What’s with this?
http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.php3
About 2/3 down the page.
“Factor by which radiation-dose levels found in the Library of Congress exceed typical levels outside a nuclear plant : 260”
OK, I’ll grant you that the radiation is at “acceptable levels”, but why is it significantly higher in select locations?
What is the Library of Congress made out of? When I took a radiation safety class at UT the teacher told us that the Capitol building is the most radioactive building in Austin because the granite it’s made from has some naturally occuring radioactive elements in it.
But, of course, it’s not that radioactive there, just more so than buildings that aren’t granite.
I checked and found out that the Library of Congress building does have a lot of granite in it.
Something disturbs me about all of those articles. The Library of Congress isn’t one building, it’s several enormous public buildings and a host of warehouses. Roll Call, especially, should know that.
The Jefferson Building is probably the one everyone is most familiar with. It’s the one with the big copper dome and the ultra-flash reading room underneath it.
I always thought that the stone used in the Jefferson Building was sandstone with some marble, like many of the other buildings on the Hill and around the Mall. (Sandstone may also be the reason why at least one of those big 'ol buildings is undergoing a major facelift at any given time.) I could be wrong.
The Madison Building is largely marble on the exterior, and is architecturally quite different from Jefferson. They are connected by tunnel.
Another possible culprit is cinderblocks. Anything you pull out of the ground has some amount of radioactive stuff in it, but it’s usually not concentrated enough to be significant. When you burn coal, though, you end up with some non-coal stuff down in the bottom of the burner, some of which gets sold for use in cinder blocks. These cinders are disproportionately made up of the heavier impurities in the coal (lighter things end up in the smoke or gaseous by-products), and radioactive materials are usually pretty heavy, so the cinders (and the blocks made from them) are rather more radioactive, mass for mass, than plain stone.
Of course, nuclear power plants tend to be rather obsessive (in a good way) about radiation safety, so just outside a nuke plant is likely to have lower levels than any place you’re likely to name.