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Von: owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu [mailto:owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu]Im Auftrag von Franta, Jaroslav
Gesendet: Freitag, 14. März 2003 18:04
An: Radsafe (E-mail)
Betreff: request on coral calcium ( NORM data )Hi all,
I wonder if someone on Radsafe with access to a gamma spec could be kind enough to do a gamma spectroscopy analysis and a radiation field measurement on one or two representative commercial coral calcium products.
As others have stated earlier, this could be interesting, as Corals apparently enhance sea water concentration of uranium by a factor of ~1000 times ( from 3.3ppb to about 2-4 ppm U ), and coral older than a century or two will also contain all the decay daughters, including thorium, radium, polonium and radioactive bismuth & lead.
I am not a specialist on corals, but I have spent three weeks on a very beautiful atoll (three days on another one near by) in the middle of nowhere (French Polynesia) doing sampling and measurements of in-situ gamma-spectrometry and dose rates. It was Mururoa and Fangataufa, the place, where the French have conducted a lot of nuclear explosions, first in the atmosphere, then underground. I do not have the figures with me, I am at home, but an enhancement by a factor of thousand is still ricidulous if you start from almost zero. (Remember: Zero times thousand is still zero!) Qualitatively I can tell you that we were not able to detect Rn-222 in indoor air - there is simply none, because corals do not contain uranium and therefore no Ra-226. So, what about this story?A colleague in Chalk River (Canada) recently said that "we do a classroom demonstration with a 300 g can of Nu-Salt (a K-Cl salt substitute for people on low-sodium diets, purchased off the shelf from the local grocery store) which can be shown to quadruple the background radiation field on contact, using a simple Geiger counter with 3" window. The demo had added significance for several reasons: (a) the amount of potassium in the can is equal to that found in an average human body (about 150 g); (b) the product is used widely for its health benefits; and (c) if the grocery story stocks (or a customer buys) more than two or three cans of Nu-Salt they would be in violation of the Nuclear Safety & Control Act for unlicensed possession of K-40, if it weren't a "naturally occurring nuclear substance, other than those that are or have been associated with the development, production or use of nuclear energy".
Four times "background radiation" - what is that - is not threatening. K-40 concentration is like potassium concentration controlled in the human body, except for certain rare diseases. With other words: What you put in on top is excreted below and the potassium as well as the K-40 concentration in the body is kept constant. Its use as a nutrient seems to be legally correct, at least K-40 is exempted from such radiation protection considerations on food in Europe. The storage of tons of KCl is probably another question, because external irradiation would be involved. A very interesting question indeed! I'll look it up when I return to work.
Wonder if coral calcium might also fit into the category of violation of the Nuclear Safety & Control Act for unlicensed possession of RAM (radioactive materials).
Coral Calcium - if really produced from corals - cannot contain large amounts of potassium. Potassium is water soluble, so how should it be concentrated? I see no chance, that it would violate any radiation protection legislation or even come close.Franz