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New Hand-Held Detector Determines Radiation Type
Red Leader writes: "This article covers a new portable radiation detector. A serious problem with conventional Geiger counters is that they don't indicate the type of radiation they're picking up. Thus, fissile material can be disguised as medical stuffs. This device uses a 'low-power cryogenic cooling mechanism originally designed for the aerospace industry' to cool a germainum detector rather than a really big thick-walled steel tank of liquid nitrogen."
Since there are no unique medical uses for uranium, that shouldn't be a problem.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
As other psoters have mentioned, Uranium does not have medical uses.
However, Plutonium-238 was (is?) used as a power source in some pacemakers. It's not the bomb isotope, so I guess this detector will be able to tell the difference.
They didn't specifically say that they use a GeLi detector (they could also use high purity Ge).
One should mention that GeLi detectors need to be cooled all the time, even when not in operation, otherwise the Li distribution in the Ge crystal would be destroyed and the detector useless. This is not the case for high purity Ge detectors.