Just watched Chernobyl and saw how “everything” electrical got destroyed from the radiation, but not the geiger counters. Why it that?
In: Biology
Hey, a thing im qualified to speak about! We’ll call radiation zoomies because thats what we call it at work. When zoomies hit a gieger counter it produces a little electrical pulse which is amplified and put through a speaker which makes the chirping noise. it is designed to do this so it can detect zoomies at really low levels. But at high levels similar things happen inside electronics making little pulses, which for complex computer based systems can cause a 0 to flip to a 1. Depending on where that happens it can kill the functionality of the system and since in high zoomie areas this is happening a lot so it has a high chance of killing complex systems. Due to the nature of neutron zoomies (the type experienced near active or recently active nuclear fuel) this can make the thing exposed to zoomies also radioactive itself, which makes it hard to fix easily.
Tldr the gieger counter is simple and the computers are complex so they are more resistant.
Edit: also during chernobyl several radiation measuring devices did fail, though whether the failure was due to high radiation or soviet era contruction and quality control is not known.
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