“A few months ago I stayed at a hotel room on a business trip which I found to be noticeably radioactive. The levels were (70 to 120 CPM vs. my 28 to 40 CPM background for the area). What confounded me most was that the readings were uniformly distributed throughout the entire hotel! What ever it was, it had to be at least 1 MeV in energy and gamma in nature… or so I suspected.
Just this week I returned to the same location and opted to stay in same hotel. This time I brought nearly $9,000 worth of equipment to find out why. This was a good first test of my new Polimaster 1703MO-1B gamma spectroscopic dosimeter, which should be able to identify the offending isotope and give me realistic dose rates. I was not let down!
The Polimaster identified the isotope involved as potassium 40 in a mere 60 minutes, but the results were plain to me in just ten minutes. I backed up these findings with my Spectrum Techniques UCS30 and my trusty Geiger counters (you always need a Geiger counter).”
Bottom line, the moral of the story is that these days, you are not safe just ‘trusting’ your food, your hotel, your car, and everything else to be ‘safe’. Everyone should have a pancake Geiger Counter and take it along to trips to the grocery store, shopping for clothes, on vacation, etc.
Radiation is invisible. There is no way to test EVERYTHING that goes to market to see if it is safe, on the manufacturing side, or so the government claims. They test at most 1% of what goes out and rely on companies to do the rest. We all know how well that works.
Buy a good Geiger Counter and test EVERYTHING, all the time. Your life and your families lives may very well depend on it, especially in these times of global scale disasters like Fukushima.
AGR Free Press 