I was wondering if anyone here knew of any sites that monitored radioactivity in the US? My dad picked up a Geiger counter, and we've noticed some somewhat distressing readings if the machine is reading accurately.

Every time it rains, we pickup 100 rads/hour (1 x 100x on the selector) which we checked yesterday after we had some extreme amounts of rain over a short period of time. Today, it is fluctuating between 200 and 350 rads/hour. We've noted that after a few days of sunshine, that the rad count drops to around 1 rad/hour.

We've noticed that during and after rains for a few days, we are extremely drained, too tired to really want to do much, and radiation exposure is something that can cause such things (dad was in the military and took training concerning that).

I'm just wondering if anyone else has seen any notes on things like this in newspaper articles or in some obscure news posting online? We know that the Japanese plants were dumping radioactive material off into the ocean and a lot went up into the atmosphere in steam.

So, thoughts?

Out of curiosity, do you live near a coal plant? They dump a lot of uranium into the atmosphere.

I'm not seeing anything that says that coal generators produce uranium? The only thing I'm finding about uranium is all about nuclear technology, not coal.

But yes, Indiana seems to have around 25 active coal plants, roughly 60 miles away from my location is the closest.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

My first inclination would be that the Geiger Counter is not calibrated. I've heard that's a fairly common occurrence.

The second guess is the coal plants, as elfy mentioned.

I'm also thinking that the "symptoms" are mostly psychosomatic or confirmation bias. You really need either a lot of exposure or very long exposure periods to show any noticeable signs of radiation poisoning. Marie curie pretty much breathed radium for several years before she started getting sick.

I think you may be misreading the dials. In my mind, a 100x scale means that it's been amplified 100 times, which would be 0.01 rad. For example, a 10x oscilloscope probe makes 0.1V show up as 1.0V.

My dad looked up the information, though I think I'm going to go look it up myself tomorrow just to see.

However, the facts remain the same, after a couple sunny days, it barely reads anything, after rainfall, it reads a lot :<

Regardless of what it means, it can't be all that great.

With oscilloscopes it's the other way around; it refers to 10x attenuation, not amplification. A 10x oscilloscope probe will therefore make a 0.1V signal show up as 0.01V. This can be achieved with a 9MΩ resistor in the probe to form a voltage divider with the oscilloscope input's 1MΩ impedance, increasing the overall impedance to 10MΩ and reducing the load on the circuit under test, improving accuracy.

Eeek, that's absolutely right; I don't think my brain is attached to the rest of me anymore. Oh well. That would mean that tifreak8x is quoting the rad/hr measurements correctly, but I still tend to think a re-calibration is in order.

I'm not sure there is really much to calibrate beyond making sure that it is set to 0 with a 0 out test for the gauge. I will look into that as well.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43475479/ns/us_news-environment

Found this via windows live, thought it was quite on topic.

If only we had an agency that could protect the environment from stuff like this. But noooooooooo, that would be radical anti-business job-killing socialist fascism!

Our contract with VT Yankee is running out and the legislature just said "we don't want to give you money to pollute our state. time to pack up."

Worked fine, and got a bunch of other businesses competing for the energy that they were supplying.

That only helps one state. Pollution created elsewhere still hurts you and everyone else in the country; we all share the same air and water.