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Testing Geiger Counters
thesandbender writes "My girlfriend's family lives in Japan and is very interested in obtaining geiger counters for testing food and other materials. Geiger counters are now impossible to get in Japan and are on long back order from most providers in the U.S. which makes me suspicious of anything we can get our hands on. My question is, what's the best way to test/verify a geiger counter. I know I can point it at a smoke detector and it should go off but I'm not sure what I should see on the gauge. We'd even take it to any reasonable local facilities for testing (NYC area). Any input would be greatly appreciated!"
A common way to test a Geiger counter is to use a small sample of Vaseline glass such as a bead. The glass contains a small amount of uranium oxide which should be detectable.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Well, perhaps an Ionization type detector, but probably not other types, like Optical.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Geiger counters are not really useful for food testing. They generally won't detect alpha radiation which is the most harmful type. Besides, elevated concentration of caesium or strontium can be easily mimicked by elevated levels of natural K-40.
They really need to stop worrying about food testing. Or get a professional radiometer (which will cost $$$$).
"Point it at a smoke detector" won't work: the americium in smoke detectors emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the walls of the detector. There's no sense messing around here: if you want to do it, do it right. You will need a little bit of money and the ability to do math.
Buy a calibrated radiation source: you can buy them here, among other places. They're relatively cheap -- tens of dollars. Cs137 is very easy to get, but you also might want to get some Sr90, which is a pure beta emitter. These sealed disks contain such a tiny amount of radioactive material that the risk to health from them is negligible, and they can be mailed and used without a license. However, I do not know mailing them internationally is legal or wise.
(The same company will also sell you a lead container to hold your sources in, but I'll tell you from personal experience that quite a few gamma rays will go right through the container.)
Put the source in front of the detector, a short distance away. If your detector is working, it should start clicking/beeping like crazy. Calculate the count rate. By working out the geometry, looking up the properties of your source, and converting curies to counts per second (hey, nobody said this would be easy), you can work out the "efficiency" of the detector. Move the source farther from the detector: the counts should fall off as an inverse square law.
Now that the detector is calibrated, you can use that efficiency factor to calculate the radioactivity of an *unknown* source.
Important note: while these sources are generally considered safe, the radiation they emit will be *many* orders of magnitude more than any contamination in Japanese food products. You can look at this fact in two ways: either this shows that concerns about food safety are overblown, or suggests that the best way to protect yourself from unnecessary radiation is to not do this experiment.
If you don't have access to or don't want to buy calibrated radiation sources, you can buy yourself some "No Salt" salt substitute, which is food-grade potassium chloride. The naturally radioactive potassium-40 in it is easily detectable with a good Geiger counter: you can look up the natural abundance of 40K and do a little chemistry to figure out the number of curies in a carefully measured gram of KCl, and use it as a calibration standard.
If Geiger counters are hard to buy, you can make one. Here's an absolutely brilliant video on how to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6Q7VfWdgEg
The basic idea, and brilliance, is simple. Get a plastic scintillator and hook it up to a CCD camera. Use a time exposure to record the flashes of light, and you have a cheap and easy Geiger counter.
That's a radiation detector, but it's not a Geiger counter.
Of course, what the poster wants most probably is just a radiation detector (and the Geiger counter is just the one radiation detector he knows of), so your advice isn't wrong; it's just wrong to call that a Geiger counter.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Certain kinds of plaster board are made from material recovered at cement furnaces and it too has a quite high radiation level.
Radiation measurements are part of my job, I'm certified for it and I can tell you making a useful measurement of foodstuff requires expensive gear and a lot of time.
A simple way of checking the counter is to point it downwards to a non-polluted part of the ground, record the reading in counts/sec, this is called the background radiation.
Background radiation is as low as 4-8 counts at sea and around 30-40 in an area with clay or granite. Going up in the mountains might expose you to ~100 counts/sec from cosmic radiation. Now point it at the object you want to check, when the reading is less than 3x the background it can be considered non-polluted. That doesn't mean it's safe but at least there's less worry.
The biggest problem is these meters will not show you all radiation, usually only Gamma and Beta radiation while Alpha can be just as dangerous. Some sorts of radiation have a hard time passing through even a thin layer of moisture, that includes the skin of vegetables.
All in all, buying a Geiger counter is most likely a total waste of money and certainly a source of misinterpretation.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
geiger counters for testing food and other materials
Geiger counters are absolutely useless for testing anything other than minerals, background radiation and things like ventilation ducts (surprisingly a major collector of everything radioactive). After Chernobyl disaster I made, used and later calibrated a simple Geiger-counter-based ionizing radiation meter, and it was useful to determine how contaminated the areas around my city (Gomel) were. The result was exactly the same as what was confirmed later -- some short-lived contamination within the city (easily attributable to I-131 due to distinctive half-life around a week), mostly clean to the southwest, more contamination (longer-lived, counter was useless for determining its nature but later I have learned that it was Sr-90, Cs-134 and Cs-137) to the northeast.
However to test anything that even resembles food, you need a gamma spectrometer, complete with a test chamber made of lead bricks. I happened to participate in those measurements much later, and I am certain, Japanese environmental/food safety authorities are already using something similar now. You have absolutely no chance to get anything close to it on your own, so just don't.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Use common kitchen salt (NaCl). It contains a small amount of potassium chloride (KCl). The amount of KCl in the salt you buy should be listed on the packaging. 0.012% of the KCl present will contain a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium, potassium-40 (half-life of 1.3 billion years). So, if you weigh the amount of salt you test with your Geiger counter, you should be able to figure out how much potassium-40 you have. The specific activity of potassium-40 is 0.0000071 Curie/gram. One Curie is 3.7×10^10 decays per second, so one gram of potassium-40 should give you 263000 decays per second, one milligram of potassium-40 should give you 263 decays/second, and so on. By comparing your measurement results to what you would expect, you can tell how well your Geiger counter is performing. Be ready to measure for at least several minutes, though.