1.    Last first:

> Anyway: People worry about Nuke plants. How funny.

Straw man / substantially different comparisons being made 
here.

2.    Geiger-Muller tubes generally have a finite lifetime. 
Odds are your father's one is non functional and many 
disposal ones may be too. Making one's own GM tubes from 
scratch would not be too too hard. if you acquire a 
commercial tube the rest is easy.

3. > 
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-10-19-h-bomb-search_x.htm
>
> "The U.S. military lost an estimated 11 nuclear bombs 
> during the Cold War
> that have never been recovered. Some of those incidents:"
>
> I couldn't find a complete list:
> - 2 in the Mediterranean Sea.
> - 2 in the Atlantic Ocean.
> - 1 in water 8,500 feet deep near Whidbey Island, Wash.
> - 1 a few miles off the cost of Atlanta, perhaps near 
> Tybee Island.

AFAIK there is one "buried in the soft soil of North 
Carolina" which doesn't seem to match anything on that list.

They lost 2 in Spain in a single aerial incident with, 
AFAIR,  one being recovered from a vast depth at sea with 
great effort and the other being spread in very small pieces 
over a very wide area of countryside.

They may or may not or may or may not or ... have lost one 
in a fire at Greenham common when a ?B52? jettisoned drop 
tanks during a gone-badly-wrong takeoff and tghe resulting 
fire toasted an adjacent nuclear bomber. There was much 
niether confirm nor denying over this for many years.

They didn't lose one at McMurdo in the antarctic - that was 
just the friendly local reactor having issues and spreading 
its joy a little too far and wide for total comfort. They 
shovelled up an extremely large amount of soil and other 
stuff and flew it no expenses spared back to the US where no 
doubt it still resides in some safe-forever NIMBY 
repository.

4.    > I wonder how many people own a Geiger-counter. I've 
only seen one in my
> entire life. It was my dads, which I now have. But they 
> are available.

I do :-)
It's probably as functional as your father's one at present.

5.
> On the other hand, I've been told there is enough uranium 
> in my back yard to
> make a bomb, if I dug it out a few feet deep and processed 
> it to somehow
> extract and refine it. And the background radiation is 
> pretty constant. We
> joke about testing toys from China.

Amount varies with area.
A very small percent goes a long way in a deep yard sized 
hole.
Depending  on local geology you may get almost none or 
several kg from a deep enough hole over your whole section 
BUT extracting it from that much soil would be about as easy 
as getting it out of seawater AND it would be very mainly 
U238 with minimal U235. Getting the 235 from the 238 
requires conceptually simple but in practice expensive and 
difficult machinery (differential gas diffusion and/or 
centrifuge). Real people, some of whom live in several 
countries (3 come to mind immediately) with names beginning 
with I,  have large numbers of such. It is likely to be 
noticed if you get some.

If you want to up the raw amount of U23x in your source ore, 
failing being able to acquire a yellow-cake facility, you 
could start looking at old gold dredge tailings, depending 
on area.



        Russell






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