#PSA about basement radon

[reepiblog]

A lot of houses legit have a problem with their concrete basements being thick with radioactive radon daughter products. In some areas a high-than-normal rate of lung cancer can be directly blamed on common building materials, frequent temperature inversions, or the types of naturally occurring rocks. You can read more about this from the EPA. Of course if you want to check your basement for radon a RADIAC meant for detecting general area radiation levels is not the instrument you want to use, an air sampler and an alpha particle detector would be better. You can detect alpha with a Geiger-Muller tube, but I've always used a scintillator myself. So if you have readings on that thing then, yeah, it's probably more likely to be fallout than radon.

Or maybe someone was making dirty bombs. Or maybe Marie Curie used to live there. Or maybe it's a whole lot of really old watches.

workplace comedy sketch where a nuclear power engineer and a paranormal investigator get their equipment mixed up and go to their respective jobs unaware of the difference

[that-gay-jedi]

And I mean I get humans are really bad at measuring risk, it's why we grew up with PSAs about razors in candy while the singular threat to children on Hallowe'en is actually traffic and cars, it's why people fear a vaccine but not the far more dangerous illness that necessitates its use, it's why an 0.01% chance of dying looks really small and so you do the thing 10000 times and then are surprised when you die, etc etc.

But like it's actually so fucking important to know about the common sources of ionizing radiation in everyday life and the gist of how dangers are mitigated in technologies wherein radioactive materials are useful.

I can count on one hand the number of people I know who understand even one unit of measurement out of the many used to measure radiation. I live in a region that seemingly hasn't even collected any data about indoor radon levels. Nobody who isn't considered some rare kind of history nerd seems to know what a breeder reactor is, let alone that other types of reactor designs exist. People don't know where uranium comes from (nor the history of environmental racism attached to its extraction). I learned more about early fission experiments from a basement production of the play Copenhagen one of my theater nerd friends put on 10 years ago than I ever did in school.

Like listen local theater is great, I think we should bring back annual Dionysia that should be legally required to cost the wealthiest classes and/or the state more than the entire military budget for the year every year, and learning about science from the arts is a vital and severely underrated source of knowledge, but people in university-level science courses should learn more about science in school than they do from a 30-minute biographical play performed in the dark with no set, only a single flashlight passed between the 3 actors for props, and no stage.

I wish the general public knew so much fucking more about radioactivity in general bc you get people who would probably eat the little bit of Americium in a smoke detector if you dared them and have never heard of radon testing for residential buildings and don't get why you're not supposed to fuck around with an x-ray machine etc and you get people who are afraid of the microwave, cell phones, bismuth and a really big magnet and sometimes those are the same person