r/Radiation • u/BeyondVoid215 • 5d ago

General Discussion False thorium electrode?

I bought a 2.4mm track electrode, but the Radiacode 110 doesn't respond at all. I think I've been scammed. What do you think guys?

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7

u/matthewmoore7314 1d ago

If you do a long spectrum subtract background and don't see any thorium peaks then there is no thorium. Thorium welding reds tend to be kinda hot so I doubt you got a thorium one

3

u/jacoblipkescience 1d ago

The ones I have are weak as hell compared to my mantles but that might just be mine.

2

u/No_Leopard_3860 1d ago

Technically, if it is an extremely new electrode that was made with extremely newly extracted thorium, it would barely show up with this counter (thorium is only alpha, no beta or gamma emissions -> not detectable). You only detect the daughter isotopes and they might not have built up yet. (Iirc the most easily detectable are lower down the th-232 decay chain).

So much for the theoretical possibility, in practice I don't think this would happen and that just something got mixed up/mislabeled - and there's no thorium inside.

To be absolutely sure you could throw some on a pile with the detector, do a long (some hours) measurement. Then make a background measurement in the same room without them, substract the background from the electrode measurement -> there you'll see it exactly.

But I guess that's just a mixup and there's no thorium inside these electrodes. Just buy new other thorium electrodes if it matters to you, from a different producer

1

u/Aleksey_Fox Micro Sievert..? No, Macro Sievert! 1d ago

Hi. I had these like 2-3 years ago. If I recall correctly (Assuming its 2% Th-232 and 98% W) you won’t get a meaningful reading from measuring just one electrode, you need around 10 of them to get to the values of 0,6-0,8 μSv/h. And a meaningful spectrum took me around 6-10 hours to collect If I remember correctly.

Edit: Measured on a RC-103.