cargo.cult
Radioactive plane at a Warsaw museum
An old IL-28 Beagle with a fictitious # 65 at an army museum in Warsaw's Sadyba showing a slight radiation around the nose cockpit of some 0.60 to 0.80 uSv/h, which is ca. 5 times more than the typical background. Flight instruments at the time were painted with radium enamels to enable glowing at night without any power, but these instruments were highly radioactive. I believe that this was the source of the radiation shown on the photo.
Other radiation sources from old military planes can originate from ice detectors with Strontium-90 or Yttrium-90, or jet engine fire detectors.
As a note, once I had an old cockpit instrument, which showed over 9 uSv/h, and which I stupidly kept for many years at home on an exposed shelf...
Radioactive plane at a Warsaw museum
An old IL-28 Beagle with a fictitious # 65 at an army museum in Warsaw's Sadyba showing a slight radiation around the nose cockpit of some 0.60 to 0.80 uSv/h, which is ca. 5 times more than the typical background. Flight instruments at the time were painted with radium enamels to enable glowing at night without any power, but these instruments were highly radioactive. I believe that this was the source of the radiation shown on the photo.
Other radiation sources from old military planes can originate from ice detectors with Strontium-90 or Yttrium-90, or jet engine fire detectors.
As a note, once I had an old cockpit instrument, which showed over 9 uSv/h, and which I stupidly kept for many years at home on an exposed shelf...