The Health Physics Department of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California, is engaged in a continuing study of fallout and natural background radiation in the San Francisco Bay area. Portable scintillometers are used to gather data. The gamma-ray response of the scintillometers is compared with the response of an integrating ion chamber over an energy range of approximately 1.5 MeV starting at 0.12 MeV.nThe results verify the theoretical assumption that the scintillometer response is proportional to the number of y-ray photons, whereas the ion chamber response is a measure of the dose, i. e., and proportional to the energy of the γ rays as well as to the quantity of the incident gammas. Additional results also demonstrate the validity of using a radium source for calibration of the instruments used for natural background measurements.
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