NiCE Club @ UC Berkeley

Meeting - 20 Feb 2025

Chat with Prof. Hanks

Notes from the meeting:

• 8 people attended
• we learned about Prof. Hanks' outreach programs through RadWatch

Professor Hanks with the NiCE club

Additional Notes from the Meetings

We learned about Prof. Hanks' outreach programs through her lab group RadWatch. The RadWatch group operates a global network of radiation detectors to educate the public about how radiation works and its prevalence in our environment. This group was started after the 2011 Fukushima accident to measure the impact of radiation contamination. Following the accident, they found temporary increases in the airborne atmospheric concentration of Cs-137, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, but radiation levels quickly (within a matter of weeks) fell back down to natural levels, concluding the environmental impact of the Fukushima accident. No oceanic or terrestrial contamination was detected in the Bay Area or anywhere on the Western Coast of the United States.

Reference Links

• Caesium-137 is a radioactive isotope that is produced during the nuclear fission of U-235, the primary reaction used to produce nuclear power commercially.
• Cs-137 has a relatively short half-life. It is produced in a reactor at a constant rate due to the continual fissioning of the U-235 nucleus to produce power, and transmutes from Cs-137 to Ba-137 as a part of the natural radioactive decay process.
• Most Cs-137 in the environment is human-made resulting from open-air nuclear weapons tests during the 20th century.