by Doug Coulter » Fri Apr 08, 2011 12:29 pm
Yeah, that's my take, good calibration source -- the best. In the tubes, they have a lot of gas pressure for it to work with. Almost every other possible calibration source (eg your basic hot rock of some ore or whatever) has so many daughter products and lines you need a really good gamma spec to even resolve it all - fun to look at after you have one, but not that useful to get there in the first place.
Bill does want me to do an experiment, and as soon as the weather is right, I'm going to do it. We have a shoebox of very hot rocks and other sources. It reads a few millirem/hour from outside the box, I'd guess if we used them all, about 10 mrem/hr. The idea is to get two boxes, one with hot rocks, one with just rocks. Put a couple slices of bread in a baggie in each one. See which one molds worst/first. I think this will be less effective than the short UV breadbox I saw online, but who knows? Might get some interesting mutations on the molds or something. I'll do that in my remote storage building, where I'm not exposed myself -- no one hangs out there and it's far from here, so it should be reasonably safe to do and is a good place to store things like that. Even in a lead pig, most of that stuff gives off radon.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.