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Re: Hazardous radiation produced by a Tesla Coil?

Gamma rays, are BY DEFINITION emmited from dadioactive decay, they are NOT high
energy photons necessarily, look at co-60, probably the radiography industries
favorite source of gamma's emmits most of it's radiation at 1.3 Mev... It also
emmits some roughly 400 kev gammas, you can get x-rays with energies higher
than that from the gamma emmision of co-60 without trying too hard... It simply
happens that most gammas are relativly high energy, and in comparison x-rays
are relativly low... it doesn't have to be this way though... Thus, if a tesla
coil is not driving an accelerator, it CAN NEVER produce gamma radiation. The
creation of x-rays from a black body source, which you refer to from the curent
rise in the spark gap is true... I'll give you that much, but it's going to
take ALOT of energy to generate any 'x-ray' photons... I would be very
surprised if any coil ever built puts enough peak curent through the spark gap
to produce x-rays... If they did, it would be simply absorbed i the air though,
therefore it would not be a hazard... But I do admit, you were right on that
one...
Pyroguy
(Please ignore poor grammer I studied physics, not grammer!)

Tesla List wrote:

> Original Poster: "Jim Lux" <jimlux-at-jpl.nasa.gov>
>
> ----------
> > 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.