Terracotta Floor Tile

[Sparky]

I was testing the latest modifications to my shield with a small fragment of Terracotta Tile. I just posted about this shield in that index category. Terracotta is the same brown ceramic they make flower pots out of. I trimmed it to fit my shield with a hammer. It was not very hot, only about 2 cps over background in the shield with a 38 mm NaI Probe, or about 21 cpm increase with a 2 inch pancake GM detector. The spectrum attached took 19 hours. The question always is "Thorium or Uranium?" The answer, in this case, appears to be mostly Thorium.

What surprised me was the large K40 peak. Maybe this is common in ceramics, I don't know enough to know. The effect of all that Potassium was to really enhance the Annihilation peak at 511 keV. I had no idea so much energy/mass/energy conversions were occurring in your garden variety flower pot.

[Geoff]

Clay typically contains weathered feldspar minerals which contain potassium.