Scintillocartography
ivan.sanchezortega.es
Scintillocartography
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Scintillocartography
#2One line in the piece says "Observing the direct effects of radiation, although possible, requires extraordinary circumstances.". While this is mostly true, you can actually observe radiation directly, with your own eyeballs, without any extraordinary methods. Basically all you need is a radioactive source, scintillator and a very dark room. That's how scintillation counting was done back in the day. This sort of device is called a Spinthariscope, you can find examples of them on youtube and what you see is a lot like the map in the OP. So I'd say the author did a good job.
Re: Scintillocartography
#3Interesting read, it culminates in making a sparkly twinkly map to graphically convey radon location and strength which seems a bit 1980s to my mind.
For the work in Nuclear Sessions I’ve used a 2017 dataset of radon potential, published by the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council.
This dataset was selected purely on the basis of availability: it was the easiest (and first) geographic dataset regarding radiation to be found.
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...
The usual practice is to accumulate one second sample windows of the gamma spectrum while travelling at 70 m/s, normalise the data to remove various wobble factors, and extract three significant channels to form an RGB image - you can always add fiddle layers to indicate radon or out of band features (such as uncommon trace elements from atomic tests).
That said when reading the title I though this might be about the new trend in radiometric sampling - using a scintallation source surround by layered spinning masks - when you get a gamma spark you can better guess to some degree the direction of the source, when many gamma interactions accumulate you can build up a pretty decent 3-D image of gamma sources surrounding your instrument.
One of these was recently trialed in the HN infamous Western Australia Mining Company loses Radiactive Source! stories from earlier this year.
Re: Scintillocartography
#4One line in the piece says "Observing the direct effects of radiation, although possible, requires extraordinary circumstances.". While this is mostly true, you can actually observe radiation directly, with your own eyeballs, without any extraordinary methods. Basically all you need is a radioactive source, scintillator and a very dark room. That's how scintillation counting was done back in the day. This sort of dev…
The author probably counts these as indirect effects, as it is the collision of the α particles with zinc sulfide, and not a direct effect of radiation like Cherenkov.
Re: Scintillocartography
#5The actual map animated map: https://ivan.sanchezortega.es/2023-02-radonmap/radonmap.html
Re: Scintillocartography
#6I suppose this is as good place as any to ask: What is a good scintillating detector for DIY use? Geiger tubes are relatively easy to find, but all scintillators I could find were "ask for pricing" scientific equipment or some dubious old russian military stock (which I don't want even if it works).
Re: Scintillocartography
#7> This blue glow has barely entered popular culture. The only two examples I’m aware of are the cinematographic depictions of the Chernobyl disaster, and the ficticious Nuka-Cola Quantum non-alcoholic beverage in the Fallout videogame series.
Don't forget Dr Manhattan from Watchmen!
Re: Scintillocartography
#8I suppose this is as good place as any to ask: What is a good scintillating detector for DIY use? Geiger tubes are relatively easy to find, but all scintillators I could find were "ask for pricing" scientific equipment or some dubious old russian military stock (which I don't want even if it works).
Geiger tubes are click counters - number of gamma ray events within a large window, but was that click from Potassium by products, Uranium decaying, or Thorium falling apart?? Or, shock, horror, something "radioactive" from atomic fallout!! You'll never know.
If you want to identify stuff, you'll be looking for an energy spectrum.
If you're after an actual spectrum and you're thinking DIY then a starting point is a thalium doped sodium iodine cyrstal and electronics
https://alphaspectra.com/scintillation-detector-manufacturin...
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2-inches-NaI-Scintill...
Alibaba is listing a single 50mm round x 50mm thick crystal plus electronics at 3K USD each (less than 10) which seems steep to me given years back we used 42 litre crystal packs (with CSIRO grown crystals and in house PhD electronics engineers, etc - so YMMV).
Now your problem is sampling the output levels several thousand times a second, binning the counts, and having a calibration source and compensating for tempreture drift.
You can buy a box that'll do that for you or you can DIY that with reference to radiometric survey field guides (there's one from AGSO - probably Bob Minty has his name on it).
A good all in one handheld is probably something like https://www.radiationsolutions.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03...
which is one of those "contact us and get a quote" jobs from a Canadian company of good repute with Jens Hovgaard, a Finn, as the Tech CEO | President.
He knows his stuff and has an industry algorithm named after him .. although others did similar work elsewhere about the globe.
Re: Scintillocartography
#9I suppose this is as good place as any to ask: What is a good scintillating detector for DIY use? Geiger tubes are relatively easy to find, but all scintillators I could find were "ask for pricing" scientific equipment or some dubious old russian military stock (which I don't want even if it works).
I've had my eye on this one. Not affiliated, just looks fun.
Re: Scintillocartography
#10> This blue glow has barely entered popular culture. The only two examples I’m aware of are the cinematographic depictions of the Chernobyl disaster, and the ficticious Nuka-Cola Quantum non-alcoholic beverage in the Fallout videogame series. Don't forget Dr Manhattan from Watchmen!
At least in Brazil, because of this pretty infamous accident, people now know to be aware of blue light sources.