On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are people who hunt down non-radioactive steel.
Apparently the background radiation of the air increased after 1940s but there are equipment (like geiger counters) which need extremely low radiation for optimal sensitivity. The main source of these low background steel are currently from scavenging sunken naval ships!
I first heard about it when I was working on gamma ray spectrometer software for detecting background radiation in environmental samples. The spectrometer needs lead shielding that ideally taints the sampling as little as possible.
I've been to a few antiques stores where they have a blacklight case to show off the fluorescent uranium glass teacups and candlesticks. If you don't have a blacklight with you, it's tough to tell the difference between truly radioactive glass colored with uranium salts, and green-tinted depression glass produced at the same time last century that is neither radioactive nor fluorescent. Depression glass has an interesting story all its own https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_glass)
It actually surprised me that you can buy uranium glass online on ebay or etsy. It's not controlled or anything, and there are some very weird old curios manufactured last century. (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...). I bought a tiny little salt cellar this way once the desire to own something radioactive overcame me.
It’s actually fairly easy to own radioactive things. Bananas are fairly cheap, and potassium has a high enough radioactive fraction to give your body a few positron emissions a second. Of course your risk is still higher from slipping on the banana peel hilariously.
This is my dad. He's also a retired health physicist in nuclear power and now is distributing old civil defense Geiger counters to schools. Some other potential sources of radiation in the home are granite countertops, and of course radon...
Actually radon is the only one to be really concerned about. Especially on first floors of poorly ventilated buildings with deep basements. It can be really harmful to one's health - granite countertops can't.
It's fun sticking a Geiger counter inside a uranium glass bowl and watching the CPM tick up... Really unnerves people. We fear radiation way more than we should, going outside and being exposed to the sun is way more dangerous than licking a uranium glass.
Heh, yeah. People sort of reflexively back away from the china cabinet. The toxicity of uranium is rather like lead: big heavy atom with lots of bonding available but really slow to move. But no one cowers from leaded crystal (except perhaps the State of California).
Glass that glows in a blacklight was the rage in artistic borosilicate glassblowing in recent years, also. The physics behind this is pretty interesting (electrons jumping levels and releasing excess energy). We all started carrying around UV flashlights at shows.
Along with their competitor Glass Alchemy, they also make several other formulas that fluoresce different colors like pink and blue. (Also check out glass that changes color in fluorescent lamps: https://northstarglass.com/product/tag-069-parallax/ )
My friend, Ryan, (shameless shoutout) has been manufacturing glass for a while now, and has some very interesting polychromatic glass that changes all sorts of colors. https://greasy-glass-color.myshopify.com/collections/uv
The article just says the radiation is too low, but it matters to know. Some 30 years ago, it was possible to bring a glowing glass sphere as a souvenir from various Uranium mines in then Czechoslovakia.
There were numerous reports of acute radiation illness and cancers after that - one couple kept the sphere on the cupboard and therefore were exposed to direct radiation for many hours every day.
They both died with leukaemia and complications.
Isn't this the exact time to err on the side of caution? If you know nothing about uranium glass, how are you to know that this won't be another Goiania incident?
Erring on the side of caution here would mean sending the student home for the day with his plate, and a note that says "student was sent home because we're uncomfortable with any level of radioactive materials in the school. They're not in trouble, but please don't do it again". It's still more than is really necessary, but I can understand not wanting to expose other people's children to any level of unnecessary radiation.
There's a huge difference between "a thing designed to eat out of, with radioactivity as a trinket" and "a thing literally designed to cause cell death". Even in the era when radiation was marketed as healthy, we weren't giving people doses anywhere close to the output from that radiotherapy source.
That thing was outputting almost 5 Grays per hour at a meter away. You would have a high enough dose for Acute Radiation Syndrome after 12 minutes of exposure at a meter away. A little over an hour of exposure puts you in the "probably going to die even if you get to a hospital" range, and 6 hours puts you in the "there's nothing we can do for you, you'll be dead in less than 48 hours" range.
It's just nonsensical for a consumer product, even in ye olden days. People would have noticed that anyone who bought the glassware almost immediately became seriously ill with mysterious symptoms.
There are lots of products from then that had more radiation than was healthy, but it was in the "long term exposure is going to cause cancer or other diseases" form, not the "you are going to die imminently" form. Even in the Radium Girls, who were ingesting radioactive paint, it took 6 years from the opening of the factory to the first recorded death. They also had an unusual method of exposure; I'm willing to bet nobody at the school was debating eating the plate.
