We watched
season 6 of Bosch last weekend. One of the stories involved the theft of some radioactive
cesium from a hospital. This got everyone understandably excited -
there have been a couple of ugly incidents involving this stuff. I remember hearing about
the one in Brazil, that one gave me a very bad impression of Latin American Bureaucracies.
In the show, a whole alphabet soup of government agencies descend onto Los Angeles. One concrete action they did was to make an aerial survey of the city using helicopters carrying
radiation detection equipment, very much like the photo above.
Jerry Edgar, played by a notorious gangster from The Wire, buys a personal radiation detector (similar to the one pictured above) that ends up being pretty useful. Interesting thing is that no one mentioned either of these detection devices by name, but somehow it was pretty clear what was going on.
The victim was wearing a radiation dosimeter ring, similar to the picture above. I knew people working with radioactive materials wore dosimeter badges, but the rings were new to me. They make sense though for people who are actually handling radioactive materials. How dangerous radiation is depends on time and distance. We are constantly exposed to very low levels of radiation, but how close you are to 'hot' radioactive material can make a big difference to how much danger you are in. You can stand a couple of feet away from a low level source for a few minutes and be in no danger, but if you are actually handling it, your hands are going to get a much higher dose.
Love that show - i used to read the books in the last century
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