Radioactive Fence Posts?

[drizler]

Don't sweat that tiny dose of radiation off the pipe posts unless you plan on eating one or two. It's harmless and you get plenty just in daily life . That Alpha particle radiation as related to me by my dear old Uncle Sam (who never told a lie) was what goes flying around if one of those C 141' slid off the runway or caught on fire and any of the 20 or so warhead containers blew up. The classic dirty bomb and uniform would be immediate gas mask and preferably gloves. Those particles are so big they claimed you could easily see them under a microscope and heavy so they just blow in the wind and dirt finally settling there. The only real danger even then would be breathing or swallowing the stuff . Decontamination would be a shower and ditching all your clothes for disposal. Your skin is plenty thick enough to keep it out too with the exception of cuts and such . That's about all you need to fear from any dirty bomb really.
The stuff in steel usually comes by accident and they put in the detectors all over because some outfit brought some in from Mexico once I read and it was hot as ****. Anyways now days you see detectors everywhere along interstates and all border crossings even rail road but that is there to thwart our Muslim friends ideas.
The big thing you want to check and nobody does is RADON brought to you by your own basement. That is the second leading cause of all lung cancers and only recently do most places make you test when you buy a place. It's cheap insurance just toss the cube in your basement write down the date./ time then pull it in specified time write the date time and send it it. You check the results on the net. Radon can be found anywhere in localized hot spots so you can't just look at a radon map and say it's not here anyplace. If you have it you can mitigate it easily enough by good ventilation . If you have gravel pits for shale crushed stone you really need to check it. All crushed stone has radiation. Every single load that ever crossed our border station set the alarm off . They say you should check your basement every 10 years or so in case something has found it's way in there crack opened up ect. It's just cheap insurance . No sense dying 20 years later for no reason if you can check for the stuff.
I read 10 or so years back they decommissioned some of the Oak Ridge reactors. Guess where they sent all that steel? Right into the scrap bin some 750 tons I think it was. Handled right and mixed in with all the other scrap being melted it was supposed to be absolutely safe. Sounded like being cheap to me but after all Uncle Sam would never do such a thing would he?????? Anyways, I wouldn't give those fence posts a second though. Radiation disperses so much that the levels drop like a rock even a few inches away.

 

[wawajake]

When I worked at the uranium mines in Northern Ontario back in the 80's we had to wear a radiation monitoring type badge , that would be checked by admin staff every couple of months , and if it was too high they gave you a surface job for a few weeks instead of going underground. Some of the guys would purposely store their badge (size of a credit card) on top of their TV's , and that would then maybe give overage readings on their badges , and they would get a more cushy surface job for a few weeks.

yep I worry more about radon gas , that you never know where it might be (not neccesarily just around where uranium mining takes place) Although our town did have high radon gas readings and all the houses had radon ventilation systems installed .

 

[CCWKen]

If you were so worried about radiation as it seems, you'd never go outside during the day. You get more radiation from the sun than you'd ever get from the pipe.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Those particles are so big they claimed you could easily see them under a microscope and heavy so they just blow in the wind and dirt finally settling there. The only real danger even then would be breathing or swallowing the stuff .

I assume the particles you are referring to are the particulate matter scattered by the dirty bomb, and not the Alpha particles themselves. To my knowledge, Alpha particles are too small to even be seen by an electron microscope.

 

[KennyG]

I assume the particles you are referring to are the particulate matter scattered by the dirty bomb, and not the Alpha particles themselves. To my knowledge, Alpha particles are too small to even be seen by an electron microscope.

True. The atoms we see (or detect) with an electron microscope are probably around 10 to 100 picometers (10 to the -12 power meters) in diameter. The alpha particle (which is effectively a Helium atom nucleus) is probably 10,000 time smaller. Keep in mind that, at the atomic level "see" doesn't really mean anything optical because the limits of light wavelengths.

 

[Tractor Seabee]

Poor OP is probably shaking in his boots over all this esoteric discussion on radiation instead of his poor ole fence posts that somehow became irradiated. He really just needs to just get them to a nuclear material disposal agency such as the Department of Energy uses.

In the Navy PW department I retired from we had a nuclear trained Mech engineer that could not get promoted in that career. He would spend loads of time trying to explain simple technician level facility problems in all these esoteric terms and over engineer as if he was dealing with protection from 20 megaton bombs. He never got any real work done so our supervisor turned all his work over to me and set him on progress to termination.

See you got me to join the club.
all
Ron

 

[ch1ch2]

Stick around, there is always more to learn here.! You just wait until I go off on one of my tangents and start talking about HF radio wave propagation and the declining sunspot cycle.

I don't understand.
What does Harbor Freight have to do with sun spots?

 

[k0ua]

I don't understand.
What does Harbor Freight have to do with sun spots?

I suspect even though you did not put a smiley face on your post, and being ex military you already know most of the below, but just in case:

HF=High Frequency... not Harbor Freight.

HF is that part of the radio spectrum spanning the frequencies between 3 Megahertz to 30 Megahertz. Sometimes called generically "the shortwave bands".

The HF frequencies can support global worldwide communications without the use of infrastructure. On each end of the communication circuit you just have a source of power, an HF radio and an antenna system. In the middle you have the naturally provided and solar driven, ionosphere.

 

[Redneck in training]

My neighbor in Czech Republicc was a ham operator. He told me that he knew that condition must very good when he could hear some particular time taxi drivers from New York on his reciever. It was around 1980.

 

[TomSeller]

Do these fenceposts glow in the dark?