Fake Trinitite Spectrum

[Geoff]

Well, I got burned on this one. I bought a "certified authentic" piece of Trinitite a few months ago and just tested it yesterday. Attached is the 24 hour spectrum with background subtracted.

fake trinitite.JPG

[Steve Dubyk]

Ouch, it looks like typical U ore. Trinitite has dominant peaks from Cs-137 and Am-241, with lots of little peaks from Eu-152, -154, and other nuclides. I can post a couple of papers in the library that show the spectrum from trinitite.

Steve Dubyk

[brehwens]

Hi Geoff,

That sucks... I bought my trinitite sample via a contact from the Yahoo forum, so it was kind of failsafe. I could also verify that it was indeed trinitite.
Still, the 3x3" probe I used picks up lots from the background as well and the trinitie sample was weak, so a smaller probe and more lead could possibly be more informative. I hope to be able to test this in the time to come.

[Steve Dubyk]

I've attached a file with a few more examples of the trinitite spectrum, using different probes. I do like using trinitite for testing, especially to see the 26 and 59 keV from cesium and americium.

Steve

[Geoff]

I used my 4.5x.75 inch NaI detector and ran it for 24 hours. Then I ran the background for 24 hours and subtracted that to get my spectrum.

Here is all the data

blah.JPG

[cicastol]

Hi, i've taken a 16h spectra of a Trinitite sample, 3"x3" Luuk detector with my new modular lead shield.
Main peaks are from 241Am ,137Cs and Eu154/152

[Sesselmann]

Geoff (and others),

I'm not sure what you are seeing, but the images hosted by photobucket are just showing an add to upgrade my account. This forum typically hosts its own images, so please resize your images to a reasonable size < 900x900 and upload them in a standard format.

3rd. party hosting can be unreliable and could result in meaningless posts hanging without images.

Thanks..

Steven

[Geoff]

Sorry Steven. I saw the news about this a while ago. I'll go through all my posts and fix broken images.