Virgin Lead

["Dale E. Boyce" <dale@radpro.uchicago.edu>]

Actually I believe the contaminated lead was virgin lead. If you
start with lead ore from a mine where the uranium concentration
and therefore radium concentration is high, you will end up with
hot lead from the Pb210, Bi210, Po210 daughters (RaDEF).

A group I used to work with had a whole stack of lead ignots that had
been ballast in an old dutch sailing ship.  It was latched onto in the
belief that it would make great shielding for low background detectors,
having had time for radioactive contaminants to decay away.  In reality,
it was still more contaminated than lead we bought that had been mined
in Illinois recently.


Dale Boyce
dale@radpro.uchicago.edu