With the developing nuclear disaster in Japan, I discovered that there is lots of money being made selling geiger counters. Prices of geiger counters on Ebay and various other places seem to have tripled instantly.
Well, you could say that’s the free market in action. But it wouldn’t surprise me if prices are driven up by people not actually needing geiger counters but buying them anyway out of fear while they are not likely to experience any effects of the disaster.
Today I saw something much worse, some German on Ebay trying to sell a “geiger counter” which actually is a high range survey meter, a CDV715 according to the picture.
This person is even recommending this device to Japanese people. I would say that is a very bad recommendation because:
- this meter is high range, if the needle moves you are likely in the exclusion zone around the reactors where one shouldn’t be anyway.
- it will not measure smaller amounts of radiation, you cannot use it to check whether food or water has been contaminated or not, or compare contamination levels.
- it will mostly detect gamma radiation, so it won’t properly detect the beta radiation coming from the Iodine-131 release from the reactors which is something you really want to be able to measure.
It kind of sickens me that there are people trying to make money of this disaster while thousands of Japanese died and more are homeless, and have to cope with possible effects of fallout from the leaking reactors.
Finally, €199 is way overpriced for a survey meter, I bought a German made one for a mere €10. An original Civil Defense CDV715 should cost €100 at most.
