Friday, January 18, 2008

New York wants to ban geiger counters

I'm not making this up:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/a-license-to-check-for-wmds/

is reporting that New York City wants to require "licenses" for any detector for nuclear, biological, or chemical detectors. We know how "permitting" devices works in Chicago--they never banned handguns in the city, they simply stopped issuing permits for them.

Geiger Counter
Is this Mr. Dangerous?

What exactly is so bad for someone to possess a detector? The claim is that the Police Department wants to prevent mass panic. In reality, they want to control information. They want to prevent citizens from making their own judgement and force them to rely on "authorities". Why not make a law to make it a crime to create a false panic? There's probably one already on the books, so we don't even need any more laws to deal with it. How many false panics have we had? What? None?

This as more than an attempt to prevent false panic from misinformed geiger counter owners. I see it as the city declaring that individuals are not allowed to think or do on their own, that they must be informed only by the authorities, that the police always know what's best. That's a bunch of bull.

The bill is so broadly and poorly written as to make illegal chlorine pool testers, geiger counters, and even your own nose. What if I make a radiation detector out of a fluorescent light bulb or LED? Are you going to require permits for those too?

EDIT: Schneier compares it to locked fire alarm boxes that slowed the response to the Great Chicago Fire.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

What the hell?!? If you want to start importing them, I'll be your supplier.

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Thanks for the offer, but I'm in Chicago, safe for the moment from the boneheads.

Anonymous said...

If one broadens his panorama it all makes sense. The Twin Towers had mini-nukes at their bases. The radioactive dust is scattered all over lower Manhattan, perhaps further. The perps have been using THEIR geiger counters and have been alarmed by the persistence of this radioactive dust in myriad building crooks and crannies. The perps don't want the average New Yorker to be nosing around with HIS geiger counter.

Dean W. Armstrong said...

henri--
You make a very extreme claim that is clearly false. What is a mini-nuke? Even the smallest bomb would make huge amounts of fission products, all of which would create megaCuries of radioactivity. Radioactive dust in nooks and crannies is likely the result of radon decay, which infiltrates buildings easily from surrounding soil and when it decays the daughter products are strongly attracted to airborne dust particles.

Anonymous said...

My statement is only 'false' to one who has not done serious in-depth study of the physical evidence concerning the "collapse" of the Twin Towers. My statement is certainly, however, alarming... as is most of the news emanating from the activities of our various governmental branches. My advice to New Yorkers: Get Curious! Buy yourself a geiger counter! Start poking around the dusty corners of Manhattan! You can never tell what you may find!

Dean W. Armstrong said...

You're great, Henri. Please explain the cover-up that kept the radioactive noble gases out of the atmosphere, you know, xenon-133 and 137 and krypton-85, the ones that can't bind with anything and are formed in large quantities during any fission reaction? Where did they go? You'll find it impossible to keep them confined.

Anonymous said...

Very negative and very 'spinning.' The salient aspect of the proposed ban on geiger counters is 'whatever motivated the council members, the police, etc. to propose such an ordinance in the first place. The APPARENT NEED for such an ordinance does not exist! So, I come along and sketch out a scenario which answers very clearly the question 'why.' To prevent the discovery of something in the NYC environs which, the authorities deem, is best left UN-discovered.
So, you to come back to shoot me down with the question about mini-nukes (Google lists 36,500 pages on the subject, some of them ceratinly probative.) I accept that mini-nukes do exist. They have been around for some decades. After long study I also accept that the Twin Towers and Bldg #7 were brought down with demolition explosives, in the latter case standard, in the former two cases rather exotic.
But do you offer your own explanation as to this bizarre city council ordinance? No! You seem only intent on shooting down my scenario. Negative, what?
Now you are intent on proving I don't know very much about radioactive gases. You are right. Gases have a tendency to blow away in the wind, don't they? No one would buy a geiger counter, it seems to me, to investigate a radioactive gas. Some other method would be used, wouldn't it? The truth of the matter is that people have already reported finding radioactive dust in the Manhattan area, and I suppose the ordinance was to prevent MORE such discoveries from occurring. That could become embarrassing to some people, couldn't it?
So let's get back on track. We need to hear your scenario about why the City Council wants to ban geiger counters. We are waiting all a-twitter...

rodin said...

Please explain the cover-up that kept the radioactive noble gases out of the atmosphere, you know, xenon-133 and 137 and krypton-85, the ones that can't bind with anything and are formed in large quantities during any fission reaction?

