2000 curies of Ci

[Major Variola (ret)]

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one or two articles on the web which may be outdated.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.