Just watched Chernobyl and saw how “everything” electrical got destroyed from the radiation, but not the geiger counters. Why it that?
In: Biology
strong radiation makes current in wire randomly. If you want your electronics to do something then that sucks. If you just make a wire attached to a speaker, you get little bleeps and bloops every time and you can hear the radiation.
Who says it doesn’t?
It reports levels of radiation. We see levels harmful to us and run. We’re both safe.
Levels harmful to us haven’t quite hit those harmful to the device. If we stayed long enough or ventured deeper into the radiation, then we would probably see the device suffer from exposure at some point.
Well… the person or device that found us might, anyway…
I haven’t seen that and there are a variety of Geiger counters. They are either shielding the sensitive parts or there are no sensitive parts. As technology shrinks it becomes more susceptible to being destroyed by small damage. A device with ICs (integrated circuits, the chips on the boards) will be far more likely be destroyed by radiation than an old school device built with chunky resistors, capacitors, and the like. And even with ICs, there is a huge variety of trace sizes (the width of lines that conduct the electricity). Current tech has them down to a couple nanometers now. A single energized particle can completely destroy that.
If it is unshielded, it would eventually be destroyed by the radiation, and even if shielded, there has to be some part that isn’t.
Geiger counter enclosures, where the circuits are, are shielded, and the most basic analog readout units are honestly barely electronics – just a couple of resistors, a gas filled tube, a passive speaker, a capacitor, and a battery.
A gieger counter would eventually be destroyed as well. Like enough radiation long enough would destroy lead even.
The difference is in the fragility of circuitry and signals.
Like the rover for instance, that they used to try to clear the roof. It had circuit boards, with dozens of tiny components working in concer, and signal wiring, which needs precise consistent electricity to work.
Well radiation destroys those tiny components, and interupts the signals. The rover was pretty vulnurable to the task at hand.
Geiger counters on the other hand are very simple devices, with no circuitry, and no need to communicate signals. So even though they would eventually be destroyed by radiation, they aren’t as fragile to radation as more complicated devices.
Very ELI5:
Think of radiation like little bullets. Think of electronics like a car. Normal cars don’t typically get shot at, so they arent made bulletproof. Getting shot will mess them up. We CAN make bulletproof cars, but its harder and more expensive, so unless they NEED to be bulletproof we dont bother. Similarly, we can make radiation-hardened electronics for things that go into space (whered theres a lot of radiation) or military hardware that needs to work even in a nuclear war.
In this analogy, the geiger counter is a very special car that is designed specifically to drive around and catch any bullet shot at it, and count them. That’s its whole purpose for existing, so it’s designed to do just that.
It’s not true that everything electronic gets destroyed instantly, there’s video footage from immediately after the accident and also later from high radiation areas inside the rector.
Video cameras are complex and relatively fragile, so if they can survive for that long then a simpler device like a geiger counter will last even longer before degrading and eventually failing.
“Everything” isn’t getting destroyed by radiation, complex electronics or living creatures get destroyed.
Geiger counter that does clicks instead of numeric display is incredibly simple – a battery, speaker and a gas vial between them. That’ll work just fine long after radiation kills any person that might be holding it.
It destroys electronics, not necessarily all electric equipment. The margin to failure for advanced electronics is much smaller than a simple current detector.
So you can have significant degradation of a Geiger counter and it will still be USABLE unless you induce a large enough current to actually burn out windings.
On the other hand, even a small amount of damage to a circuit board can brick a computer.
Geiger counters are designed with the expectation of being used around radiation and they can be built without delicate electronics if necessary.
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