Radioactive Stuff // 2011 edition
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ค. 2011
- I have been collecting radioactive items and minerals for almost two years now so it is time to share it with you and all the other collectors on TH-cam.
A good source of other radioactivity videos is Bionerd23's channel:
/ bionerd23
Best radium based collection I have seen on TH-cam:
th-cam.com/users/ALARAiswi...
Captions to help you understand my danish accent :o) :
OK - after that disclaimer let's take a look at my radioactive collection as of July 2011. It contains small samples with relative low activities but I still take precautions with these because of the radioactivity.
Mishandling these can be dangerous and even lethal in long terms.
Let us start with the thorium-based part of my collection.
This includes thoriated welding electrodes and gas mantles, euxenite, polycrase, thorite in different sizes, aeschynite and iron rich thorogummite.
Here I use my Gamma Scout to measure the activity of the thorogummite.
I have set the alarm quite high at 50 microsieverts/hou so the Gamma Scout will start to tick over this level.
This time it peaked at 89 microsieverts/hour. My normal background level is .12 microsieverts/hour so this piece of thorogummite measures 744 times normal background level - not bad.
Next I'll show you my special thorite sample which is cut like a gem stone.
If the grim reaper ever were to wear jewelry this would be it.
Dark and deadly - but quite beautiful actually. The camera doesn't do it justice.
The seller did point out that this is not suitable as jewelry. He wasn't kidding...
Next up is the radium based part of my collection.
These are radium painted watch hands. I hate them. They caused so many deaths amongst the women that painted them, they emit a lot of radon and even a tiny speck of paint that falls off these loose spare hands is highly active.
Much safer are the sealed vacuum tubes used in radars during World War II. I have a single Westinghouse 1B45 and two Western Electrics 1B22. It is the 1b22 tubes you see in the video.
As you can see one of the boxes is still sealed. It has remained unopened since June 1945 - that's over 66 years.
Moving on to the americium based sources.
I have a total of 9 americiumoxide discs in various stages of the extraction process from smoke detectors.
Three with an amount of 37 kBq and 6 with 33 kBq.
When I turn on the ticker in the Gamma Scout it starts screaming from all the alpha-particles hitting it... and then it passes out. Too much for it to handle.
Luckily with only the alarm turned on it manages to get a proper reading.
The radiation is almost entirely alpha-particles which can't even penetrate the outer layer of dead cells in your skin so it is relatively safe radiation.
Last but not least: my colorful uranium based collection. What you see is uranium glass, phurcalite with zippeite, betafite, uraninite, torbernite, samarskite, boltwoodite, autunite, samarskite with ytterbium, uraninite with gummite and more torbernite.
I also have some of the famous uranium glazed pottery. This is not the Fiesta Ware brand. It is marked GMBC and the other ones in my collection are from Vernon Kilns.
They are actually orange in real life but my camera picks them up as red - sigh.
Here is a ½ gram sample of the infamous depleted uranium. It emits almost only alpha-particles which are stopped by the glass so I'm not picking up that much activity from it.
I am not taking it out of the ampule though since it's also toxic.
Sorry for the bad lighting but it peaks at 2.0something microsieverts/hour.
Thank you!
It's actually grown considerably since I made this video. Update video hopefully coming in 2013. Stay tuned ;)
Thank you very much!
I do put a lot of time into my videos (that's why I don't upload often...).
I can easily spend three whole days on editing a five minute video. Good thing I don't work with this professionally - I would quickly be fired for being too slow with my endless final touches ;)
I respect it but I don't fear the levels shown in this video. I do keep my dose very low by keeping this collection in the garage and only approach it once in a while - just for safety. It's not on permanent display inside my house :)
Remember that on average your body is hit by ionizing radiation 10 000 times every second of your life just from background radiation (3 - 4 000 of these from the K-40 and C-14 in your own body). Our bodies are not unfamiliar with low levels of radiation ;)
So what do you collect?
