Natural background radiation

[William Gaatjes]

Saw a documentary about nuclear energy called Pandora's promise.

And one the speakers, went all over the world with a Geiger counter and found some interesting places.
I looked up if there was a website and lo and behold, there is.

http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2013/01/22/hot-spots-earths-5-most-naturally-radioactive-places/
And the interesting part is that there seems to be no increase in cancer rates at these places.
But i do not know about birth defects and to be honest, we do have to take into account other usual suspects like chemical pollution first before blaming background radiation.

It was also about how low the background radiation level is in Chernobyl and near Fukushima in comparison with other big cities in the world.
Just as with the accident with the Demon core, radiation is all about intensity. The operator from demon core got zapped with neutron radiation and he died of acute radiation poisoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

In reality, even in a clean environment i think we constantly develop the very early stages of tumors. But a healthy body just takes care of it. But when you have an unhealthy lifestyle and eating the wrong kind of food and living in a environment that is severely poisoned, all add up and your body looses the battle.
Life itself has evolved in background radiation so it has evolved countermeasures against it.


edit:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X03002947
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html

 

[feralkid]

nm.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always thought it would be neat to mount some kind of Geiger counter on an antenna pole and have it take directional readings at certain intervals, could map out radiation levels like you would radio signals and see how it changes over time, and if there is an actual source that happens to appear you'd pick it up and where it's coming from. Something like this could be interesting around nuclear plants too.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Yeah, a radiation detector is easy to make with photodetectors like the BPW21 and the BPW34.
The cheapest version is to use such a photodiode, take the cap off and wrap it with aluminum foil in such a way that no light (or any EM radiation) shall enter.

Some math is needed to tune by using several layers of aluminum foil but with a BPW21 and BPW34 , a cheap detector can be made.
Analog (low noise) amplification and a mcu to do the counting for overall count like clicks per second, clicks per minute or hour, total amount of clicks per day.

When you search for: "aluminum foil photodiode radiation"
The first hits are pdf explaining how to build such a device.

https://www.google.nl/search?q=alum...irefox-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&ei=cqNWWJgV9MbwB5jBkpAM