For some reason, this weeks Electronics Goldmine flyer had only one dish on the menu: Geiger Counters. Would you like them in the rain or on a train? I have to say though, flying a Geiger Counter is a practical application for small UAV which cannot be accomplished by manned aircraft.
So Kudos in advance to anyone who orders this kit ($149) and logs the results of a fly-over.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZVtwJerqSg
The camera is working, so a measurable level of radiation can be tolerated by consumer electronics.
That is the most amazing personal story I have ever read on-line.
Here is another I found touching on the same subject.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/22/chernobyl-cleanup-survivors-messa...
Greg is right Jack. It takes a lot of REM to kill. I used to be an "Atomic Energy Worker" until I contracted a form of pre-leukemia called MDS. Canadian radiation exposure standards at that time was a maximum annual allowable exposure of 1 REM. In the six years I worked in the field my total exposure was less than 1 Rem, but no amount of radiation is safe. All it takes is one gamma ray photon to damage a chromosome in a bone marrow stem cell like in my case, and when that defective bone marrow stem cell reproduces with copies that live longer than normal stem cells do, and no longer knows how to make red blood cells or platelets, it's descendants slowly take up all the available bone marrow space and in about 4-5 years you start to get weak due to the low hemoglobin in your blood, and when you get cuts they don't want to clot because you hardly have any platelets. I was very lucky that the doctors found the MDS before it turned into full blown leukemia. The only cure for MDS or leukemia is a bone marrow stem cell transplant. What I found very ironic was that a very high dose of 1200 RADS of cobalt 60 gamma ray total body exposure cured a radiation induced disease caused from less than 1 REM exposure. The cobalt 60 gamma ray treatments are spread over 3 days with two 200 RAD treatments per day 8 hours apart. Because bone marrow stem cells are very large they are the easiest cells to kill in the human body with radiation. Being someone who worked with radiation every day and knowing how dangerous it is, laying in the radiation treatment room and willingly letting my body accept 3 times a lethal dose of radiation was the hardest thing I have ever done! Every cell in my body was screaming at me to get up and run out of that room! But when you are faced with a disease that will kill you, you have no choice but to put your trust in medical science. In my case I was one of the lucky cancer survivors. The docs give a 30% chance of beating bone marrow cancer for surviving, and if you make it 4 years all the bad stem cells were destroyed and you are considered to be cured. For me March 9th was 6 years cancer free. So even if.... correction... I should say when, because some of these brave people in Japan trying to save those reactors WILL get leukemia or other forms of bone marrow cancer just like many of the heroes of Chernobyl did, have hope like I did through bone marrow stem cell transplants. So I would like to ask anyone reading this who is not a registered blood donor to consider becoming one and to also agree to become a potential bone marrow stem cell donor. I was saved by a generous US Army soldier who agreed to also be a stem cell donor. It turned out he was a perfect 10 out of 10 antigen match and was the same blood type so I had no serious rejection issues. Many years ago it was painful to be a bone marrow stem cell donor, but not anymore. My donor told me all about it and all he had to do was over a week to have three small shots of a medication that told his body to make lots of extra bone marrow stem cells, and at the end of the week he went to his local hospital in the state of Maryland and they hooked him up to a machine that looked like a kidney dialysis machine. The machine had a centrifuge in it that separated out the larger and heavier stem cells in the blood from the ordinary blood cells, and in a few hours he was done and on his way. The hospital in Maryland, USA froze these precious stem cells and flew them to the hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia where they were given to me intravenously after being thawed right after my 6th 200 RAD radiation treatment to kill all my bad stem cells. The human body is an amazing machine. These new stem cells now traveling around in my blood stream knew exactly when they were passing through my bone marrow and would leave my blood stream and implant themselves in their new home (my bone marrow). It took about 10 days after they set up shop in there new home to start dividing and producing healthy red,white, and platelet blood cells, and within two weeks all my blood counts started to climb and have been totally normal now for 6 years.
I don't know exactly what prompted me to write this long story. I know personally how dangerous this invisible menace can be, and when I here the morons on Fox News say there is nothing to worry about, and the maximum exposure from these Japanese reactors in North America is no more than a CAT scan or chest x-ray they are full of crap. No amount of ionizing radiation is safe. Especially alpha or beta radiation which is actual atomic particles that have mass and can do many more times the damage of gamma radiation. It is well known that just a microscopic particle of enriched Uranium or Plutonium in your lungs will give you cancer. I guess I also wanted to write it to show like in my case if you get bone marrow cancer from radiation exposure that it isn't a death sentence and there is a cure through the bone marrow stem cell medical procedure. But only if there is a match out there, and if the fall out from Japan hits us on the West coast of North America that we all can help by becoming registered bone marrow stem cell donors. In closing for what it is worth, the electronic Geiger counter kit at the top of the blog is an excellent one because of the Geiger tube having a thin mica window. This will let the most dangerous of all alpha radiation through. Alpha radiation is a very high speed helium atom that has no electrons. Since it is the most massive, it can do the most damage. Even though alpha radiation can't penetrate a piece of paper or the dead top surface of our skin because it is so big, if it gets into a lung that has no protective dead layer like our skin it will irritate the sensitive lung tissue and cause cancer almost 100% of the time.
Best regards,
Jim
(Comment by Greg Fletcher - I delete/reposted because the original created format errors in the page. )
Jack, Those nuke workers aren't comiting suicide. Last I heard was 2 of just went over 10 rem. A fatal dose is more like 450 rem. Those guys are probably done, not living, but working in the nuclear field. I figured that if 300 guys all got 25 rem, which is the new gov limit in Japan, maybe one or two would die early or get cancer that they wouldn't have otherwise. They are protecting them selves from internal contamination by always wearing a fullface respirator. It is very heroic of them to volunteer. They will get to retire at full pay after this because they have thier lifetime allowed dose.
They could really use a quad with sensors and imaging. It would handle the rad field as the refilled the fuel pools from airport fire trucks. And if it crashed so what. You got some data, send up another one and get more.
Jack is referring to the "biorobots" so named during the Chernobyl non-accident; however, I'm not sure they have died either. Most of the reported deaths from Chernobyl are found in the increase of certain cancers within the fallout zone. Greenpeace projects ~250K deaths...
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/chernobyl-...
(The relevant point being that identifying the region affected is an important objective for tree-huggers and atom-huggers alike - and achievable with SUAV).
(I dare say that Japan might pay for radiation pin-pointing UAV in the very near future; they will quite likely want to find and remove every particle).
I Think that better approach is to have a radiation shield around the main electronics and use fiber optic to connected different device using fly by wire approach .
Best
Roberto
@Michael
I stand corrected. Learned something new.
Definitely measuring radiation level and taking pictures using a UAV would be a great application. Things like the arduCopter + arduPilot which are relatively cheap would mean you wouldn't mind just throwing the whole thing into a bucket of concrete after it's mission.
I don't know about the measurement unit of this sensor - I only hear them talking about sieverts - a good chart of meaning sievert values can be found here.
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