-------- In message <[email protected]>, "Richard (Rick ) Karlquist" writes:
>This reminds me of a Jack Kusters (of HP fame) anecdote. >At which point Jack pointed out >that in that case, it was clear than they had a radon >incursion in their facility. I have a hard time beliving radon was a relevant failure mechanism for "telco-class" Rb units, things would literally glow in the dark long before the Rb concentration became a problem. It is true that Radon is a small atom, but it is 50% larger than Helium and that is a big handical when diffusing. More importantly, Radon decays in a matter of days, much faster than it would "evaporate" out again, and it leaves a tell-tale signature of lead atoms behind from the decay. I find it far more likely that their problem were molecular hydrogen, which is even smaller than Helium atoms, and present in copious amounts near any rechargeable battery and a fair number of industrial processes. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com and follow the instructions there.