The student would have been dead or severely ill if it were anywhere close to Goiania. Acute Radiation Syndrome has a fast onset; the longest time between exposure and symptoms listed is 6 hours. The fact that the student appeared to be healthy should tell you that the dose isn't immediately dangerous. That it sat in an antique store (pulled from another article) without the owner falling over dead should be another clue. Further, this was just a quarter sized shard of a plate, so the owner presumably has several. If one of these shards emitted a dangerous level of radiation, the whole pile in the antique store would have poisoned an entire neighborhood. The student also brought a Geiger counter, so they don't even have to guess at what the dose was; they could measure it and go from there.
Many primary school teachers can’t find the area of a rectangle and yet the US still has among the best Maths departments in the world. The determined effort to confuse the two notwithstanding, the main purpose of the K12 system is warehousing children, not education. To a truly remarkable extent incompetent teachers don’t matter.
Readit News
Apparently the background radiation of the air increased after 1940s but there are equipment (like geiger counters) which need extremely low radiation for optimal sensitivity. The main source of these low background steel are currently from scavenging sunken naval ships!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I first heard about it when I was working on gamma ray spectrometer software for detecting background radiation in environmental samples. The spectrometer needs lead shielding that ideally taints the sampling as little as possible.
It actually surprised me that you can buy uranium glass online on ebay or etsy. It's not controlled or anything, and there are some very weird old curios manufactured last century. (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...). I bought a tiny little salt cellar this way once the desire to own something radioactive overcame me.
NileRed even made a video of manufacturing his own uranium glass https://youtu.be/RGw6fXprV9U?t=1048
And mind the bananas.
I have a couple pieces with manganese iirc which glows a faint orange. But it doesn’t compare to those nice emission lines off the uranium.
https://youtu.be/Iphv7i3IRRU
Concrete.
Radon.
A US company called Northstar collaborated with Gaffer Glass from NZ to make a modern borosilicate uranium glass. https://northstarglass.com/product/ns-137-ill-umanati/
Along with their competitor Glass Alchemy, they also make several other formulas that fluoresce different colors like pink and blue. (Also check out glass that changes color in fluorescent lamps: https://northstarglass.com/product/tag-069-parallax/ )
Hope the school got called out for their incompetence. What hope do our children have if this is the competency our educators?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
The tool they used to detect the radiation was also giving the answer. Look up the dose then get excited.
There's a huge difference between "a thing designed to eat out of, with radioactivity as a trinket" and "a thing literally designed to cause cell death". Even in the era when radiation was marketed as healthy, we weren't giving people doses anywhere close to the output from that radiotherapy source.
That thing was outputting almost 5 Grays per hour at a meter away. You would have a high enough dose for Acute Radiation Syndrome after 12 minutes of exposure at a meter away. A little over an hour of exposure puts you in the "probably going to die even if you get to a hospital" range, and 6 hours puts you in the "there's nothing we can do for you, you'll be dead in less than 48 hours" range.
It's just nonsensical for a consumer product, even in ye olden days. People would have noticed that anyone who bought the glassware almost immediately became seriously ill with mysterious symptoms.
There are lots of products from then that had more radiation than was healthy, but it was in the "long term exposure is going to cause cancer or other diseases" form, not the "you are going to die imminently" form. Even in the Radium Girls, who were ingesting radioactive paint, it took 6 years from the opening of the factory to the first recorded death. They also had an unusual method of exposure; I'm willing to bet nobody at the school was debating eating the plate.
The student would have been dead or severely ill if it were anywhere close to Goiania. Acute Radiation Syndrome has a fast onset; the longest time between exposure and symptoms listed is 6 hours. The fact that the student appeared to be healthy should tell you that the dose isn't immediately dangerous. That it sat in an antique store (pulled from another article) without the owner falling over dead should be another clue. Further, this was just a quarter sized shard of a plate, so the owner presumably has several. If one of these shards emitted a dangerous level of radiation, the whole pile in the antique store would have poisoned an entire neighborhood. The student also brought a Geiger counter, so they don't even have to guess at what the dose was; they could measure it and go from there.
Deleted Comment
Knowing what's above your pay grade is the exact opposite of incompetence.
* Cerium (blue white)
* Dysprosium (yellow-white)
* Europium (orange)
* Manganese (orange)
* Samarium (orange)
* Terbium (green)
I've only been able to find small samples of these, so I don't know how much glassware there is compared to uranium, though.