a propaganda issue as it has ever been, and there's no sign of sanity being introduced. Just a comment suggested by this blog - typical of thousands---

Confirmed: EPA Rigged RADNET Japan Nuclear Radiation Monitoring Equipment To Report Lower Levels Of Fukushima Fallout
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/05/19/confirmed-epa-rigged-radnet-japan-nuclear-radiation-monitoring-equipment-report-levels-nuclear-fallout-22823/

The public are encouraged to think of 'tests' as something off-stage and invariably correct, as in 'AIDS test'. They are encouraged to accept the most ridiculous journalistic assertions. There's a good analogy with temperature: arguments rage over the 'temperature' of the earth, often with well-meaning participants, and yet, obviously when you think about it, it's impossible to measure the entire earth's temperature - quite apart from the effects of shadows, winds, air currents, seas, heating effects below ground, and all the rest of it. All quite apart from the accuracy of the equipment. Similarly with all the types of radiation...

At the present time, there seems to be no chance that the groups responsible for metrology will get together and present honest and accurate information on such issues. They are too politically and economically sensitive. But wouldn't it be nice if someone posted here or elsewhere reliable information on how, if at all, things like 'fallout' can be measured?

__________
A reminder, posted by NUKELIES 24 March 2011:

Yukio Edano, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, admits that they are not actually measuring radiation levels at Fukushima’s nuclear power plant (and cannot accurately do so), but are instead only “estimating” the radiation via the use of a computer simulation model.

From Is Japan Really Irradiated? japan-fukushima-was-radiation-a-lie.html
_________
Another comment:
The James Randi 'skeptics' have a link to http://www.world-nuclear-news.org which they describe with delightful naivete as an outlet put together by nuclear engineering professionals and science journalists to get accurate information out to the public.

The 'skeptics' also link, apparently seriously, to a site called 'boing boing' http://boingboing.net/2011/03/12/nuclear-energy-insid.html with a short piece consisting entirely of second-hand material.

See our site's comment on Randi and his pathetic band of pseudo-skeptics randi-JREF-revisionism-pseudo-skeptic.html

[rerevisionist]

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ON DETECTING RADIATION

[1] Photographic emulsion
Here's a summary of what happens; the technology is not the same as modern video detectors: The 'emulsion' is small crystals of silver halide (typically silver bromide) embedded in gelatin, which provides a slightly flexible base which also allows liquids to penetrate it. It looks milky, because of the tiny crystal fragments. A small amount of light causes a seeding effect - some crystals are affected, pretty much invisibly. 'Developers' are chemicals in water which cause the seed of silver to spread to the rest of the crystal. (Hence, larger crystals permit greater sentivity to light, but at the cost of graininess). Fixers remove the unexposed silver halide, by chemical reaction.

It was discovered by Becquerel that photosensitive material was fogged by radioactive materials depsite being wrapped in black material. The word 'radioactive' is a rather clumsy one, and must have been coined at about that time. This technology is still used - lapel clips or other devices are placed in environments with minerals etc subject to radioactive decay. When the film is developed, its measured darkness is related to the exposure. This can be regarded as established technology.

Here's a 1980s account of dosimetry; http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull252/25205381619.pdf Note that it's all dependent on photosensitive material.

[2] Geiger Counters
This is where the problems begin. The idea is fairly simple: an electric circuit has a small gap, exposed to air. If the conductivity in the gap drops enough, a charge passes. This can be measured and typically a sound is produced - the series of clicks made famous Hollywood-style.
. Quite a number of things increase conductivity: higher water content of the air, the presence of dust with any sort of charge - static electricity, lightning, electric circuits, magnetic fields; lower air pressure; ionised air caused by previous discharges. Geiger Counters do NOT detect neutrons. When an unstable element decays, neutrons and gamma rays are both given off, but gamma rays - just a type of elecromagnetic wave - vary in wavelength and other characteristics. I haven't been able to find any statement that gamma rays can be assumed to cause charges in air in any systematic way. This for example here's a British government site including metrology of ionising radiation - it doesn't even mention Geiger counters - http://www.bis.gov.uk/nmo/national-measurement-system/programmes/acoustics-and-ionising-radiation There are plenty of similar sites.
. The conclusion seem to be that Geiger counters may well be misleading. Note that it seems quite difficult to get reliable information on this topic; no doubt there's a sales and marketing aspect.

