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The beta decay of 145 Gd has been studied in sufficient detail for comparison with the decay of its fictional analogue. Pandemonium. It is shown ~ that >98% of the 145 Gd decay intensity was observed. This result casts doubt on the value of decay schemes determined solely by statistical techniques.The decay of the fictional nucleus Pandemonium has been described by Hardy, Carraz, Jonson, and Hansen(l) (hereafter HCJH). This nucleus was proposed to decay in such a complicated manner, with numerous B-decay branches and.y-ray transitions, that it could not be experimentally studied. Despite the fact that the simulated Pandemonium decay scheme was constructed using a statistical model, without any experimental confirmation, the authors concluded that we 11 need to reevaluate the usefulness of a whole class of experiments". In view of the gravity of that conclusion, the actual decay of Pandemonium has recently been experimentally investigated( 2 ), in detail, to test the arguments put forth by HCJH. It will be shown here that those arguments were too simplistic to describe real decay schemes and that the death knell for such studies is unwarranted. B-transition probabilities generated in a random Porter-Thomas distribution assuming a constant B-decay strength function( 4 ). This last point was significant in that a constant B-decay strength would effectively remove all nuclear structure from the analysis.-2-The resulting decay scheme was used to generate a theoretical y-r~y singles spectrum for Pandemonium. This spectrum appeared very realistic and was conventionally analyzed to discover how much experimental information could be extracted from various amounts of data. HCJH concluded that 9 with 11 more complete data than most experiments can produce 11 only 81 of 'VlQOO y rays would be observed representing 94% of the total Y-ray intensity. They further proposed that this problem would be compounded if additional complexity in the Y-ray deexcitation pattern were included. For the earlier 145 Gd decay scheme, HCJH concluded that "'20% of the decay intensity went undetected.The recent study of 145 Gd decay ( 2 ) has resulted in the placement of 326 Y rays deexciting 136 levels in 145 Eu. This decay scheme was constructed primarily from the analysis of a Y-ray singles spectrum with 2xl0 9 events and from coincidence data consisting of 1.3xl0 7 y-y coincidence pairs. These experimental y-ray singles statistics roughly corresponded to HCJH's best case (10 6 events in the srongest peaks). The actual decay-scheme drawing is too large to be included in this letter and will only be referred to in the following discussion. Four times the number of predicted y rays were observed and that result was consistent with a very complex y-ray deexcitation pattern. Indeed, the number of y rays observed is a meaningless figure-because ali. transitions between every level will occur with some finite:intens'ity. It is more important that they rays observed represent a substantial portion of the total y-ray intensity. HCJH estimate...