Background radiation on my travels

[Sesselmann]

Hi all,

Some of you might be aware that I am on vacation in Europe at the moment and although I am technically not here on business, I carry my Atom-Swift personal dosimeter in my pocket. https://www.gammaspectacular.com/blue/g ... atom-swift

I have its threshold set to 500 nSv. but every now and then the alarm goes off in my pocket, once or twice walking past hospitals, where I assume they are using CT scanners, and once in Norway while looking at large impressive granite sculptures in the Vigelands park.

Rather more interesting was on the ship from Oslo to Copenhagen somewhere in the middle of the ocean when background level dropped to 7 nSv. which is about 1/10 normal background (better than a lead shield).

lowest-background

Another interesting experiment was measuring background on a flight from Oslo to Paris. This is essentially the same experiment Victor Hess performed around 1913 and just as he discovered, background radiation initially falls as the plane takes off, and falls quite low, but then it starts increasing and eventually stabilises around 5-6 times background on the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Francis_Hess

inflight background

Airport security gave me quite a bit of trouble when I asked them not to put the dosimeter through the baggage scanner 🤣

Next time I fly I would like to bring a gamma spectrometer and check if there are any peaks in the high altitude background.

Steven

[Magnus7]

I did also measure during a boat trip from Copenhagen to Oslo a couple of weeks ago and observed the very low radiation at sea.
I measured inside the ship first and expected the radiation to be higher outside ontop of the ship but I did not notice any difference.
The attached picture shows travel on board followed by 24 hours in Oslo, then a new boat trip back, and finally background in Copenhagen.
Registered as CPS by a RadiaCode 103 gamma spectrometer.
I thought that we got a lot of gamma fron the atmosphere but it looks like the main part comes from the ground.
Is that common knowledge?

[Rob Tayloe]

I have taken students on tours of nuclear power plants. A question arose about the danger from radiation to students during this tour. I obtained a G-M detector capable of logging the counts received each second. Following are some photos from the tour and the time dependent results from the G-M detector data that day. I am also attaching a graph using the same detector during an airplane trip from Albuquerque, NM, via Dallas, TX, to Columbus, OH. The detector went through x-ray scanners at the nuclear power plant and at the airport. Upon subtracting the x-ray scanner data, one finds the integrated exposure to be higher for the airplane trip than the reactor tour.

I hope the photos are shown in the correct order - sometimes this seems to be a problem for me.

GMC-300EPlus.jpg (19.92 KiB) Viewed 19274 times