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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

I think that type of glazing was once somewhat popular for dinnerware. Gladly that got solved by the colors becoming quite unpopular after the 70s.

(I'm aware that I'm writing this on "the orange site"…)

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Yes, Fiestaware. Where the most popular color was red, which originally used natural uranium oxide as the pigment in the glaze. It was actually WWII that saw the US government confiscate their stock of uranium in 1943. They used depleted uranium from 1959 to 1973 when the finally discontinued the red color. And an estimated 2 million pieces sold between 1959 and 1969. [1]

And people collect them. I remember being a kid and looking at my grandmother's display of plates and being told they were radioactive. But only a little. You can also still find them on eBay easy enough.

[1] https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consum...

A family I knew in Montgomery County, Maryland, dumped the pepper out of its Fiestaware shaker and took it to a fire station's test-your-stuff day. My recollection is that the pepper was not hazardous.

A lot of glassware had uranium and other radioactive materials in too.

Here's a good subreddit for it in the wild: https://www.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/

Vaseline Glass[0] is pretty common to find in antique stores if you want your own uraniumware

[0]https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consum...

chuckles

glancing at my living room and seeing second-hand 70s orange antiques, glasses and dinnerware everywhere

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