>> Gases would disperse, and who says fission reaction anyway? The beauty of pure fusion SADM is can be scaled down to any size. I doubt one 'bomb in the basement'. More logical is microfusion SADM's taking the place of the main explosive charges for the cores. After a week's constant dilution by hosing and rain WTC6 basement still had 60x normal tritium

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Here's a paper describing the tritium found on the site and attributing it to emergency exit signs on the airplanes with a minor component from weapon sights. At 34 Curies, it is easily the source of the slightly elevated tritium levels. That amount would contaminate 425 million gallons of water up to the EPA limit for drinking water (20,000pCi/L).

As for your claim of a pure fusion bomb, I laugh at that. For most of the fusion reactions even a tiny fusion bomb would generate plenty of neutrons to transmute nearby materials and make them radioactive.

rodin said...

Link? What do you think brought down the 3 WTC buildings?

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Oops, that HTML didn't render right. http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1678&context=lbnl

gwon said...

In the end, the report on Tritium levels concludes the known sources were sufficient to document the levels detected. Eliminating detectors from public use would certainly keep the ignorant from making rash decisions and running around screaming false claims that could create sheer panic.

Public servants will always protect themselves from unnecessary work. They wouldn't want to have to deal with a city full of ignorant people running wildly about.

I don't think outlawing detectors is a good choice, but I could certainly see why it would be proposed, especially given some of the comments here.

Titus Sviatoslav said...

The Towers were brought down by deep underground nuclear demolition devices that were declared in the PNET (Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty) with the old Soviet Union.

Underground nuclear explosions create a different radiation signature than above ground, as most of the radiation is absorbed in the rock. The buildings were demolished by letting the crush zone and the rubble zone of the cavity extend into the Towers foundation, allowing them to propigate up the structure.

The devices were designed into the buildings and first placed in 1973.
Remember, the tallest building ever demolished by conventional demolition was 47 sories.

See the video presentation of former Soviet Nuclear Services officer Dimitri Khalezov for a complete explanation of how the devices were designed.
Seriously, take a look at it. It will anwer your questions about 911.

Titus Sviatoslav said...

P.S.
If you think you are safe in Chicago, Dimitri says that similar deep underground nuclear demolition systems were installed and declared in the PNET in the Sears (Willis) tower.

King of the Paupers said...

Jct: They should name the people who put forward these ideas because they're responsible for the catastrophe they don't want to warn people about. So let's say politicians in New York don't want their citizens warned.

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Howard T. Lewis III had two posts here, which I've deleted:

Blogger Howard T. Lewis III said...

Titus got it right. Don't help the Big Apple perps get away with this. Read Jeff Prager's analysis of motive as well. You been missing out on a whole heap of facts there Dean W.Armstrong. Again, check out the google search....Activist Post: Architects and Engineers Question... to get better clued into reality.

4/17/2011 10:25 PM
Delete
Blogger Howard T. Lewis III said...

Oh, I almost forgot. The Mossad helped and the motive has to do with Talmud greed and the CIA stealing Marcos' gold and the Black Eagle gold, which was the gold stolen by the Nazis in Europe during WWII and confiscated by the OSS-CIA after WWII. Guess who ended up with both.
TV plots don't have nuthin' on this mess. Which still is only monkeys throwing their poop in all directions.(You don't get out much, do you?)

4/17/2011 10:35 PM

Dean W. Armstrong said...

These comments are utterly wrong; I've pointed out any nuclear fission reaction must emit some percentage of inert gas fission products that cannot be hidden. They are fundamental indicators of such events. And of course, no spike was recorded in 2001. If you are unable to acknowledge this independent, unassailable information, then I hope you realize your brain is subject to conspiracy theory problems, and you should deal with that.

Anonymous said...

Wow - a revitalised thread ;-) - rapidly going off topic too !

Now, why on Earth would 'authorities' wish to ban passive monitoring equipment unless they had something to hide?

Bearing in mind the fundamental nationality of your very own Gestapo, er, sorry, DHS & TSA, could it be that a certain embassy in NYC is leaking something a little more physical than secrets?

As for geiger counters, they are very easy to construct these days, even for a tyro electronics hobbyist - eg: http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=C6979

Ironically, Russian tubes are flooding the secondhand market and are actually very well designed and constructed ;-)

To get to the bottom of this weirdness, perhaps a revisit to the Georgia Guidestones and Kissinger's Eugenics policy is in order?

aldo

ps: Hi, rodin - long time no see - still Dissential?

Unknown said...

http://www.techlib.com/science/ion.html

build your own