Collectors who hunt down radioactive glassware | Hacker News Reader

Collectors who hunt down radioactive glassware

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85 pointsdsr1265 comments

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

An article about virgin lead - low background lead for science equipment: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/search-d...

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.

NileRed even made a video of manufacturing his own uranium glass https://youtu.be/RGw6fXprV9U?t=1048

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...

Are you one of the three kids that will want this stuff shipped across the country?

I have one of those Geiger counters in disrepair.

> Some other potential sources of radiation

And mind the bananas.

Or wood. Or basically most things. Just depends on the level you’re comfortable with.

The radiation from bananas is completely harmless though, as the body keeps the levels of radioactive potassium constant due to homeostasis.

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.

I’ve got a small collection of uranium glass. It’s always fun to crank up the black light when friends come over. And it looks great at Halloween.

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.

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).

The State of California can bite my grandparents' vintage leaded crystal decanters without the Jameo or Glenlivet 12.

Edit: lead.. mmm. Yeah, I probably should only use them to serve, rather than store, to prevent bottle-chuggers.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/it-dangerous-store-alcohol...

Also, wash your hands like after leaded soldering when handling the exteriors of alcoholic beverage containers:

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-06-2...

Pilots, flight attendants, and passengers on the Concorde.

Concrete.

Radon.

What do you mean? Could you elaborate?

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses#av...

I found no mention (cmd+f) of “concrete” or “concorde” there; I still don’t follow.

Sometimes fly ash is added to concrete as a pozzolan. It is produced by burning coal and is slightly radioactive.

The Concorde cruised at higher altitude than most commercial planes, thus you had less protection from the atmosphere during the flight and received higher amounts radiation from cosmic rays.

Then again it flew for a shorter duration, so I don't know which method of travel exposed you to higher accumulated radiation.

I made a Geiger counter with 50 tubes and show here what happens when you put a Uranium-glazed plate on it:

https://youtu.be/Iphv7i3IRRU

Good job. I thought the watch dials would be more radioactive than the plate.

I'm a watchmaker, and know the radioactivity of old dials, and hands, are not dangerous unless snorting the inside of watches, but it is still on my mind when Servicing.

Old Westclock dials/hands supposedly are higher in radioactivity than other brands.

I've been thinking about building a Geiger counter in the cost is not to high.

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.

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/ )

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

Very cool, I've used his glass a lot! Excellent quality and he has wonderful dedication. Ryan would be an awesome interview for HN, actually.

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.

Where can I read more about this?

> When the plate registered as radioactive, someone at the school panicked and called in a hazmat team. The entire school was evacuated

Hope the school got called out for their incompetence. What hope do our children have if this is the competency our educators?

Better to evacuate than deal with the parents, probably.

If I were the parent there they would have to "deal" with me complaining about senseless and idiotic evacuation.

But would you sue them or keep calling them about it for weeks?

I don't see what is there to sue for, but I'd definitely go and see the principal in person and explain why I think this was a bad idea, and encourage other parents to do the same - hopefully it would take enough of their time to be enough of a pain in the ass.

Having been that parent, taking a lot of time counts for sure.

So does talking to other parents.

Bonus points for announcing that intent and then having them see other parents show up, and also take time.

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.

> incompetence

Knowing what's above your pay grade is the exact opposite of incompetence.

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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

This was really interesting to read. You should submit this as a post on its own.

> If you know nothing about uranium glass, how are you to know that this won't be another Goiania incident?

The tool they used to detect the radiation was also giving the answer. Look up the dose then get excited.

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.

Other glasses that glow under UV:

* 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.

Depending on the glass chemistry, Europium is either a hot pink or a blue.

Perfect for your next gender reveal party!

Not U glass, but I’ve been considering getting an orange Fiestaware set. I realize that modern dishes don’t contain U, but the symbolism is there.

However, I still haven’t bothered to look up pricing or where to order, let alone of ways of convincing my spouse that we absolutely need bright orange dishes for the family for street cred with a very niche crowd.

It's quite economical to acquire small U-glass pieces. I have a pair of shot glasses made sometime between 1900 and 1930 which are great fun at parties. I grabbed the pair off of EBay for ~40 dollars.

Now one must be a little careful with such glassware due to the modest risk of leaching. When my soon to be wife moved in she used the U-glass regularly not realizing the risk/special occasion only requirement.

Same craze for radioactive vintage lenses.

For cameras or prescription glasses??? If it’s the latter- it’s literally too close for comfort.

For cameras, usually those use thoriated glass due to its high refractive index. Radioactivity level is too low for even slightest damage as thorium dioxide mostly emits alpha particles that is easily blocked. There are urban legends about radioactive lenses causing fogging of the film inside a camera if left mounted for few years but I couldn't verify them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoriated_glass https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Radioactive_lenses

One large problem with thoriated glass lenses is that they tend to lose transparency. See the "Radiation browning" section of parent's first link.

I have a 35mm Nikkor with thoriated glass. It has a slight yellow tint that’s easily corrected in post.

I totally do this, I love going to antique store and estate sales looking for orange feistaware, aircraft instruments with radium, radium painted watches and clocks. Uranium Glass. Basically if it makes the meter tick and it looks cool it will get added to my collection. As long as it's not anything loose or dusty. I.e. radium watch with a busted glass cover.

Don't forget thorium doped welding rods and thorium lantern mantles. :-)

I miss bionerd23's YT videos.

