ABSTRACT

Ionizing radiation (IR) has always been a mystery to most people. Actually, much more is known about ionizing radiation than the hazardous chemicals that constantly bombard the workplace. After all, there are only four major types of radiation (alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, and neutrons) rather than thousands of chemicals. There are instruments that can detect each type of radiation and provide an accurate dose received value. This is not so for chemicals, where the best that we could hope for in a real-time situation is a detection of the presence of a chemical and not what the chemical is. With radiation detection instruments, the boundaries of contamination can be detected and set while such boundaries for chemicals are near to impossible except for a solid.