[OSM-talk] radioactivity

[Nic Roets]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 4:45 PM, John Smith <delta_foxtrot at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> I wasn't asking about tagging but the difference with radiological waste is
> half lives in the hundreds of years of years, fireworks just go boom once
> and that person don't make the same mistake twice.
>

Actually conversation, and your question, concerns uranium, with a halflife
in excess of 1 billion years. In fact the decay of uranium is quite slow
and, as Stefan points out, the alpha particles are very easy to contain. So
the US is finding it hard, if not impossible to detect a uranium based
nuclear weapon being smuggled across its border :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_scanning

The crowd sourcing model does not apply to radiation measurements and
testing soil samples for toxins. It is has too many statistical biases i.e.
mappers not looking in the right places. Rather let a trained scientist
design a coordinated testing plan.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20090809/e626e6f7/attachment.html>