Visualize Radioactive Decay?

The the story that goes with the video above can be found over at Frontline. They showed the footage from an endoscope that was sent into the Fukushima reactor. It was pretty cool but the video quality degraded as they got deeper in. Watching this I remembered the Alpha particle detector I made from a webcam a couple years ago. The "snow" in the Fukushima video is likely coming from high energy particles or rays hitting the CCD of the camera.

If you have a cheap webcam and a radiation source you can easily demonstrate this. If you have an old smoke alarm you have a radioactive source. If you don't have one laying around just go out and buy a new one and swap it out for one you have at home. You're supposed to change those out periodically anyway. Additionally you can take the remaining parts of the smoke detector and use the beeper for demonstrations of the Doppler Effect.

There are full instructions for the webcam Alpha Detector over at InventGeek.com Personally, all I did when I tried this was open up a cheap webcam and put the Amaricanium source directly on the CCD. I set it up in a desk drawer so that I could close it to block out stray light.