The Atomic Energy Lab Kit for Kids That Came with Actual Radioactive Materials

Well, radiation sources are a little more common than one might think, even today. I have half a dozen in my home -- smoke detectors, tritium lights.

That may be in things people don't even expect. Objects made out of uranium glass may set off a Geiger counter. A lot of watches have tritium dials, and older ones have radium dials (a serious risk, unlike tritium). Quite a few people have something radioactive in their jewellery or keepsake box somewhere.

A relative gave me his old US Army compass, and one day while re-examining it I noticed the marking on the back: https://i.imgur.com/CLT98kI.jpg 130 millicuries of tritium at manufacture. And sure enough, the dial is still very faintly lit some decades later (tritium half-life is about 12 years), though it takes total darkness to see it at this point.

Of course any ionizing radiation outside of the tritium-containing glass means something has gone terribly wrong. But when your experiments, and security precautions, are all sensitive to any sort of radiation, I can imagine wanting to keep it off-site.

"It described the likely radiation exposure as “minimal, about the equivalent to a day’s UV exposure from the sun”, provided that the radioactive samples were not removed from their containers, in compliance with the warnings in the kit instructions."

> The professional journal IEEE Spectrum published a more-detailed review in 2020, discussing the kit in the context of the history of science education kits and safety concerns.

> It described the likely radiation exposure as “minimal, about the equivalent to a day’s UV exposure from the sun”, provided that the radioactive samples were not removed from their containers, in compliance with the warnings in the kit instructions.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fun-and-uranium-for-the-whole-fami...

The article mentions a 2020 paper from IEEE that suggests the radiation exposure from playing with the kit would amount to around 1 day’s worth of UV exposure, so it appears the kit was pretty safe. Of course if a child were to break open a container and say eat the radioactive material, or inhale any dust from it, the radiation exposure would be far greater. Enough to cause cancer in older age? I’m not sure.