Loading ...When I was a youngster about 10 , I had a neighborhood friend whose father owned a shoe store , just a few doors down from the movie theater . Often before or after the Saturday matinee kids’ movies we would go to the store and put our feet into that machine . We thought it was cool to wiggle our toes and seem them move within the outline of our shoes . His father put a stop to that fun .
Later in life , I used to scrape corrosion product samples from irradiated nuclear fuel and place the filtered samples into a lead cask . On one of those campaigns , the Health Physics tech came by with a Geiger-Muller counter and asked me to place the filter ( now in a covered petri dish ) on the floor to get a reading . It pegged his meter , and he took off like a scared rabbit , to reappear a few minutes later with another G-M meter with a long collapsible wand , several feet long with the sensor at the tip . He had never before seen anything that hot in someone’s hands .
I should add that my lifetime cumulative dose to my trunk is less than what is allowable for a nuclear worker in any 12 month period , by being aware of what I was handling . Time ( short ) , distance ( as far away from head and trunk as possible ) and shielding ( in that case , virtually none for gamma radiation ) is the recipe for safe handling .
Of course my hands are now mutated claws , LOL . Not at all !
Unlike the early researchers ( the Curie’s ) in France who held objects in the beam of an X-ray with their bare hands while exposing photographic plates . There was also a laborer in a Canadian research facility who was part of a team send below the reactor to find a missing colbalt 60 slug ( used in cancer treatments ) , who ignored the instruction to locate it visually within his 30 second search ‘window’ and return and report . He found it and picked in up , proud to be the finder . As he returned to the operations floor , he was ordered to drop it and move away , but had a lifetime job of leisure afterward as a living guinea pig for the effect of high intensity radiation on the extremities .