Last Thursday, Mike B. was in the neighborhood and stopped by for a visit. We were talking about various threats to the social order. He mentioned EMPs were of concern to him. I mentioned another plague, the high crime rates of Seattle and other big cities, nuclear fallout, …
Mike: Kerry (mutual acquaintance and head of a university chemistry department) is the only person I know who owns a Geiger counter.
Joe: [gets up from his chair, opens the cupboard above Mike’s head, pulls out a box, and shows Mike a Geiger counter].
Mike: Okay. Two people.
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
Now that’s funny…
Pocket scintillometer here, stored with the potassium iodide tablets.
They work better, and are less fragile, but I worry that the scintillators (their supporting electronics, they use a photomultiplier) might be more vulnerable to EMP. The old Gieger/Muller tube designs had no integrated circuits.
Yes, GM tubes are pretty simple. You can make your own, even; John Strong’s wonderful “Procedures in Experimental Physics” shows how.
You should have that book, it’s great stuff. Amazon shows it as available — a bit curious since the publisher of the reprint, Lindsay Publications, very unfortunately shut down some years ago when its owner retired and for some reason didn’t try to sell the business.
I’m pretty sure we know the same Kerry. It does not surprise me that he has one.
🙂
Try not living in Seattle? That and visit the live wind maps of your, and surrounding area to check seasonal wind patterns?
Seattle is one target. But Bremerton and Bangor naval bases are going to get multiple ground and air bursts.
Those Russian nuke torpedo-drones are going to toss crap a long way up. Whereas Seattle would more than likely get air bursts. (Lower radioactivity. Greater structural damage.)
But all this is supposing we won’t economically implode before nukes are necessary?
Illegal immigration/economic implosion will be much worse than nukes ever could be. (One only need compare Hiroshima to Detroit of today.)
Is there a reason China imported all those full-auto conversions for the AR15? I mean we only caught 10,000 of them, right?
Heard who ordered them or where they were headed? How many shipments got through to whom?
Besides, history-UN cannot condemn anyone other than us for that kind of destruction. Roaming tribes/gangs are going to be much worse than nukes.
In my part of Idaho, the risks are being downwind of Fairchild, Richland, and proximity to Dworshak. I’m not sure about Dworshak being a target, but it is very close.
Where exactly are Fairchild and Dworshak near you? They’re not in Clarkston/Lewiston are they?
Fairchild Airforce base is just west of Spokane. This is less than 100 miles from my property.
Dworshak dam is less than 35 miles to the east of Lewiston. And it is less than six miles from my property.
Hmm.. It would take a great deal of fallout to stretch 35 miles east and *up*…. does Spokane present that likely a ground burst target? They got that many silos? yeah… I see some concern.
That dam though, if it goes it’s gonna wreck havock downstream, but I’m not convinced th inertia would flood back upstream as far as orofino (there is 500ft of head though). I don’t see it as a nuclear target, but maybe you know something I don’t… that would suck. I have things at stake there too.
The wind map I watch shows Yakima firing range, Hanford-Richland as the target/fallout problem for Lewiston/Boomershoot area than Fairchild.
Dworshak? Not likely a target. Although the downstream would be Biblical all the way to the coast. But they only have so many nukes that get through. So, Grand Colee would be a much better target to flood things.
I have the iodine, figure the mushroom clouds will be an indicator of incoming radiation, so I don’t have one of those particular cool toys.
Some assembly required geiger counter kits can be shipped from China.
Very likely fully assembled ones too, but the kits are more fun.
Hey, all. Long time lurker, first time poster. Here’s an interesting site I ran across last year. https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-96.04,45.86,1378/loc=-127.333,50.428
I agree that wandering bands of ‘fun seeking yoots’ are a more immediate and reasonable threat in the near term.
And now for a maybe silly question. Back in the day, when TMI had its little problem, KI was unavailable in my little corner of the world, so I bought kelp tablets. Good idea, bad idea? Inquiring minds want to know.
Stay safe
Awesome site!
I do not have an informed opinion on the kelp tablets.
“Illegal immigration/economic implosion will be much worse than nukes ever could be.”
There’s no question nukes are worth planning for, but cities and military installations are in fixed locations. With nukes a little map work and atmospheric research define the severity of threat one faces to aid in planning to deal with it.
Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, come in much larger quantities than nukes, are self-propelled, frequently state-supported, and quite capable of randomly arriving in your “not-a-nuke-target” town or at your house. While it would take quite a large number of illegal immigrants to achieve the destructive level of even a small nuclear device, the end result personally is the same and the probability of it considerably higher.
I own two. But then I do play with radiation for a living….
I got both a counter (for measuring smaller amounts of radiation) and survey meter (for measuring large amount of radiation) March of 2022. Recently I had a stress test done where they injected me with tracer. I was surprised by how hot I was. I was even tripping the survey meter at a low level. No big deal because it only lasted a day or so. If I had been that hot for a month, it would be a different story.
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I actually know three people with Geiger counters. I’m not sure what that says about me.