Airport X-rays & Computers

["William G. Nabor" <wgnabor@uci.edu>]

Radsafers:

     Last Wednesday a colleague of mine took her Hewlett-Packard
portable inkjet computer printer with her on a plane.  The printer
was in her carry-on luggage and passed through the X-ray detector
at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA.  Upon arrival the
printer wouldn't work.  A call to the HP technical support line
elicited the response that the X-rays had fried the printer's
electronics.

     How likely do you find this explanation?  Do you get the
impression that the HP tech might have been too quick to blame
something not covered by the warranty?  After all, portable
computers are carried on board planes by the thousands every day.

     Have any Radsafers had a similar experience?  I'm not talking
about stray magnetic fields erasing a floppy or two.  To my
knowledge there was no magnetic storage in the printer.  We seen to
be talking about X-rays themselves zapping an EPROM or something.

     If you do think this is a likely explanation, then why is this
starting now?  Is it due to smaller/more fragile electronics or
stronger X-ray fields?  Do we need to post a warning?
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William G. Nabor
University of California, Irvine
EH&S Office
Irvine, CA,  92697-2725
WGNABOR@UCI.EDU
mailto:wgnabor@uci.edu
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