Okay, so today I decided to mess around with Landauer film badges. I’ve always been curious about radiation and how it’s measured, so I figured, why not try making sense of these things?
First, I needed to actually get my hands on some. I poked around a bit and found some suppliers – not gonna lie, it felt a bit weird ordering something related to radiation monitoring. Like, am I really doing this? Anyway, I ordered a couple of different types, just to see what the deal was.
Getting Started and My confusion
When the badges arrived, my first thought was, “Okay, now what?”. They’re just these little plastic things with some film inside. I spent some time, reading, and realized I needed some basic knowledge about how these actually work.
Basically, you wear them, and they track your exposure to radiation. The film inside gets darker the more radiation it’s exposed to. Pretty simple concept, right?
The Experiment(kinda)
I wasn’t about to expose myself to any dangerous levels of radiation, obviously! I wanted to see if I could even tell a difference between a badge that hadn’t been exposed to anything and one that had seen a tiny bit of radiation. So I found my old smoke detector.
I know some old smoke detectors use a tiny amount of Americium-241, which emits alpha particles. I didn’t take the smoke detector apart or anything crazy, I just placed the landauer badges near the detector.
- took a new badge,that as my “control.” It just stayed in its packaging, far away from anything.
- took other badges and put it near the smoke detector for various lengths of time – a few hours, a day, a couple of days.
My Observations
After playing around with the badges and the smoke detector (again, nothing dangerous!), I sent the badges to the provided address.
Honestly, the whole process was more about satisfying my curiosity than any serious scientific experiment. But it was cool to get a feel for how these things work, and it definitely made me appreciate the science behind radiation monitoring a bit more.
