"Background radiation is all
around us in tiny quantities.
Nature even planted unstable
atoms deep inside the earth itself.
They decay one by one here
and there in a barrage of inconceivably
small and silent explosions."
You can't see radiation.
You can't touch it, smell it,
feel it, see it,
you don't have any physical senses that
can warn you
of the dangers of radiation.
My name is Gary Olsen. I am the Chief
Marketing Officer for
VPI Technology Group.
We help different industries and a lot of different
companies develop new products.
Some people come to us and say
"I need a prototype and I want you to design
it for me," so, we'll help
them design a new technology, prototype it,
and then take it all the way
through the full design process until it's ready
for manufacturing and we can do regulatory testing
and certification on the product as well.
In 2001, we were approached
by a company who wanted to design
a suite of radiation detection products.
We were able to acquire that
product line and progress it
forward, and to this day we've added quite
a few new products to the product line.
One of the challenges with designing radiation
detection equipment is you usually need high
voltage chain circuitry within there,
and trying to design that into
a board into a small form factor
in a small space
can be challenging when you have both low
voltage and high voltage circuitry
that need to co exist on the same printed
circuit board.
There's background radiation all around
us all the time.
Here we are at the Capitol building for
the state of Utah, and this building
is constructed - the outside veneer is
a granite.
(Detector starts beeping)
Oh, there it just went off.
(Beeping continues)
So the detector is picking up
small amounts of radioactive material that's
found in this granite.
I don't think most people are aware
that there's naturally occurring radioactive material
in stone such as
granite. I think people have that
in their kitchens, they have a granite countertop and they
may not be aware that
there's a slightly elevated
radioactivity level
in their own home.
We have radiation coming from the sun,
we have radiation coming from the Earth,
we have radiation in bananas.
There's a tiny, tiny, tiny
amount of radioactivity in every
banana you eat.
Does it mean it's dangerous and it's bad
for you? No! ALL radiation
isn't bad.
Too MUCH radiation
can have harmful effects.
Having an understanding of what levels are
safe and what levels are dangerous
is helpful.
And that's what our instruments try to do
is help us understand
what levels of radiation might
be present
in different situations.
"All life on Earth has reached
its present form in company with radiation
from this naturally occurring radioactivity.
Extremely thin,
with extremely low level intensity,
it has always been with us.
It is nothing new."
