The fourth layer, where most particles end their lives, is made of caesium iodide crystals.
Is there any effort to follow the law and begin distributing potassium iodide on a 20-mile radius?
The newer detectors forgo wires and gas in favor of highly engineered crystals made from sodium iodide or cesium iodide.
The government knew at least as early as the mid-1940s that potassium iodide was protective against I-131 absorption by the thyroid.
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And for those particles that make it past the caesium iodide, a huge electromagnet tracks their passage out of the detector.
Berkeley's chief rival, SAIC in San Diego, has sold hundreds of its cesium iodide handheld screeners to the FBI and other agencies.
More recently, the U.S. government project Stormfury attempted for decades to lessen the force of hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide.
These pellets, usually made of silver iodide, salts or calcium chloride, are physically dropped via plane or shot into the air via rockets.
Berkeley's chief rival, SAIC Corp. in San Diego, has sold hundreds of its cesium iodide handheld screeners to the FBI and other agencies.
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, people who live near nuclear plants have been buying potassium iodide pills, which can help protect against cancer from radiation exposure.
But the outfit was well-equipped with hand-held radiation detectors, full body suits with breathing hoods and ample supplies of potassium iodide, a preventive against radiation poisoning of the thyroid gland.
The NRC staff initially selected three of these recommendations --enlarging emergency evacuation zones, expanding potassium iodide distribution, and accelerating the transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry casks -- for further evaluation.
Because there are only a limited number of potassium iodide tablets in the world, people hoarding them in the U.S. are preventing them from getting those who really need them like the people in Japan.
These offices, set up over the past 15 years, deploy artillery, rocket-launchers and aeroplanes to seed clouds with chemicals (usually silver iodide) that encourage droplets to form and fall where needed, or prevent the formation of destructive hailstones.
Instead of using aircraft-borne chemicals as seeds, the researchers propose spraying seawater from unmanned, wind-powered, satellite-controlled vessels that would cruise the latitudes where hurricanes form since droplets of brine have a similar effect to dry ice and silver iodide.
In China, they use artillery shells, rockets and airplanes to spray existing cloud systems with silver iodide, a compound that triggers moisture in the clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to earth as snow or rain.
To dig up the raw material, process it, convert from oxide to fluoride to metal to iodide, to mix it with mercury, make their own light bulbs, all of this within each of the different 192 sets of national boundaries.
As my colleague Jeff McMahon has noted earlier this week, one risk of nuclear that has come to light in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster is the possibility of radioactive contaminants, particularly iodide, making its way into drinking water.
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So far the only commercially available drugs that have a biological or chemical anti-terror purpose are over-the-counter potassium iodide pills sold as a long-term radiation treatment, and Bayer 's (nyse: BAY - news - people ) Cipro, an antibiotic that can be used to prevent anthrax toxicity.
People living here in Palo Alto, Mountain View and the rest of Silicon Valley have been in a shopping frenzy, snapping up potassium iodide pills, dried foods, emergency kits and various other supplies out of concern that Northern California could receive a dose of radiation from the nuclear mess still unfolding in Japan.
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