Radiation Detection Goes Digital 58
RedEaredSlider writes "In science fiction, explorers wave around a single device and pick up many kinds of radiation — think of the tricorders on Star Trek or Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver. A professor at Oregon State University is bringing that a bit closer to reality, though in this case it's for finding radioactive material. It's a radiation spectrometer, and it works on a very old principle: particles and photons that hit certain materials will make them emit flashes of light. But for decades, radiation spectrometers had been limited to detecting only one kind of radiation at a time. David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, felt that there was a need for a device that could see at least two kinds of radiation, as well as be smaller than the models currently available."
Re:Not news. (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it is because a beta radiation detector is useless if it is in your pocket.
Beta radiation detectors in general don't have a lot of use in the field because there is always gamma radiation with beta radiation. And small gamma detectors already exist, such as the digital electronic portable dosimeters workers at nuclear plants use. If there is a question about beta dose, these same workers have thermoluminescent dosimeters with beta windows that can be analyzed on-site. If you actually need to survey an area, you can always use a beta-gamma dosimeter, but you would only do that if you were health physics tech.
There is no real use for this device.
Re:Not news. (Score:5, Interesting)
Beta particles (electrons ejected from the nucleus, basically) have a mean free path of about a foot in air. Place anything else in between, like a thin sheet of aluminum or a little bit of plastic, and it sucks up the betas real quick.
The other big problem is that gammas are quantized, beta particles are not. When something radioactively decays, it gives off gamma rays of distinct, unique energies -- very useful for determining the radioactive isotope you're looking at. Not so for betas; they're emitted over a wide range of energies, and it can be very difficult (but not impossible) to tell what you're looking at by betas alone. I don't mean to downplay what this accomplishes, in a nice, small form factor. But this doesn't revolutionize the world of radiation detection. To date, no one has really been crying for a combined, digital, gamma and beta detector. Maybe if you build it, they will come, but I don't see a large market for this.