Collecting a spent nuclear fuel fragment at Chernobyl

**Please watch in HD format for best results** The area surrounding the incomplete natural-draft cooling towers at ChNPP’s Unit 5 construction site is littered with local hot spots that are easy to find with a scintillation detector. In this video, I dig up one of these hot spots, and learn that the object responsible for the prominent radiation is a hard black fleck a mere 0.5 mm on a side. What is it? I collected the specimen and brought it back to the Interinform hotel for further explorations. The CDV-700 Geiger probe measures 35-40,000 cpm on contact with the beta window closed, translating into about 60 milliroentgen / hr and an activity of about 40 microcuries by comparison with other, known Cs-137 sources. Next I illustrate a rudimentary form of scintillation gamma spectrometry making use of my netbook’s sound card and a clever piece of free pulse analysis software called PRA, written by Australian physicist Marek Dolleiser. This spectrometer arrangement works on the AC-