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Uranium Glass
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI don't see anything that indicates that this could be dangerous, so I have to assume that it is safe. I do know that pigments made from uranium oxide (bright white), in cloisonné, can be quite dangerous. Of course, radium pigments were very dangerous (not to mention the medicinal philters).
- nsonha 5y agoAnd I don't see any indication of this being safe :) It's radiation isn't it? Most of the stuff I encounter on a daily basis are much lower on the table. So there must be some differences.
- lm28469 5y agoThese things aren't dangerous unless you grind them to dust and snort them. You're being blasted by space and earth radiation every single second of your life, the level of radiation emitted by these items isn't enough to be a problem
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoLight is radiation. There is no reason to be scared without understanding
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- blincoln 5y agoMost of it is safe to have in a display case. I have an antique uranium glass photo filter that's hot enough that I keep it in a metal box. All of the pieces I have put out enough beta radiation to easily detect. I don't have an alpha counter. You wouldn't want to grind it up and inhale the dust. I winced when I saw someone on Etsy selling uranium glass shards they'd tried to reclaim from broken pieces by putting them in a rock tumbler to make them look like beach glass. I wouldn't recommend actually eating off of it either, but most of it is so old and fragile you'd probably want to avoid that anyway.
- nemacol 5y agoFun to see on HN. Just in the last couple weeks I purchased a UV flashlight to search for this glass.
- Brendinooo 5y agoInteresting. The uranium is stable, right?
- mr_toad 5y agoUranium has no stable isotopes, although natural isotopes have a half life of billions of years.
- tokai 5y agoNo its uranium.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y agoIt's U-238, so the half-life is about 4.6 Billion years. Not totally stable, but pretty damn stable.
- nsonha 5y agoI don't think stable refers to the half life. It's a binary status.
- Koshkin 5y agoGood point; it would be interesting to calculate how many atoms per second disintegrate in, say, one gram of the "relatively stable" U-238 - my guess is, quite a few!
- Symbiote 5y agoIf I remember this correctly... ²³⁸U has an atomic mass of 238.05078826, so one mole of ²³⁸U weighs 238.05078826g. One mole means the Avagadro number of atoms, 6.02214076×10²³. Dividing by 238.05078826 gives 1g of ²³⁸U having 2.52977×10²¹ atoms. ²³⁸U's half life of 4.468 billion years is 1.4099635×10¹⁷ seconds, so in 1 second 6.02214076e23/238.05078826*2^(-1/1.4099635e17) will decay. Double precision arithmetic isn't enough for this (though it is for 1 day), but Wolfram's calculator works: 12,436 atoms decay. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6.02214076e23+%2F+238.05078826+-+6.02214076e23+%2F+238.05078826+*+2%5E%28-1%2F1.4099635e17%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6.02214076e23+%2F+238....
- bocytron 5y agoOh, is that where the iconic radioactive green color comes from?
- user-the-name 5y agoNo, that is more from the association of radioactivity with radium paint, which is a mixture of radium and a phosphor, similar to glow-in-the-dark paint. The radium will keep the phosphor "charged" so that the paint will keep glowing without having to be exposed to a light source.
- joefarish 5y agoI thought this might have been an article on turning nuclear waste into glass (vitrification). Might be of interest to some people especially given current questions/challenges regarding reclassifying nuclear as "renewable": https://mo-sci.com/vitrification-nuclear-waste-management/ https://mo-sci.com/vitrification-nuclear-waste-management/
- vlovich123 5y agoNuclear is “clean” energy in terms of generating minimal waste compared with natural gas, coal, hydro etc. It’s not technically renewable but it’s widely available enough to the point that it could power our civilization for a good long while. Enough time that fusion should become feasible which technically isn’t renewable either since there’s a finite amount of hydrogen in the world but should be enough to see us through building a Dyson sphere of some kind.
- technotarek 5y agoFor a rather wide variety of uranium glass objects: https://attic.city/search/usa/Uranium https://attic.city/search/usa/Uranium FYI, Attic is our niche search engine for goods from small, independent businesses. You’re not gonna find much Uranium glass from the likes of Home Depot, Amazon or Walmart :)
- ceronman 5y agoOne of my favorite YouTube channles, Nile Red, has a cool video showing how to make Uranium Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGw6fXprV9U
- ghostly_s 5y agoAds every 2 minutes, host has zero personality and seems to have no real understanding of the safety issues he's dealing with. Not for me...
- pininja 5y agoYouTube premium removes ads. If you watch an hour or more of his videos you’ll realize he’s an extremely cautious creator and knows what he’s doing.
