Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Where can I buy radioactive isotape with higher power?

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SiliconWizard:
Can't wait for someone to come and ask how they can get ahold of enriched uranium.
 ;D

magic:
Who cares if it's banned? :-// :P

Assuming it is, dunno, IANAL.

LaserSteve:
True fact, certain brands of packing tape generate weak x-rays when pulled off certain surfaces in a vacuum...   Researchers in the US and Russia independently discovered this. So if he would have asked for Xsotape....

Steve

LaserSteve:
Read up on David Charles Hahn, and his backyard EPA Superfund site  if you need an idea of why large scale  home nuclear reactions can be a bad idea...

EDIT, Take a look at Slide 14 in this publication:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1121/ML11210B521.pdf

Steve

Cerebus:
Just for the hell of it, I did some back of the envelope calculations as to the possible level of lethality of a 1 curie gamma source.

A 1 Curie (37 GBq) cobalt 60 gamma source would, if unshielded and radiating isotropically, deliver an 8 Sievert dose of radiation into a 70 kg man if the source was held 30 cm in front of their chest for 24 hours. Because I did simple maths there's probably a fudge factor of say 3 either way. That is the effects could be either 3 times higher or three times lower, but as a ballpark figure it's a fair indicator of the radiation dosing risks of a 1 Curie gamma source made using the most popular material for commercial high activity gamma sources, 60Co (This source would only contain 840 µg of 60Co).

A dose of 8 Sv (over a short period of time) is enough to kill a human in short order with 99% probability, a dose of 5 Sv over a short period of time is an LD50/30, that is a dose with a probable lethality of 50% within the next thirty days. So, yeah, this is a dangerously powerful source and would require careful, controlled handling.

If you were 300 metres away from the same (unshielded, isotropically radiating) source, it would effectively double your (world average) absorbed dose from background radiation from 3 mSv/year to 6 mSv/year - about the same effect as moving from the UK to Finland.

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