Fusor Forums

Richard, Interesting that you find Th in your soil. There are some known Th deposits around southeast PA where I used to do most of my amateur measuring, but the radon source in the area of our former home in York was U. Way back when Mike was in the seventh grade he did a project that proved it by ...

Here is a picture of my travel rig. As Richard said before scintillators are high count rate. I usually leave my device on c/s, but the detector block is pretty amazing. In scaler mode I have been able to sense repeatably an old style smoke detector at 20 ft.

Richard, I definitely could be convinced that my spot on 95 is the road itself. The only way to be sure is to venture off the road and see. The spot you spoke about on 83 would have been in York County PA which was my former home for 34 years. I found the whole area full of hot spots. Recall that th...

Richard, I have on occasion driven with a large block plastic scintillator from a portal monitor in my back seat connected to a digital rate meter set to alarm at twice the typical reading I see as I drive. With regards to your area, I have seen gamma reading 3 to 4 times my chosen background on 95 ...

The grid rotation is interesting. I wonder if gravity wasn't the only influence. Years ago, a partial grid rotation occured in my son's fusor that was definitely not gravity. In his case we believe it was em forces.

I will add to Richard's advice about radium storage. It is difficult to seal the radon daughters in. They get everywhere. At one time I had some watch hands and a couple other radium pieces in a sealed tub that I kept closed for more than a few months. One day I opened it to use one of the sources a...

Maybe try braided tungsten wire instead of solid strand. It is more available and helps with ease in forming. Heavy tungsten wire is very hard to bend without breaking. Go to tungsten.com and check out their orphan bin under their products tab.

Richard,
You may remember that I demonstrated the phenomenon at a previous HEAS with your fusor. I took the bare probe of my PNC-1 and used my body to thermalize the neutrons. My body liquid was darn near as good as the parafin in the detector block.

To answer the question about the neutronrae, it has no moderator in it.

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When using the neutronrae as a dosimeter as it was intended, remember that it sits against a human body which tends to moderate nicely.

I've been thinking about this a little more, I remain unconvinced that fission products would be uniformly distributed through the reactor to the point that every sample would be expected to have remaining products today if any did. The reactor used two different fuel types, metal and oxide, and I w...