At 10:54 AM 10/29/04 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 09:19 PM 10/28/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Perhaps you meant Cs-137. Halliburton loses mCi of Am-241 etc monthly.
MilliCuries? That's a bit surprising, though losing microCuries of it would be more likely. An average home smoke detector has 1-5 microcuries, and industrial detectors go up to 15, according to one or two articles on the web which may be outdated. So you're saying they lose hundreds to thousands of smoke detectors a month?
They lose the neutron sources used for well logging. They contain mCi amounts of Am241 and other hot 'topes. They use a reaction with Be to produce neutrons from alphas, like the early nukebomb initiators. More often, soil-density gauges are lost/stolen from road crews. They also have fractional Ci amounts of RDD-able topes. But they're very useful; fairly sturdy; acceptable risk. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2004/ and read a few days' reports.