I had a friend who lived in Opelousas La, and he had a geiger counter. We prowled the town with it. The small red brick post office building was wild, from uranium-tinted bricks.
There are lots of natural radio active things around. Read a story long ago about someone was giving a talk on dangerous radio activity. Put a geiger counter on some material, but come to find out the building was more radio active than the samples.
The salt subistuite sold to eat is often slightly radio active. Think it is potassium chloride.
On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Oct 2021 08:21:54 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Once at home I found a box in the attic, curiosity .. opened it and found it was full of nice green uranium glass. Asked my mother and seems I'v been drinking and eating from it until somebody told here it was dangerous. Explains a few things :-) An other story I heard from an uncle who was a watchmaker jeweler was that somebody broke their wrist as the radiation from the watch hands weakened it (could have been any other reason I'd think). All those radium containing watches were then taken in. I once had a light switch with a green radioactive on/off button.. And tritium lights now :-)
I had a geiger counter peak when they flew over here with an F16, could have been carrying a nuke, or maybe it was interference from their scanning beams.
Smoke alarms had americium-241, but are mostly optical these days... You can just order uranium ore on ebay, I have some.
There are radiation sources everywhere, I would like a good RTG especially now energy prices go up and up.
US aircraft carriers had radium-powered deck lights, about like hockey pucks. They still show up in the dirt at the old Hunters Point shipyard, now housing.
I want one.
They WWII dials are hot enough to set off some radioactive contamination safety detectors. My father's radium dial watch is hot as hell on a Geiger counter. It would have been a little bit hotter when new.
I'm not convinced that the Ravigator is all that much of a threat provided that it is the inside coated with uranium and lead. Most of the radiation from natural or depleted uranium is alpha particles so even a sheet of paper will stop them almost completely. You can safely handle a slab of depleted uranium with a sheet of mylar wrapped around it. It has various aerospace applications as a (very) dense metal.
Some WWII eyepieces are a bit dodgy too because they used lanthanide glass but without purifying to remove the thorium. It is enough to make people nervous of using them but not really any great threat.
Some old grinding and polishing compounds are quite a serious threat for the same reason but as a super fine powder they can get to places where you really don't want an alpha hot emitter.
There is 2ppm U in many things and a fair bit more in granite. It is the radon gas it gives off that is the threat rather than the uranium.
I have a small collection of uranium glass - a beautiful fluorescent lemon to mid-yellow colour which glows bright green under UV light.
On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Oct 2021 20:10:07 +0100) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <skhseh$1tpj$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:
I have some thorium containing welding rods, gives some extra ticks on the geiger counter, also from ebay, like this:
Old Coleman lantern mantles too.
Something ironic, about taking things for granite :-)
Yup. The big bags of potassium chloride that are sold at hardware and home-improvement stores, for recharging water softeners with potassium (rather than sodium) are "hot" enough to make a Geiger counter click quite a bit.
There's a very popular surfing beach over near Half Moon Bay (south of SF) which has a radiation level roughly twice the usual background radiation level for the area. Turns out that there's a layer of monazite-rich soil running right along the bluff, and the monazite erodes out and collects on the beach. The natural thorium content is quite significant.
One unit of radiation exposure is the BED, the banana equivalent dose.
Keeps the Mavericks crowd warm.
On a sunny day (Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:48:32 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Better than windmills
Morons at work:
"Those in favor of mobile nuclear power for the battlefield claim it will provide nearly unlimited, low-carbon energy without the need for vulnerable supply convoys"
The nuclear biz has been making the same claims for 70 years. To this day its fans claim its problems are not technical in nature but only "public perception."
The public perception that the nuclear industry sucks at delivering on its promises I guess. No other field of industry has sucked at delivering so often yet received so many second chances.
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