X-Rays
Can be generated indefinitely, given an electricity supply; they're different from radiocative decay. 'Cactusneedles', the 'father of nuke skepticism', believes or believed that the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly plant used large X Ray machine(s) to irradiate fraudulent bombs, under the pretext of imaging the interiors. This presumably means the 'bombs' must contain substance(s) which respond to X rays by shopwing up as 'radioactive' later.

[rerevisionist]

Here are some unedited comments from a 3 minute Youtube video by 'electrosyl', put up Mid-August 2011. To show the incredible confusion over units of measurement, methods of measurement, and interpretations.

Radioactivity in rain 20 000cpm / sq. meter Toronto Canada!!!

Apparently, thunderstorms concentrate radon gas because the atoms are positively charged and are attracted to electrically charged thunderclouds. There is also 214Bistmuth and 214 Lead in the rain, they are daughter isotopes of radon. - I never knew rain could be so radioactive! - Diamonddavej 11 hours ago

How many? seiverts's is 20,000 CPM's? - SuperNewf1 1 day ago

Discount N-13, its a positron->gamma emitter. I'm going through lists of atmospheric-source radionuclides with candidate half-lives? and beta/alpha emission. Doesn't look promising. - mouse454 2 days ago

Could it be that there is enough new uranium free on the surface of the planet from bomb testing, mining, Wars (Bosnia, Iraq, ect) fukushima/semi-valley/ect, stacks of depleted in Tennessee, ect to explain an increase of free radon in the rain? If so this would be a global phenomenon, but again I think? meteorology would explain a lot of this when put together with radiation physics of local (T.E.)N.O.R.M. sources. - joelb79 3 days ago
@joelb79 The more I think of it, your idea has merit. The NWO uses Uranium in all it's forms as a weapon for depopulation around the world . Then the uranium "gasses" off radon with a half life of 8 days, it travels the world's jet stream, the radon decays to it's daughters, gets washed out by the rain and I then report high counts! But what I don't understand is radon is heavy (x8 air), how is it getting into the Jet stream if the Uranium crap is on the ground? How is it getting up? there? - electrosyl 3 days ago

This is probably washout of Radon in the atmosphere. This is occurring now, and it occurred before the Fukushima catastrophe. Please seek out expert opinion before? you make conclusions about this. - cdgr0820 6 days ago

So fuking retarded - all these random numbers & nobody compares it 2 N E thing relevant, like equivalent sun exposure, or microwave oven, or cell phone on your head, or WHATEVER! & Rense site is flooded with this endless krap of meaningless stats nobody bothers 2 explain the health FX of? = LAME! - Deathrape2001 6 days ago


[....]
@electrosyl - Yes. You're quoting the standard line. ["Each time a particle comes in, a sudden drop in the electrode voltage causes a click in the speaker of the unit and moves the needle of the meter a certain amount".] Suppose as another example you have rubber shoes and get an electrostatic charge. Presumably that meter will show a high reading if the charge gets discharged slowly by e.g. dust in the atmosphere. What people are getting at here is that the reading is hard to interpret. And neutrons are what fission is supposed to give off; if there's a 'radiation danger' and you can't measure them, what use is the meter? You might? at least acknowledge - rerevisionist 4 days ago
@rerevisionist - Not all decay releases neutrons. Look on the web, see what it takes to detect free neutrons and you'll see that? most people can't afford that equipment. Geiger counters are affordable. I'm very well aware that corona discharge can mimic Geiger counts. I'm a tech and I can recognized problems like that. I assure you my instrument was worked properly. Look at the video, when I bring sample the counts go up, when I remove the sample the counts go down. Corona discharge is constant. - electrosyl 3 days ago
[....]

hi, damn thats not normal 20.000 cpm only seen it that high when 3 ppl from safecast went to fukushima look for :How I spent my Sunday in Fukushima real nice report? and scary numbers. i dont think it from geo-engineering but cant be sure ofcoz but we are beeing sprayed 2-3 times a day here in holland/europe and we dont see those jumps in CPM or µSv/h, before fuku we had 13-20 cpm as normal background rad. and now its 30-45 avarage and jumps when it rains to 60-70 cpm. - SoSanl76 6 days ago

[rerevisionist]

1983 film by ABC Motion Pictures' writing credited to Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, both somewhat novices to film scripts. No technical advisers listed. The usual disclaimers seem to be missing - or maybe they were removed from a 2005 free handout version.

Here's a summary of the technical material only:-
**Landscape related to Cimarron, New Mexico and Crescent, Oklahoma
**Kerr-McGee plant ('Nuclear Facility') shown, including name and logo, but not the full extent of the 'plant'
**Workers with glove-boxes with mechanical mixers combining uranium oxide and plutonium oxide (greenish powder, according to the shooting script notes) - this goes into a 'slugging press' and comes out in short silvery metallic rods
**Latex gloves to keep hands contaminant-free
**Some sort of detector checks hands are not contaminated - 'MONITOR YOURSELF ON THE WAY OUT'
**Test of loud alarm (as scene-setting - audience will know what it is)
**'Hot truck' being dismembered by welding equipment and buried, in 'baggies'
**Incident with contamination - workers in respirators
**Incident with worker being scrubbed after being 'cooked', but not a nasal smear
**Incident with Silkwood setting off alarm, being scrubbed
**Silkwood character reads union material - no acceptable level for plutonium
**Silkwood character moved to 'metallography'; sees her boss retouching negatives of cross-sections
**Union (I think unnamed) in Washington takes an interest and wants evidence
**More than a kilo of plutonium rumoured to be short
**Silkwood sets off alarm, again - scrubbed again. House checked and deemed dangerously radioactive. Silkwood at Los Alamos is deemed (by sensitive equipment) to have about 6 nanocuries of americium in her lungs.
**Car crash perhaps with retouched negatives, though 'none were found'


Notes--
[1] Legal position of comments: I have to assume that actors saying things like "They're trying to kill me - you know that" and
"They [employees] all look like they died before they died" and "make sure he's telling the truth cos there's a lot a liars round here" are purely for effect and have no necessary basis in fact - they're the sort of things those people might have said. But what about implications - 'The precise circumstances of death are not known', 'A year later the plant shut down', "We are 3 months short on this contract... there's only 1 million dollars in the hole.."? There must be elaborate laws on what's legal, and it's perfectly clear they must be biased towards the film industry. I don't what they are and have never seen any informed comment on this topic - all the TV programmes I've ever seen on films avoid these things.
[2] Kerr-McGee (if Wiki is a guide) had oil, gas, and coal interests mostly determined geographically, in SW USA, and related interests - forestry, some chemicals. More recently it was involved in sites dotted around the world - maybe they'd been reading 'Lonely Planet' guidebooks - then sold off in 2006. Anyway, according to Wiki -
. Kerr McGee had nuclear interests after about 1952. 'It received licenses in 1962 from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for processing uranium and thorium, and in 1963 for enriched uranium. In about 1965 it started producing uranium fuel ... 1973-1975 it would produced mixed Plutonium-Uranium Oxide (MOX) 'driver fuel pins' for use in the Fast Flux Test Facility at the Hanford Site in Washington State. In 1970 a plant started turning yellowcake uranium into uranium hexafluoride. In 1987 it began producing depleted uranium tetrafluoride using depleted uranium hexafluoride as input.
. None of the above is quantified by Wiki, but it certainly sounds relatively minor and incidental. The organisation doesn't seem to have run electrical power stations, or for that matter gas supplied or gasoline stations, but seems to have been fuel only.
[3] The film is certainly rather weird, at least on re-examination. For example--
**Where's the information on production of U235 - presumably some gas diffusion plant?
**How can a greenish or brownish powder be compressed to give a silvery finish?
**If plutonium is so dangerous, how can latex gloves give serious protection against a glovebox leak?
**As one of the characters says, why didn't the union get involved before, if they genuinely believed plutonium was so dangerous as to be in effect unworkable?
**A retouched negative is easy to detect, as the once-smooth gelatin surface is obviously marked - this doesn't show on a print, but is hard to hide on a negative
**Can a Geiger counter style device reliably detect a microscopic quantity of plutonium waved in front of it?
**Surely there are legal limitations on portraying companies like that without evidence?
[4] Is all this consistent with nuclear power as some sort of hoax?
Yes!


Just for fun - notes on the human interest of the film
**Interesting to note the Jewish promotional stuff throughout; whites are shown as having minimal vocabularies with short words, some as hicks with huge families, some as single parents with drunk/ violent exes, not liking blacks, and so on - invariably with absolutely no knowledge of the outside world.
**There's lesbian promotion with the Cher character, a media theme of that time
**It's quite funny to see what I take to be product placement, including a 'white Honda civic', Coca Cola (machine carefully visible in lunch break scenes, and open bottles), Coors canned beer, and Silkwood advertising then-new time-release cold symptoms suppressants - "like the ones you see on TV"

[Ranb]

[2] Geiger Counters
This is where the problems begin. The idea is fairly simple: an electric circuit has a small gap, exposed to air. If the conductivity in the gap drops enough, a charge passes. This can be measured and typically a sound is produced - the series of clicks made famous Hollywood-style.
. Quite a number of things increase conductivity: higher water content of the air, the presence of dust with any sort of charge - static electricity, lightning, electric circuits, magnetic fields; lower air pressure; ionised air caused by previous discharges. Geiger Counters do NOT detect neutrons. When an unstable element decays, neutrons and gamma rays are both given off, but gamma rays - just a type of elecromagnetic wave - vary in wavelength and other characteristics. I haven't been able to find any statement that gamma rays can be assumed to cause charges in air in any systematic way. This for example here's a British government site including metrology of ionising radiation - it doesn't even mention Geiger counters - http://www.bis.gov.uk/nmo/national-measurement-system/programmes/acoustics-and-ionising-radiation There are plenty of similar sites.
. The conclusion seem to be that Geiger counters may well be misleading. Note that it seems quite difficult to get reliable information on this topic; no doubt there's a sales and marketing aspect.

I think most of your paragraph on GM detectors is misleading. The GM tube is a sealed tube, sometimes with a mylar window to allow detection of beta radiation in addition to gamma radiation. The "air" in the tube is usually a dry gas designed to flash (ionize) then rapidly recombine so it can detect another ionizing event. A GM tube can indirectly detect neutrons that are absorbed and decay releasing gamma or betas.

Radiation detection and meaurement can be determined by how gammas reacted to air. Read up on reontgen and how that unit is measured.

Look up the market for dosimeters. The market is large.

Ranb

[rerevisionist]

Well, it's the 'indirect' detection that's the problem. And the fact that it's difficult to get explicit descriptions of how 'meters' and so on work. In fact it's not surprising; if it were possible, people would have known for decades that there was no radiation at Hiroshima. The fact is that the Fukushima operators themselves don't even attempt to measure 'radiation'. So there are clearly problems with the whole subject.