- nottorp 5y ago>> Ads every 2 minutes > YouTube premium removes ads Ads every 2 minutes won't make me give Google money, at best they'd drive me away from the site. As a matter of fact, last time i tried to watch a long video it did have ads every 2 min. Fortunately it was a speedrun of a game so I just found a similar one on Twitch.
- kwhitefoot 5y agouBlock Origin does too as far as I can tell.
- gonab 5y agoI think this is a very mean commentary. I usually don't feel the urge to comment, but this is a really mean commentary
- Retr0spectrum 5y agoI'd much prefer a slightly dry but genuine personality, than a hyperactive and fake "youtuber personality". The content speaks for itself. He generally takes safety pretty seriously, too.
- datameta 5y agoTurns out the UV-A from black lights in not entirely safe. Can cause wrinkles and skin cancer log term as well as short and long term damage to eyes. I'm glad I haven't used mine since college.
- gabrielblack 5y agoI have some marbles and a crucifix ( that kind you hang on a wall) made of this material. I inherited them from my grandmother , the marbles was intended to be toys. The crucifix also is visible in the dark and it's the object with major emissions, but nothing dramatic. The marbles emit mostly alpha rays. Both can excite notably my Geiger counter, but, storing them in a metallic box, (i.e. that sheet metal box for biscuits ), no emission leaks. I'm using the marble in my DIY random number generator, based on a Geiger tube and an Arduino board.
- hutrdvnj 5y agoCouldn't you just measure background radiation?
- willis936 5y agoYou don't have to look very hard to find entropy, but finding it in a cool and fun way is rare. This is way higher on both the functionality and fun scales than a wall of lava lamps.
- gabrielblack 5y agoMy device, as other implementation, use the particle passing through the Geiger tube as a "virtual coin" , given a sampling frequency, if one or more particles are detected the firmware returns 1, if no particle is detected, zero. In other words, the random numbers are built a bit at time. My configuration with the background radiation returns too many zeros, so I needed something more ... lively. Anyway, what is the point to use the natural radiation if you have the serious stuff ? :-) When I say that the device is a nuclear RNG, peoples smile but when I turn it on and they listen the characteristic sound of a Geiger counter, the average reaction is "WHAAAAAATTTT ????". It's funny.
- implements 5y agoJohn Von Neumann’s method of creating a uniform distribution of random numbers from a skewed source (too many zeros) was: “(From a stream of) bits, (take) two at a time (first and second, then third and fourth, and so on). If the two bits matched, no output was generated. If the bits differed, the value of the first bit was output … (this) can be shown to produce a uniform output even if the distribution of input bits is not uniform so long as each bit has the same probability of being one and there is no correlation between successive bits.” (Edited from Wikipedia)
- psanford 5y agoAfter buying a MightyOhm geiger counter kit[0], I needed something to test it with. Uranium glass ended up being one of the cheapest things you can buy that will register above the background radiation level. [0]: https://mightyohm.com/blog/products/geiger-counter/ https://mightyohm.com/blog/products/geiger-counter/
- imglorp 5y agoRelated: Fiesta Ware. Maybe worth going through the thrift store with a Geiger counter. https://www.thoughtco.com/how-radioactive-is-fiesta-ware-608648 https://www.thoughtco.com/how-radioactive-is-fiesta-ware-608...
- nemacol 5y agoLooking around ebay for a geiger counter and found this post, which includes some pieces of Fiesta Ware as a test source. https://www.ebay.ca/itm/170706729804 https://www.ebay.ca/itm/170706729804
- fourstar 5y agohttps://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_8&products_id=1088&zenid=e3bsfn43l6i1b6te6sdlmtcpb6 https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
- spython 5y agoThere have been quite a few photographic lenses containing radioisotopes: https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Radioactive_lenses https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Radioactive_lenses A few years ago I sent an Olympus Zuiko 55mm 1.2 to a friend in Russia. It has thorium in its glass elements. The lens didn't arrive for weeks and he started worrying whether it was lost on the way. He then was summoned by the customs authority to make a statement on the radioactive material he was importing. Turns out, during import they take a radioactivity reading on a container full of packages. This lens alone was radioactive enough to trigger the alarm for the container, and they had to make multiple readings (like in the puzzle with the coins of different weight) to find the radioactive package. In the end, I think he had to give up the lens.
- Symbiote 5y agoThere are radiation detectors at airports, seaports, road and rail borders of many countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_portal_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_portal_monitor
- nottorp 5y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/