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one or two articles on the web which may be outdated.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