[Ranb]

There are detectors for measuring neutron radiation. Why are you having a hard time finding out how neutron detectors work? That information is readily available. I use neutron detectors at work. When a ship is getting ready to leave the yard after an overhaul, one of the things we do is check the integrity of the reactor shielding. With the reactor at high power, we carefully measure gamma and neutron radiation levels on contact with the shield. Reactor power instruments are calibrated and we can verify that the shield is intact and radiation levels are within those allowed for safe operation of the reactor.

Why are you claiming that there was no radiation at Hiroshima?

I was in Japan a few days after the earthquake and tsunami. I flew over as part of a team to assist the shipyard's efforts to decontaminate the US Navy ships that participated in relief efforts. The airborne contamination we dealt with was very real. It contained isotopes expected in nuclear fallout from a reactor that overheated. It was an interesting difference to the way we normally operated. Most of the activity quickly decayed. Our samples showed that radioactive iodine was not a major problem and only a few people needed to take potassium-iodine as a precaution to reduce I-131 uptake in the thyroid.

The contamination from the damaged reactors in Fukushima was very real. It was readily detected in the air in Yokosuka by routine monitoring. While it was hard to get data at times from the Japanese, we knew enough from our own monitoring to keep out of danger.

I am trained to respond to casualties involving high radiation levels. The guys at the power plants in Fukushima had real guts operating there if you ask me.

Ranb

[ApolloGnomon]

Well, it's the 'indirect' detection that's the problem. And the fact that it's difficult to get explicit descriptions of how 'meters' and so on work. In fact it's not surprising; if it were possible, people would have known for decades that there was no radiation at Hiroshima. The fact is that the Fukushima operators themselves don't even attempt to measure 'radiation'. So there are clearly problems with the whole subject.

A few helpful links about geiger counters:

http:// www.galacticelectronics.com/GeigerCounter.HTML
Includes schematics for the circuit

http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~lecturedem ... 88.30.html
Laboratory procedure information for a college course

http://www.albert-cordova.com/Cdv700/ge ... unters.htm
Helpful information for those in the market for Geiger counters, with descriptions of other techniques also used to detect radiation

http://www.creative-science.org.uk/geiger.html
Another description of a home-built Geiger counter with schematics.

Several sources for Geiger/Muller tubes currently available:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8875
http://www.imagesco.com/geiger/geiger-counter-tube.html
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=geiger+tube
http://www.lndinc.com/products/category/34/
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main ... cts_id=773

Sources for prebuilt Geiger counters and DIY Kits:
http://www.geigercounters.com/
http://www.imagesco.com/geiger/geiger-counter-kits.html
http://www.scientificsonline.com/portab ... unter.html
http://www.gammascout.com/
http://www.radmeters4u.com/

[rerevisionist]

We're not interested in links; we're interested in genuine information from informed people. You are incapable of either and are banned.

[ApolloGnomon]

You stated "it's difficult to get explicit descriptions of how 'meters' and so on work."

I presented information that I thought might help you understand "how meters and so on" work. Schematics, easily built by electronics hobbyists (I built one in high school with surplus parts); sources for the geiger tubes; complete commercially available units; descriptions and explanations for how they work and how to use them.

Your choice to reject the information out of hand, call me a troll and threaten to ban me does not bespeak a great deal of confidence in your knowledge base. It appears, instead, quite fearful of information

You state in another thread "The policy of this site is to encourage incisive debate." I don't see it. Instead, you've banned anyone who comes along and offers "the cut and thrust of of debate."

I haven't challenged your nuke myth, I've simply offered explanatory information on a couple of topics I know about, electronics and space hardware. Banning everyone who wanders into your little closed-loop doesn't seem like arguing from a position of strength but from a position of weakness.

I'd rather see you beat the crap out of my statements with information. But if you think banning me is the best (or only) way to defend your precious notions, by all means do so. Then I win.

Wanna win? Don't ban me. Prove me wrong with facts and information.

Or, you can follow through on your petty threat to ban me, proving that your ideas don't stand up to casual scrutiny.