Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
My wife tripped one in Shanghai--nuclear. It caught the nuclear heart scan she had the day before. I was quite unimpressed with how they handled it--totally focused on finding the reason for the false positive, no attempt to figure out if it actually was real. (It would have been simple enough to check her for hot spots with a geiger counter, they didn't. She had left the card from the lab at home, they simply took her word for it. At least that was better than the US police that did the opposite--set up a radiation detector and threw everyone that tripped it in jail. 100% were from nuclear medicine, zero smugglers.)
Originally Posted by
trooper
Yes.. because a Geiger counter is standard equipment everywhere.... I carry my own of course...
If you're going to set up a big radiation detector you should give the people manning it small ones also to locate what the big one found. What China did was simply stupid. (And then we hit a second detector going out of customs. It triggered, we stopped and waited and eventually gave up and continued when nobody responded.)
A geiger counter isn't perfect because while the residue of nuclear testing will show up as whole-body radioactivity people with radioactive seeds implanted will show a hot spot like a smuggler. (I don't know how many of those would be traveling, though.) Radioiodine will also show up as whole body with a big hotspot.