I was thinking of making TH-cam videos about minerals, especially the radioactive ones. So I decided to see what was out there. This was the first video I came across, and I'm glad to see the first mineral you mention had my label with it. I hope your collection has been progressing. Good specimens are progressively difficult to acquire. Thanks for sharing the love of some of the most interesting materials on earth.
@strontium141 :
Yep, most people suffer from radiophobia because of ignorance but people often smoke or tan which I find much more dangerous than low radiation.
I don't blame them if they have only learned about radiation from disasters like Hiroshima, Chernobyl or Fukushima. Or Hollywood movies where any radiation means RUN!
As you know: with a few precautions there's nothing to fear from the low radiation in my video.
No, they do not have to be worried. The military DU is different from my pure sample in the way that it is alloyed with 1-2% of other stuff to prevent oxidation.
My sample is blackened by U-oxides - basically it is rusted - and radioactive dust can fall of it and get into my lungs etc.That's when it gets toxic and why I keep it in the vial.
As far as I know the military will never accept rust which could give a malfunction in a critical situation.
The problem with DU is at the receiving end...
@sklodowska226 :
Thank you. No, the small torbernite pieces are from the Margabal Mine, Aveyron in France. They are solid crystals with virtually no matrix!
Bismuth is so vaguely radioactive that it was only recently proven to be radioactive. Only very few labs has the equipment to show it's radioactivity - I will never be able to show it. It's half life is over twenty billion billion years (not typo) so almost nothing is happening...
With that said I do own two nice samples of bismuth. I show them in my video 'Exotic Metals vs. Magnet' :)
Thanks for watching and commenting.
:)
I don't use these for food although they are considered safe to use. If the food is very acidic and lays on the plate for a long time uranium could get into the food. Even though it is very, very small quantities I wouldn't eat from these. There's simply no need to take the risk since there are so many non-radioactive dishes ;)
Thanks for watching and commenting.
I can see the careful work and patience that went into this video. Thank you :)
For this I used Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 14 which is quite old and unstable with HD video. But I have switched to HitFilm 2 Ultimate which is much more advanced and stable. Highly recommended.
Thanks for watching!
That would be sad :)
Taking an intercontinental flight with several hours up in the cosmic radiation is far more worse than what I expose myself to in this video. Not to mention being in the sun or tanning bed (UV-rays), living in the city (air pollution) or smoking (!!!!). Everyday the world is trying to kill you ;)
Thanks for watching!
I love seeing and learning radioactive stuff with you!
This is an excellent play list. I love watching it.Cheers.
The Gamma Scout can be bought directly from their website for around 500$ + shipping. Cheaper ones - often russian - are found on eBay.
Exactly. Except from the green uranium glass and the americium discs all of my collection is stored outside in my garage separated from my house and prolonged human contact.
I have much stronger stuff in my collection now than shown in this video (need to make an update video at some point). These samples are kept in airtight plastic bags behind thick layers of stacked garden tiles. I try to minimize the dose as much as possible (ALARA) without being radiophobic.
Thank you!
Looking forward to your video because you and Bionerd23 are the American and European champs on TH-cam, when it comes to radioactivity :)
I was actually really lucky with the 'small' torbernite samples. Usually they are very expensive but I found a French collector with reasonable prices, bought the whole lot and even got some free samples thrown in the package :)
I also need to make a new video because my collection is now quite larger than shown in this video.
A tiny speck (the size of a dot) from a nuclear power plant core is far, far more radioactive than anything shown in this video (check bionerd23's Chernobyl videos where she finds and measures some tiny fragments).
All in this video is quite low activity. But I do handle it careful to avoid it getting into me and have internal exposure. External exposure once in a while is very low risk from these low activity sources - but internal is always bad.
Thank you. That's a very comprehensive reply and it certainly answers my question. If I do buy a sample of Uraninite I'll keep it in the shed or garage instead of indoors.