Comments on Nuke Pro: Food Testing with Geiger, Gamma Scintillator by Antiproton, for Radiation

Thank you for sharing this. I am glad that I watc...

2016-02-17T22:12:42.671-08:00

Thank you for sharing this. I am glad that I watched the second video first. Excellent overview. I wish I had seen it sooner! Kelly AT

Amazing clarity. Or I should say - as close to cla...

2014-03-30T06:57:45.144-07:00

Amazing clarity.
Or I should say - as close to clarity as I have ever gotten.
I'm totally floored for the detailed explanation. Thank you for your help. Will recommend this page to anybody with these questions - not many around me at the moment, but - unfortunately - I'm sure there will be many, very soon. :(

Food testing is tricky. I haven't tried it y...

2014-03-29T07:29:03.676-07:00

Food testing is tricky. I haven't tried it yet. But water blocks radiation quickly, so anything moist will be blocking all of the Alpha, and most of the Beta, probably most of the gamma will come out, one reason Gamma is particularly nasty is that it doesnt get stopped quickly.

To test food, take a sample, weight it, dry it out completely, pulverize it into a powder (think about your lungs now, if you think there is actually radioactivity, take precautions) put it in round tray the same size as your pancake type geiger sensor, and place geiger directly over (but NEVER touch) and run a test for 1 hour, total count.

Compare it to "background" which you took with the geiger over the empty tray, the previous hour, while you were preparing the food sample.

Keep in mind, you only detected half of the radiation....the other half going down away from the geiger went the other direction. Now you have to divide the net click per hour by the efficiency of your geiger, which may vary by type of radiation, Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

Now divide your click per hour by 3600 to get click per second.

That will give you an OK Bq

Now divide by the weight in Kg of your sample. I would use the "wet weight" because you want to know....how many bequerel in1 kG of fish, or apples, in their wet state, because you will be eating wet food.

I would think twice about anything over 10 Bq/kG,

Thank you so much stock! So the way you measure be...

2014-03-29T02:36:10.760-07:00

Thank you so much stock! So the way you measure bequerels would be :

1.Set your geiger to counts per second ( CPS)
2.Measure the weight of food item ( how many kg)
3. Divide CPS by kg ?

Or is that an over simplification ?

The school ground dirt in my hometown in Japan measured 75bq/kg last august for cesium.
I'm still trying to understand what that means.

Watch the second video, you will then understand W...

2014-03-27T16:20:18.164-07:00

Watch the second video, you will then understand What a CPM is in relation to a Bq. Simply when a decay hit a Geiger Mueller tube or pancake, it creates a "click".
But Geigers are different shape and sizes and have varying ability to detect radiation (thats called efficiency). A bigger pancake type will "catch" more clicks than a smaller tube.

Also some are just better quality...they will catch more, even of lower energy decays. Now watch the video of the food sample ...you can see how your geiger would only be catching a portion of the radiation. And some 50% that hits your geiger wouldn't even cause a click.

Thanks for this great video. Great walk through co...

2014-03-27T15:32:18.211-07:00

Thanks for this great video.
Great walk through comparison of inspectors geigers and scintillators.

And finally some eureka on bequerels, that is the hardest one to grasp for me.

40 bq/kg - that means 40 atoms decaying per second. Hard to visualize that, but is there any chart that connects bequerels to either CPMs or sieverts?