Well, it's more along the lines of Ned's Atomic Dustbin: it's meant to be atom-proof. Or, more to the point, gamma-proof, or at least able to recover from gamma exposure.
Anyway, I'd been pondering how to test this feature, and thinking it'd be convenient if I could get my grubby little mitts on a few dozen Bq of, say, Co-60, packaged in a nice lead (or U-238, or whatever) cylinder. All the radioactive stuff I have handy around here is alpha emitters, and totally useless for the purpose at hand.
Well... looks like you can still buy small sources by mail-order. And by small, I mean up to 10 μCi. Co-60 seems to come in a 1 μCi source, which is... um... 37 kBq. Right about 3 orders of magnitude hotter than I was thinking of.
Which should make for a pretty good test. Set the source atop a suspected-sensitive component, and see how long it takes to malfunction, and whether the malfunction is detected and handled.
...And how long would it take to erase an OTP EPROM? After all, gamma radiation is just far-beyond-UV that can go right through the black plastic package. Wonder what effect it has on flash memory (which is present on the toaster controller).
Quick Google: yes, looks like somebody's done a project on The Effect of Gamma Rays On Man-In-The-Moon Memory. Apparently large doses erase the chips and/or destroy them. Ungood. Well... the dose seems to have been, um, 60 kGy = 60 J/g??? That's a freakin' huge zap. Delivered fast enough, it could cause thermal damage.
I rather suspect that radiation doses survivable by any humans in the area will also have less dramatic effects on the chips.
(Hm. I'd been worrying about RAM cells getting erased. Flash and/or EEPROM vulnerability would imply a need for redundant storage, just in case one copy has a bit wiped.)
Update: Looks like, in order to cause the sort of errors I want to test for, I may need to hit the thing with either (a) ions with enough energy to make it through the device package, or (b) neutrons. Well, neutrons can be arranged, I guess. Radioactive boy scout, anyone? Now, where to get beryllium foil? I noticed someone offering 1-gram beryllium spheres; foil's gotta be somewhere.
(Note to the SVR-impaired: no, I don't really intend to play with neutrons. Having a gamma source around the place would be worrisome enough.)
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