Radioactive material in smoke detectors???

7

79mongoose

Joined
Dec 14, 2004
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77
I was reading that there was radioactive material used inside smoke detectors. Its called americdium 241 or something. I dont know how i feel about having radioactive material in my house. Does anoyone know anything about this. My fears are a piece of this material could accidently come loose and fall on the floor or something, is it pretty well secured inside?
 
Don't worry. These things have been around for decades.

The amount of radioactive material is tiny and it is well-secured. The amount of radiation involved is very, very slight.

You may want to read THIS ARTICLE.
 
BTW, not all fire detectors use radioactive material.

Some simply measure temperature and either trip and a specific temperature or upon a rapid rise in temperature. These are called "heat" or "rate-of-rise" detectors.

Some use a lightbeam and detect the scattering of the beam caused by smoke particles in the air. These are called "photoelectric smoke detectors."

Some use a radioactive source to create charged ions and then detects its interaction of those ions with charged ions emitted by the fire. These are called "ionized fire (or smoke) detectors."

They each have their pluses and minuses.

Heat and rate-of-rise detectors are mostly used in closed spaces with no air circulation or in dusty or dirty areas such as crawl spaces and atics.

Photoelectric detectors best detect smokey, slow-burning fires. They may not trigger at all on something like burning alcohol which produces virtually not smoke.

Ionized detectors best detect fast-burning and hot fires that produce a lot of ions. They may not detect slow-burning, smoldering fires.

If you're gonna have only one, ionized is the one to have since those slow-burning, smoldering fires generally eventually turn into fast-burning fires.
 
It's an extremely tiny amount of radioactive material. Smoke detectors have that sticker warning about disposal because there are millions of smoke detectors in use, they only last about ten years or so, and if they were all dumped in the trash that could eventually add up to a bit of a problem. As long as you don't take a thousand of them apart and extract the radioactive material and eat it, though, you have nothing to worry about. :cool:
 
Cougar Allen said:
As long as you don't take a thousand of them apart and extract the radioactive material and eat it, though, you have nothing to worry about. :cool:
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C'mon now, I've been eating the stuff for years and it hasn't damaged either of my heads!

;)
 
As it says in the How Stuff Works article:
"Speaking of alarms, whenever the words "nuclear radiation" are used an alarm goes off in many people's minds. The amount of radiation in a smoke detector is extremely small. It is also predominantly alpha radiation. Alpha radiation cannot penetrate a sheet of paper, and it is blocked by several centimeters of air. The americium in the smoke detector could only pose a danger if you were to inhale it. Therefore, you do not want to be playing with the americium in a smoke detector, poking at it, or disturbing it in any way, because you don't want it to become airborne."

"Alpha Radiation" is just loose helium nuclei that are moving at some speed. In a way it is a stream of particles like a small gas leak of positively charged helium. If you slow the particles down you have some charged gas ions. Generally by the time you slow the particles down they pick up some electrons and are just the inert gas helium just like you put in helium balloons. The alpha particles are only dangerous when they are moving fast and they slow down easily. If you walk in an area that is covered in fallout from an atomic bomb you can get alpha burns on your feet. If you held Amerecium in your hand for a long time you would get skin burns. It wouldn't penetrate deeper than your skin.
 
It's my understanding that terrorists would simply include a bunch of these detectors in an explosive situation... Homeland Security would immediately check for radiation and chemo/bio weapons. The radioactive material in the fire detectors would basically "vaporise" and become distributed across territory - since the radiation detectors wouldn't be able to differentiate between radioactive materials, it's the emergency response that would become socially and economically disruptive until it could be determined that the radioactivity posed no immenent threat to humans.

Basically, there wouldn't be much potential damage from them, but the social upheaval is what the goal of the terrorist is...
 
If a DB ever went off the gov would declare the are safe even if it wasn't. Better to deal with cancer years down the road then panic.
 
If a DB ever went off the gov would declare the are safe even if it wasn't. Better to deal with cancer years down the road then panic.
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Unfortunately for the government, there are to many detectors in private hands.
 
Some years ago, if I remember correctly, a young man working on his Atomic Energy merit badge took the Americium out of several thousand smoke detectors, and managed to make a quick and dirty nearly-critical mass. There is potential to do damage, but only when thousands are brought together.
 
The minimum crtical mass of Americium 241 is 60Kg.

The amount in a smoke detector is 1/5000th of a gram. To acheive critical mass you'd need the source from 300 million detectors. I don't know if that many even exist.

And that's assuming that the material found in smoke detectors is "weapons grade" purity.


You may want to read This article on the practicality of an Americium-based nuke.
 
again, I think the only thing to be concerned with here would be that a DB with this stuff in it would have a relatively low physical impact, at least in the short term, but it would create serious psychological harm and economic harm in the short term... and they wouldn't need more than the stuff from a few hundred smoke detectors to render a radioactive signature which is what would cause the panic.

If anyone ever read Tom Robbins and his "Still Life with Woodpecker" ,you may remember his Fruitloops and Batsh*t Bomb recipie... and it's general employment was to basically create a big stink over nothin... It didn't blow up; it burned with a lot of stinky smoke... just what you want when you want to make a statement.. Hey, a great book... don't know whether his recipies worked, though! LOL!!! :D
 
Once again I am moving one of 79mongooses posts to the appropriate forum. Off to G&G....again. :rolleyes:
 
Didnt know a smoke detector was considered G&G. Didnt seem like either to me, i guess all this work of moving posts tires you out :rolleyes:
 
79mongoose said:
Didnt know a smoke detector was considered G&G. Didnt seem like either to me, i guess all this work of moving posts tires you out :rolleyes:
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Maybe if you read the sticky I posted at the top of the Community Forum I wouldn't have to move so many of your posts. 3 posts in the last 3 days. :rolleyes:

As taken from the above mentioned thread:

Gadgets & Gear: Threads regarding any object that is not a knife, such as guns, gun related articles, shoes, flashlights, backpacks, spoons, cars, motorcycles, etc. belong in this forum. This includes discussion of same.
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I don't know how much clearer I can be.
 
Well, it's not a knife so it probably doesn't belong in blade discussion, and we're not talking about your daughter suffering psychological damage after seeing her dog raped by a polar bear so it probably doesn't belong in community. If a smoke detector isn't a gadget I don't kow what is.
 
Hm, staticmaster brushes have a capsule of polonium 210 in them to generate alpha particles. I've used them for decades to keep the static off my records. Uranium was used as a yellow pottery glaze for centuries, but was discontinued in the first part of the last century. Old watches had radium dials so they would glow in the dark (The big problem was that the people who painted the little numbers with the radium paint, kept sticking their brushes on their tongues to get a good point on the tip... eating radium is definitely not a good idea, but not too many people eat smoke detectors. The polonium in the static brushes is encased in tiny inert ceramic beads cemented to a metal strip inside a cage, so even if some idiot did try to eat them, it would just pass through them.) Consumer products are generally pretty safe.
 
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