The sensor noise would be distributed evenly, and not clustered around the rod like bees.
Why not? Isn’t most of the radiation coming from the rod itself? I’d expect a vertical, high-intensity cloud over the rod, which gets less intense the further it goes to the left and to the right of it.
The Cobalt-60 in that cinnamon stick has a half-life of about 5 years. It says it was made in 1963 so with the drop in radioactivity you’ve probably got a few months left to live!
Your overestimating the lethality of radiation. The “Demon Core” guy lasted 9 days. The firefighters from Chernobyl lasted a month. The only criticality events that I can find with immediate fatalities also involve steam explosions.
For those who know, steam is scarier than radiation or fire.
That’s my favorite brand of suppository!
When doing my NIH traineeship, in the new lab, it came to be my turn to do the monthly radiation inventory. When going down the list, while checking the radio labeled nucleotides and labeled reagents in the freezer etc, I came across an entry for 600 Curies of Co 60! Freaking out I immediately went to the PI and told him about this. He laughed and said someone had to be responsible for the campus radiation source and since our lab used it a lot to make feeder cells, we were the lucky custodians of said source. I did get quite the fright though!
mmmh good old orphan sources
