I MENTIONED THE NUKALERT THE OTHER DAY, and reader Bill Rudersdorf, who recommended it, followed up with this email:

From recent correspondence with George Atkinson of NukAlert / KI4U:

“The battery is rated for about 16 yrs. at normal ‘ticking’ mode.”

Which is probably far longer than we will have to worry about Putin, but there’ll probably be someone else to bother with. I’m glad you got one, it provides very valuable knowledge. I got my first Geiger Counter when I was nine. We Empiricists like data.

I got one when I was 12, surplused out from Oak Ridge National Lab, for a science fair project. The NukAlert is less fun to play with, but quite useful. And in 16 years I’ll probably be retired and sailing around the Caribbean or something. I guess I could always equip my used Hallberg-Rassy with a fresh one then.