USPS: glowing by leaps and bounds

David Honig honig at sprynet.com
Wed Oct 24 11:05:49 PDT 2001


At 10:32 AM 10/24/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Wednesday, October 24, 2001, at 10:14 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, David Honig wrote:
>>
>>> Enough rads to sterilize?  Forget film.
>>
>> What do you suppose happens to disks and other magnetic media at these
>> flux levels?
>
>
>Nothing. Magnetic oxides and metallic thin films are not affected by 
>mere few tens of kilorads, or even by megarads.
>
>Ionizing radiation has no particular first order effect on such films.
>

Um, Tim, I was talking about silver-halogen photographic 'films'.


You do raise the question of what happens to 100-atom thick gate oxides...
but that's not what *I* was writing about.

Radiation can also change the color of gems --used to 'cheat' and make
them more valuable--- but probably not a lot of diamonds go through the USPO,
and I don't know what dosage is necessary to introduce the appropriate defect
density.





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