I have a story scenario where a device containing about 10 pounds of finely powdered strontium 90 explodes in a metal vault. The door is sealed to contain the radioactive hazard, trapping an unfortunate person along with it.
Twenty years later, some other individuals come across the vault. My first question is, would they be able to detect the Strontium 90 through the door by the gamma emissions of its decay chain? Strontium 90 doesn’t emit gamma, but the yttrium 90 in its decay chain does. Can an instrument like the one in the link identify yttrium 90 through the steel door? http://www.pgt.com/nuclear/model_940.html
My second question is, would all the beta from the powdered strontium 90 have sterilised the corpse, preventing decomposition? Would you be left with a preserved, dehydrated corpse, rather badly beta-burned, twenty years later?
On the first question, the biggest issue, I think, would be whether anyone is looking for radioactive material in the vault, and how hard they’re looking. If you gave me a hundred vaults, and told me there was strontium-90 in one of them, I could probably find out which. Alternately, if you gave me just the one vault, and told me there was something interesting in it that I had to find out without opening it, I’d probably eventually try a Geiger counter. But if I just happened to come across a vault and said to myself “Hm, I wonder what’s in it?”, I would probably open it before I thought to try a Geiger counter.
Beta rays in general don’t penetrate well, but Strontium 90 has pretty high energy ones. I have a chunk downstairs and can easily detect its radiation going through sheetmetal around 1/16th inch thick (hope I’m remembering this right, as I last tried it a few months ago).
Could it be a mummy? if the vault is sealed off completely, you’d have a pretty stable environment, and since it’s not open to the outdoor, not much chance for maggots and so on to feast.
They are, in my story. They have a Gieger counter and a gamma-detecting isotope identifier. There are warning notices, and the vault door has been tack-welded. Also, it’s not a vault in the conventional sense; think more of a bulkhead partition on a ship. It is completely sealed though.
With a Geiger counter? You could have been picking up the gamma.
Well that’s good news! So the gamma makes it through the door. But does the door alter the gamma energy so the isotope can’t be identified? Or does the door merely reduce the intensity, but the gamma photons that make it through retain their energy?
I was hoping I could justify putting a truely horrible, radiation-burned mummy in the story! Not even dried out. But now I don’t know what would be left in that situation. Bodies buried in coffins usually decay leaving a skeleton, but not always: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/245/saints_preserve_us.html http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/death/mg14619718.300-the-way-of-all-flesh.html
Haven’t found a really good link on decay processes yet. There is no way for water from the body to escape the sealed metal chamber, so if we have a dry mummy, we also have a puddle. Or a skeleton in soup… I might need to start a new thread if I can’t find the answer online.
But I’d assume if they were trying to get into a large safe but knew there is a good chance there might be something radioactive inside they might just drill a very small hole and stick a sensor inside rather than open the door and have it all just puff out and go all over the place or risk not detecting it and opening the door to the danger anyway.
Not important, but I think after is more dramatic!
Not really a vault… bulkhead in an ex-soviet submersible. Onshore for two decades after a nuclear accident, stored in a sealed warehouse with other contaminated objects and low-level waste, radiography sources and such. Either Black Sea or Baltic, so hot or cold depending where I decide! And humid in either case, but not relevant - bulkhead is airtight.
I’ve heard of work that can indeed identify isotopes via their spectrum, even through shielding. In addition to detecting the radiation given off by the material itself, you can also look at transmission of neutrons and/or naturally occuring cosmic rays passing through or reflecting off of the sample. Most of the work thus far has been focused on detecting fissionable isotopes (to try to stop someone from smuggling a bomb into the country), but I’m sure the techniques could be adapted to any isotope.
It would probably be very expensive, though. It’d almost certainly be cheaper to just probe through a small hole, like Internut suggested.
I was thinking that if he lingered for awhile, it might effect the condition of the corpse—like if he was breathing in fission residue, scraping his hands bloody to the bones clawing at the hatch, tried to hasten the end by choking himself, or bashing his skull open…etc.
Depending on the conditions, maybe he could even end up as an “ice mummy,” like poor ol’ John Torrington
>With a Geiger counter? You could have been picking up the gamma.
This was with a photodiode type detector. Photodiodes exhibit some activation when struck by Beta particles, and I’m using a Beta detector made by a company that supposedly patented detectors based on this effect. But, I don’t know if the detectors could instead detect the resulting gamma emissions. I would think that if they could, this company’s product would not work properly in its intended application, but can’t be sure.