Radioisotopic Tracers For… Golfballs
June 30th, 2008
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You may remember not long ago I posted a little educational comic on the topic of radioactive tracers and detection of radioactive substances. The point of this is that radioactive substances are easy to detect, so easy that they are used to find things that are difficult to follow in complex systems. This is important to understand when considering nuclear safety becasue it means that a reactor or other nuclear installation can be confirmed to be safe and not leaking any radioactive material into the enviornment by simple instruments.
I’d mentioned enviornmental tracers, pipeline leak detection, medical research, uptake of nutrients into the body and a few other things. One thing that was not mentioned, however, was golf balls. Yes, golf balls. Back in 1951, when people had a more healthy relationship with radiation, someone got the idea that just a dab of a radioisotopic tracer would make it a lot easier to find golf balls when they were hit into the rough. Today, this might seem a bit strange, but it apparently worked quite well. As long as the amount of the material was relatively low and it was not of chemical form that is prone to biological uptake there’s little likelihood of risk from this kind of thing.
Of course, today it’s more likely that something like an RFID might be used in this kind of circumstance and in practice these would work better for this kind of thing anyway, as they could also tell one golf ball from another and may provide more directional bearing, as opposed to a radioactive tracer which could be difficult to find in an area with high background – at least without the benefit of a spectrometer or single channel analyzer.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I had not been tempted to put a check source in my remote control before.
Original Article From Modern Mechanix
This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Good Science, History, Humor, Misc, Nuclear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 30th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
These weren’t the only ‘nuclear golf balls.’ Irradiated golf balls were produced in the 1960s by Oak Ridge Atom Industries, Inc., of Oak Ridge Tennessee. The manufacturer claimed that the treatment with Co-60 gamma rays resulted in “longer drives . . . . longer lives.” Presumably the longer life of the golf ball was due to the theory that the radiation increased the toughness of the ball’s cover.
They claimed the process – originally developed by AECL Research Scientists – crosslinks the atoms in the golf ball’s rubber core, creating longer molecular chains.
Read about them here: Irradiated Golf Balls
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June 30th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Hmm.. it takes a LOT of gamma exposure to make significant alterations to the chemical structure of something like that and I’d tend to think it would be more likely to break down the polymers in the ball and thus create less durability and toughness – I supposed I could see how it might reform the molecules into cross links though. You’d really need quite a lot of exposure to get a noticable change either way. I’m doubtful that it would do better than using other engineered materials for durability..
Am I the only one skeptical of this?
Aside from that, most of these sports device gimics are just that anyway. They are sold on the illusion that the item can make you better – of course that’s actually very very very secondary to the player. It’s the same with any kind of skill-based pursuit. Give me the best and most expensive guitar in the world and I still can barely play the first few notes of stairway to heaven. Give a cheap guitar to Slash or Eddy Van Halen and they’ll still sound amazing.. although they may have to stop and retune it frequently.
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June 30th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Duffers will buy anything they think will give them an edge. I bet if we marketed a ball soaked in llama pee and claimed it when 10% longer on a drive, there would be takers.
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June 30th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
10% huh? Okay, I’ll take a pack… or five. Will it help with my slice as well?
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July 1st, 2008 at 6:42 am
drbuzz0 said:
Call me crazy, but I’m skeptical whenever anyone tells me that irradiating my balls will improve my performance.
Very skeptical.
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