Current music:	Nuclear Nightmare - Jerry Goldsmith
Entry tags:	americium 241, environmental pollution, landfill, smoke detectors

Nuclear nightmare?

My wife Jill felt the need to go to Bunnings yesterday to check out a stash of remaindered sample pots of paint which she’d heard were on sale for 50 cents. I parked next to a black vehicle which I later realised was a Hummer. Yes we have a few idiots on our roads here who think that Hummers represent the pinnacle of social achievment. Personally speaking, I favour the Yaris.

There was something different about the Hummer couple. They’d loaded their Bunnings hardware purchases in the back and then realised they’d lost their keys. There was this gargantuan spinoff of US military technology sitting in the car park as useless as could be. A gun nut could have opened up with an AK47 and they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I suggested to the man he should unpack the vehicle and check if the keys were under the stuff he’d bought. He thought that was a good idea. I hoped if he found them he wouldn’t cave in the side of our Yaris as he backed out of the parking bay.

As Jill and I were walking through the gardening section entrance of Bunnings I asked the disingenuous greeter and watcher person for people pinching stuff from the store if anyone had handed in some keys. They had. I went back the the Hummer couple and told them how to solve their problem. The moral of the story is that people who drive small cars are smarter than people who drive Hummers.

Inside Bunnings we soon discovered why there was a mountain of paint samples they were trying to offload. They were crap colours, otherwise known as puke. Even if they were free. probably no one would would want them.

I remembered that we needed a 9 volt battery for one of the smoke alarms in the house. These batteries have become very expensive. I suspect a conspiracy. A couple more dollars buys a new smoke alarm with a battery. We decided to buy four new smoke alarms and replace the old ones.

They have a component which uses a radioactive element, Americium 241. I thought these things had to be disposed of carefully - that's what it says inside an old one. However, I found an Australian Nuclear Safety Agency website which says they can be tossed out with the household garbage.


An alarming smoke alarm

According to Wikipedia, Americium 241 is a fissile element. A critical mass of about 60kg will theoretically support a violent chain reaction. The element has a half-life of 432.7 years. It decays into neptunium-237 which has a half-life (about 2.14 million years). The americium in a smoke detector resides with about 3% neptunium after 19 years. It’s also a fissile element. I can see in the picture of one of our old smoke detectors we replaced that I wrote it’s installation date as 31 July 1994. That makes it about 15 years old. Should we really be sending this sort of stuff so indiscriminately to landfill?

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

Please email the Fremantlebiz experience to a friend.
RSS feed.

Rottnest essays:

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio  website or my Picasa site.  Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay.  Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer


Click here to see our backyard.


Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally.  An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!