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Interesting. The uranium is stable, right?
by Brendinooo 5y ago
Interesting. 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....
- ars 5y agoThat's true, sort of. Some elements can have such long half lives they are effectively stable, and can be treated as if they are. For example tellurium 123, 128, and 130; and Bismuth 209.
- Brendinooo 5y agoIs this glass dangerous then?
- datameta 5y ago> ... can register above background radiation on a sufficiently sensitive Geiger counter, although most pieces of uranium glass are considered to be harmless and only negligibly radioactive.
- Brendinooo 5y agoMissed that. Thanks.
- kloch 5y agoThe food you eat every day is much more dangerous than Uranium glass, unless you also eat Uranium glass.
- CapitalistCartr 5y agoUranium, like lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, is a heavy metal and toxic, separate from any radiation, although the alpha particles from U-238 are only dangerous if ingested or inhaled, anyway.
- dotancohen 5y agoStable compared to U-235? Yes. Stable compared to Carbon 13? No.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThe radioactivity is minimal. BUT - if you break the glass or scrape it (for example with cutlery while eating) you can release shards and/or dust which may contain alpha emitters. Ingesting those is a bad idea, even if the glass is a very weak source. Side note: turns out that mid-century Fiesta Ware was made with uranium glazes (nice colours...) and it's definitely not 100% safe if broken or chipped. Even if you ignore the radioactivity, uranium is quite a toxic element in its own right. Glass should be chemically stable under normal use, but glazes definitely aren't.
- nsonha 5y ago> if you break the glass Isn't this the ultimate fate of all glass?
- hutrdvnj 5y agoMaybe nothing is stable, not even protons[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay