A bit of debunking here. People are using this radiation reading from Sicily as some sort of evidence that the Beirut explosion was a nuclear bomb. This is dishonest fuckwittery and I will explain why.

There is an interesting global network of volunteer radiation monitoring, https://radmon.org/index.php  and this alleged detection is taken from data from this site.

This particular radiation detector is mounted indoors in the town of Pedara in Sicily. It is a GQ GMC 300 counter with SBM-20 tube. Comparable hardware pictured.

So, let's look at what happened. There's a datalog online of the alerts generated by Radmon. https://radmon.org/index.php/alerts. Let's see when, exactly, the count rate on this detection instrument spiked.....

Well. This instrument pings out a dataplot.... It first started to go up at 14:51 UTC. That's 17:51 Beirut time. (I'd originally thought the instrument was on Sicily time, my bad.)

Whatever this count rate spike is, it happened 16 and a half minutes BEFORE the Beirut event. The USGS clocks the Beirut explosion at 15:08:18, but the radiation event was 14:51:44

So, our first problem is timing. Whatever happened on this instrument happened BEFORE the blast. Not after. Now, if you look at the Radmon site, you notice that there's another instrument in Pedara, Sicily, also doing live reporting. Let's look and see what it says....

So, the other instrument is the same type of tube, but a different counter. A solar powered RadMon Plus Geiger counter with SBM-20 tube.

Well, let us look at its last week of data....please note the count rate on the axis. No big spikes. There is a modest, and I mean really modest, spike on the 4th of August.

But I can look at the datalog as a .csv file. Let's see when this one spiked, ever so modestly, on the 4th. To be honest, I can't really find it. And certainly not anything odd at 15:08

Let's look at geography. Well, these detectors are, approximately ±1885km (1170 mi) away from Beirut. What kind of radiation do you think they were detecting at that range that came from Beirut? FFS

These GM tubes will detect gamma rays and beta particles. Beta particles will have a range of meters in air, not 1000s of kms. Gamma rays are photons, and will travel a long way in a straight line, but they will interact with matter along the way.

There's a reason why the line connecting Sicily and Beirut is curved on Google Maps. In reality, the Earth is curved. A straight line distance, i.e. that traveled by a gamma ray photon will go through part of the earth... Crude diagram attached.

Over the course of 1880-ish km, the Earth is curved enough that that hypothetical gamma ray will mostly travel through rock. A bit of air, a bit of water, but mostly rock.

So. Let's look at some radiation monitors CLOSER to Beirut. How about that? The numbnuts squad at "Veterans Today" didn't do that because they cherrypicked the data...

Now, before I dig into this... using a one:one comparison of count rates is a fools errand. What we are looking for is a spike at 2020-08-04 15:08:18 (UTC). Shall we look in Bulgaria? Why not. It is closer.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Haskovo, Bulgaria, ±1290 km from Beirut. (Same beam path goes through the rock issue, though). It has the same type of GM tube. Let me troll through 67.5 MB of raw data for the last year so you don't have to....

Oops... bloody thing stopped working on July 15th. Let's find another one.

OK. Here's a guy/gal with a GM tube in Sofia. 1440 km away. Still a fair bit closer than Sicily. Here's the last week's data plot:

I'm now looking at the data log... [Break in thread... back in 30 mins]

I'm back. Let's look at this Sofia Bulgaria data. Hmm. Just the normal ± stuff. (Cosmic and terrestrial radiation does jump around an awful lot.)

So, nothing going on. Let's find a sensor even closer....

This guy/gal here has a sensor 30 meters above ground, in Rehovot, Israel. This is only 220km away.

The data for 4th August seems, well, normal. I should also note that the gamma radiation from a nuclear explosion is pretty much omni-directional.

Bottom line... No, there's not any radiation detection data that supports this odd theory. None that I've seen, and the data "Veterans Today" points to has been misused.

So, something happened in that one instrument in Sicily. Lots of things could explain this. Did the instrument get dropped or kicked? Did the tube develop a leak? Did some guy with a thyroid scan sit in the next room for a few hours? But it wasn't a nuclear explosion in Beirut

GM tubes occasionally have this problem called "double pulsing" wherein a single "count" is counted multiple times. This could easily explain this odd reading from Sicily.

In fact, looking at the Sicily data, they have had problems before. Like 15 July.

I found more data. Here's the readings for the last week from an official monitoring station in Eastern Cyprus:

This station is only ±190 km from Beirut. Note that this is dose rate, not count rate. But, no spikes on 4 August.