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27190249

Are there any modern glassblowers who will touch uranium glass? The few I talked to thought I was insane for thinking they'd consider it. (In my defense, cadmium is very toxic but glassblowers don't seem to mind blowing cadmium glass.)

IIRC the main ingredient for uranium glass is processed uranium ore aka yellow cake. I don't believe there are any methods of purchasing this available to consumers.

Inhalation of uranium is also a high risk during the glass blowing process particularly as the powder is mixed to the glass. This could probably be bounded to roughly the same risk as blowing waterford crystal if the glass is pre-mixed.

What is in Waterford crystal? Is it dangerous in any point of the process?

Waterford is leaded glass, often just called “crystal” because of its clarity and to not call attention to the lead content which is minimum 25% lead oxide powder by weight

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass

> In a study performed at North Carolina State University, the amount of lead migration was measured for port wine stored in lead crystal decanters. After two days, lead levels were 89 µg/L (micrograms per liter). After four months, lead levels were between 2,000 and 5,000 µg/L. White wine doubled its lead content within an hour of storage and tripled it within four hours. Some brandy stored in lead crystal for over five years had lead levels around 20,000 µg/L

For ref the EPA limit is 15 µg/L and even that is prob on the high side since the human body has 0 use for any level of lead

There's a guy on YouTube who goes by "nilered". He does various crazy chemistry projects. He has a video where he makes uranium glass.

https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...

Looks like it would take 10 of those vials to make roughly 1 pound of uranium glass at its minimum concentration and 150 vials to make a pound of glass at the concentrations typical of the 1800s.

Hey you didn't say it had to be cheap!

You can buy uranium glass frit from here:

http://www.gafferglassusa.com/index.php?route=product/produc...

FWIW. I'd work with it, some wouldn't.

I took some glass blowing classes in undergrad and wanted to make something with uranium glass. I bought uranium glass frit from Gaffer glass and used it, none of the instructors or students seemed to mind. The main concern was the dust when pouring out the frit, once it is melted into something its pretty inert.

I made some cool stuff with it (only limited by my glass blowing skills).

As for the fear of radiation, there is a fantastic xkcd with plenty of (relative) examples: https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Randall Munroe really has a strip for everything

The article every so slightly touches on radium products but doesn't expand on what those are, I suppose that's to draw less attention to them.

I sometimes take my Geiger counter with me when hitting flea-markets and such. In our area we have a very large fall festival way out in the country-side with lots of flea-markets setup. I found my first radium clock there, the guy selling it knew what was special about the clock and thought the geiger counter was neat, the piece I got gave off a mild CPM of about 600. This helped set the stage for me forgetting I live in a bubble of smart and educated and people around me at all times... Later that day I found another dealer with a large platter of antique watches. Woot! Pulled out the geiger counter again and found the tray had a number of very hot watches... and then I saw it. A radium dial watch missing the glass cover and covered in rust and dust, I only got a 20 second reading of around 6000CPM and then I realized my face was about 1 foot from this thing... The danger of radium clock hands is the paint flaking off and inhaling bits of radium dust. CPM is counts-per-minute, so that ~20 second reading I got before I was startled probably translates to ~18000CPM. I stopped and tried to explain to the dealer that he needed to take this watch and bag it and keep it away from the public, especially children that could have access. I was trying to explain what radium paint was and he stopped me and repeated "Radon what?". I tried again, he stopped again and repeated "Radon what?". It was at that moment my bubble collapsed and I realized I had gotten WAY off on the wrong foot. Radium was a word he had never heard, radon was the closest thing (it's not uncommon to have radon gas vents on house basements in our state to prevent buildups of radioactive radon gas). This guy got real quiet as I tried to dig myself out of my hold, but the damage was done. Another person working with him came over and I explained the issue to him, he understood but was making jokes about the government shutting them down or something. At this point I also remembered that there is a strong "prepper" vibe at this particular flea market area, and this poor fellow was probably afraid I'd someone get him "vanned" by the government. Anyway, I tried to buy some of the other watches from him and he outright told me he didn't want to talk to me any more, and that he was not going to sell me anything cause he didn't need for me to sue him for getting cancer or something. Right right, I'd dug a pretty large hole for myself and just needed to walk away, his weekend was ruined and now he had to figure out what to do with this radioactive watch he didn't understand at all.

So, I learned a bunch of things really quick that weekend. One of those things is that our country-side is littered with radioactive artifacts that most people have NO idea about. Most of them are harmless, but the radium stuff is still dangerous for another 1600 years even though the radium paint stopped glowing many decades ago. When people randomly get strange cancers I can't help but wonder if there's a lot more incidental exposure that goes on than people realize. I'm not saying all cancer victims had exposure, but it probably happens more than people suspect.

Another thing I learned was just how much of a bubble I exist in, and all of you reading this as well. You work with fellow smart people, your friends are smart. Probably your family too. My point is that we end up isolated from other classes of people and coming together is a good thing for multiple reasons. Think of those in classes above you too. Anyway, that's enough about that.

Oh noes, a kid brought a banana to school. Call the hazmat team!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Edit: The BER of an average piece of 25% U glass is about 1300 bananas.

If it were possible to extract and enrich K40 from say 100 million bananas, you could kill everyone in the vicinity of it with a LD.

40 lbs box = 120 bananas at $13. So say $0.10 each. For a minimum investment of $10 million USD, you could have enough radioactive K40 to do some damage.. buried in tons of regular potassium that is expensive to enrich. Instead, for $10k / g, one could buy 1 kg of K40... if they could prove it was for a legitimate purpose.

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