Presenting the new radiation warning symbol

The International Atomic Energy Agency spent $200,000 to develop a new radiation warning symbol because they found that people do not know what the yellow trefoil stands for anymore. The development of the symbol took five years and was tested on 1650 people in 11 countries. It seems like a good design, everyone knows that a skull and crossbones means death or pirates and if something is emitting squiggly beams that cause death or pirates you should run away.

The symbol is intended to supplement the current symbol and is "to be placed on the device housing the source, as a warning not to dismantle the device or to get any closer. It will not be visible under normal use, only if someone attempts to disassemble the device. The symbol will not be located on building access doors, transportation packages or containers." The new symbol is also intended to highlight the dangers of large sources of ionizing radiation especially.

Think of the symbols this way. The yellow one goes on your smelly sock drawer to warn people of the danger inside. The red symbol goes inside the smelly sock drawer on top of the socks to warn someone of the immanent danger of coming in contact with radioactive (smelly) socks and to get away. This yields two levels of warning. Now that there are two, I wonder which one will become the new symbol of evil after the Apocalypse.

(Get your symbol in .pdf format here)

(via Science and the IAEA)

Overly sensitive radioactivity detectors - no radiation is too small?

As more and more public venues put in radiation detectors in the aftermath of 9-11 and the general terrorist scare, it appears they are catching more patients with residual radiation left over from medical tests than terrorists.

BoingBoing and others are picking up this story as new, but in a post from March of last year I described a personal experience with this phenomenon from when I was in graduate school. It was at the NIST laboratory (complete with nuclear reactor) rather than a public venue with radiation detectors but the humor is the same. From the previous post:

"You must pass through radiation detectors to enter and leave the room where the experiments are performed to make sure that no radioactive material leaves the room for safety reasons. The detectors start by stepping in them or when they detect any radiation, this last property was the source of the fun.

During one of our trips to NIST, where the experiments were performed, one of the group had just undergone a medical test similar to the one of the woman above that involved injecting a radioactive tracer. The sensitivity of the radiation detectors at NIST was so high that this newly radioactive group member could set them off from 40 feet away. His residual radioactivity was so high that he could make you fail the test (proclaimed with loud alarms and flashing lights) while you were in the machine and he was far away. It was great (if a bit geeky) fun."

That recollection was inspired by a story about a woman driving who set off detectors intended to catch mobile radioactive terrorists.

Will someone please do the economics on this stuff: How many false alarms and the costs associated with them are equal to the prevention of the hypothetical attack? Keep in mind that the false alarms are many and the probability of attack is extremely tiny.

tags: science, radiation, neutron