Comments by "Gabor Rajnai" (@gaborrajnai6213) on "Radioactive Drew" channel.

Put a digital camera literally on it. The set is if the picture is completely dark, and start to record. If you see flashes on the footage it is radioactive. If you count the flashes then you have a primitive Geiger counter.
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You can guess the exact composition of the nuke by obtaining it. If you are lucky you can even tell on which reactor it was made.
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 @RadioactiveDrew Well I guess it has a few kilograms of plutonium dispersed around too. Early gadgets werent particularly efficient.
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@raptorspence100 Half life of an element can be calculated quite exactly. Lets say you have an element, which have a half life of 10.000 years. But you dont have to wait 10.000 years for a decay. you have to have 10.000 atoms of the element, then you will have a very high chance of a decay in a year. And as soon as you have gazillion of atoms you will have decays in a second, the lower the half-life is, the more of the decays. Its like the chance of throwing a six with billions of dices, the more dices you have the higher the chance for a six. You measure a few minutes and get the half life even for elements which has a half life of billions of years, you only have to know the concentration of the element.
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Have you visited Hanford? I think its the most contaminated place in US.
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@RadioactiveDrew It is most likely true. I know that my commercial NPP's used pellets are very characteristic in their isotopic composition of plutonium cesium and americium, we measured them, although it was a few years old sample with a HPGe detector, and compared it to our university's research reactor readings. We had a government funded project for long term storage options. The only problem would be that I think nowadays weapons grade material is a mixture from different reactors, but thats just a guess of mine, Im not a weapons expert. You definitely can have educated guesses about how much uranium and plutonium was used in a composite core, because they tend to produce different decay products. Maybe in the case of a 70 years old rock sample mass spectrometry has to be used, but thats extremely precise. I think big part of why you cant trade these rocks is that they didnt want the soviets to put their dirty hands on nuclear secrets.
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Although be warned, radiation actually harms the camera, the CCD panel is extremely sensitive to it, so dont use your bestone.
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@raptorspence100 Well, Geiger counters are actually very crude type of measuring radiation, because it is only telling that a particle hit the detector, so calibration of a Geiger counter is not that important. I dont know the newones, the oldones worked with a series of photoelectron-multipliers, so if a radiating particle hit the charged metal, or cathode tube, it produced a very small voltage which was amplified up to readable voltages, but its by no means precise rather giving a general idea of how much radiation is in the area, so there is not too much reason to calibrate it. It had a terrible cooldown period of milliseconds too even if it worked perfectly.
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