ActSmall · Ground

The library

A small, slowly-growing collection of source-cited primers and printable project cards about indoor radon, the personal radiation dose budget, and well-water contaminants. Plain English. Free to copy, translate, and republish.

Every external source on every page is HEAD-probed once a day by our curator Lambda. Broken links are repaired or dropped automatically.

Primers

Read-through pieces. Each one is roughly 800-1,500 words, source-cited, focused on a single confusion or concept that comes up everywhere in public radiation coverage.

  • Radon, the soil gas under your house

    The single most-underweighted thing in public radiation coverage. Read this first. Why a colourless, odourless naturally-occurring soil gas is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, and why a $20 home test is the only useful first step. Foundational.

  • Your personal radiation dose budget

    Roughly half of a typical person's annual ionising radiation dose is indoor radon; a fifth is medical imaging; the rest is cosmic, terrestrial, and food. See the components from UNSCEAR data and stop arguing about the wrong ones.

  • What this site does not cover, and why

    5G, smart meters, microwaves, airport scanners, and consumer wireless are not on the map - not from squeamishness, but because the WHO and IARC do not class them as a public-health story at consumer exposures. Here is what those bodies actually say, in their own words.

Project cards

Single-page guides. Things a normal person can do this weekend with no special equipment, that produce a real reading.

  • Test your home for radon

    The weekend project. A $15-30 kit goes on the lowest lived-in level for 2 to 7 days, then back in the post to a certified lab; you get a value in Bq/m3 or pCi/L. Step-by-step with named test-kit suppliers by region. Printable.

How to use this library

Everything here is published under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. You may copy, translate, adapt, and republish any of it - please keep the source citations intact, and please publish your derivative work under the same licence so the next person can keep building.

If you are a teacher, a community health worker, a librarian, a real-estate agent who wants better questions to ask before a sale, a parent who has just bought their first home: please take what is useful and pass it on. None of it is locked.

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: how to flag it.