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Re: Hazardous radiation produced by a Tesla Coil?
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> From: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: Re: Hazardous radiation produced by a Tesla Coil?
> Date: Saturday, April 03, 1999 11:48 AM
>
> Original Poster: forlaser-at-gte-dot-net
>
> Gamma?
> Gamma, by definition is radiation emmited from a radioactive nuceous, by
> radioactive decay... Unles you make a particle accelerator with your TC,
you
> will NEVER get gamma rays!!!!!, x rays, yea, but for that you still need
a
> vacume tube... you don't get x-rays in air no matter what the voltage...
> electrons just dont travel well in anything but a hard vacuum... your
hazards
> are going to be HV, HF, and maybe UV from the spark gap... all of these
hazards
> you can protect yourself from with some good old fassion common sense...
> Pyroguy
Gamma rays are high energy photons (higher energy than, say, xray photons),
i.e. it is a form of electromagnetic radiation or light. So, theoretically,
one can create gamma rays by means other than atomic decay (although, it
isn't easy, and I'm not sure how one would do it.) (Perhaps
electron-positron annihilation?) Since photons are emitted by hot objects,
the energy of the photon basically determined by the temperature, one could
make gammas by getting something hot enough so that the black body
radiation peak is short enough wavelength to be gamma radiation. Off hand,
nuclear reactions are probably the only thing "commonly" available that
operates at these temperatures, but that doesn't exclude other means.
You can generate X-rays in air, (viz. radiation transport from the fireball
of a nuclear explosion, which is a reradiation of Xrays from ionized air
that has been heated by xrays, etc.). If you create a spark or plasma where
the rate of current rise is fast enough (on the order of 1E9 Amps/sec, as I
recall, but it might be 1E9 Amps/uSec) it will emit soft xrays (low energy,
that is).
It is, of course, much easier to generate X-rays with a vacuum, however, as
with gammas, that doesn't exclude doing it in air.
However, neither is likely to be generated by a Tesla Coil....
Perhaps this all seems a tad "nit-picky", however, misunderstandings about
radiation (ionizing and non), its sources, forms, and effects (Doesn't that
sound like a classroom movie title...) are the root of much ill-founded
political consternation and confusion, so we, as technically sophisticated
people (you've got to have some sophistication to make a tesla coil work),
should endeavor to be technically correct and, most important, spread the
word.