Natural uranium mostly emits alpha particles. It’s dangerous if you eat or inhale it, but the wood in the nightstand drawer is going to be enough to block them.
Paper and skin can stop alpha particles. Glass, plastic, or a little bit of metal can stop beta. It’s gamma that will get you, often because of what the gamma does through the material, knocking off new particles as it exits.
The uranium in one of these kits probably had the same potency as the radium pendants you can buy now. It’s fine as long as it stays in its container and never gets inside your body.
Of course gamma will get you, she beat cancer countless times. Gamma is badass.
Bruce Banner approves this message.
I was there for one of his approvals and can vouch for this. He came by, yelled “Hulk smash!” in a feverish tone, scooping Gamma up the stairs. They were still wrestling when I left hours later.
If you’ve had cancer “more time than you can count,” have you ever really beaten it?
Technically, we get tumor cells all the time and your body kills them all the time. It’s when your body can’t handle them that it gets bad
So let me get this straight. Radiation causes cancer. But radiation also cures cancer. Do you guys seriously believe this shit?
/s because I’ve written more obvious satire before, only to be interpreted seriously
When people need help after injuries from a knife, what happens? Surgeons go at them with little knives. What a scam.
You know what they say - when the only tool you have is a knife, all your problems get stabbed.
The reason for this is a little bit of radiation damages your DNA causing the cells to go haywire, whereas a lot of radiation kills the cells outright.
So if you get cancer, you blast the cancer cells with radiation to wipe them out. The radiation is targeted so you don’t wipe out healthy cells.
How are they able to target cancer cells?
Very carefully.
Literally, it’s like they aim a laser at it
With physics.
The particles lose energy roughly depending on their inverse velocity(=>energy) squared
What that means is that high energy particles deposit little energy at first, but as they gradually slow down they deposit more and more. There is a peak where most of the energy is deposited, depending on the starting energy and density of material (tissue). This is called the Bragg Peak and having non-constant (range of) starting energies you can specify a range of dosage deposition instead of a single point.
With shit like this
They focus the photon beams onto the affected area.
If you think this is obvious satire, then I have to wonder when was the last time you actually spoke to an average human person? There are people on this site who would unironically say something like that
I’m not sure what makes you think people on this site would be smarter than average
I remember a website by some guy experimenting with terminal cancer in himself. He’d eat gold particles and microwave himself with a DIY device made from a microwave oven.
It was several years ago, so I think we would have heard of he was successful.
fun fact: low doses of radiation are actually known to reduce cancer rates. there’s quite a bit of research into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Radiation
In Taiwan, recycled radiocontaminated steel was inadvertently used in the construction of over 100 apartment buildings, causing the long-term exposure of 10,000 people. The average dose rate was 50 mSv/year and a subset of the population (1,000 people) received a total dose over 4,000 mSv over ten years. In the widely used linear no-threshold model used by regulatory bodies, the expected cancer deaths in this population would have been 302 with 70 caused by the extra ionizing radiation, with the remainder caused by natural background radiation. The observed cancer rate, though, was quite low at 7 cancer deaths when 232 would be predicted by the LNT model had they not been exposed to the radiation from the building materials. Ionizing radiation hormesis appears to be at work.
That was the one topic that always baked my noodle at DoE. In animal tests the low dose group consistently outlived the controls. I wanted to write papers on the topic but consistently got shot down. The upper tiers were worried about public perception of “radiation can be good” papers.
Yeah that’d absolutely result in a lot of Americans giving themselves cancer
licking radium paintbrushes to own the libs.
Nuka-Cola stocks skyrocketing.
Answer: It depends on the amount and qualities of the uranium, as well as how it is stored.
Glass vial, not bad, not great.
Seriously though, those older chem sets had natural samples, so likely not enough to really do damage unless you used it as a jade stone or suppository.
Or decide to do a little stone polishing or carving. Don’t breathe this!
Now I need to go check and see if the Blend-Tec youtube channel still exists
Modded Minecraft ruined my mind because this reminded me of a time when opening a wooden chest full of plutonium gave me radiation poisoning and ruined my deathless playground. My mate picked it up after and then also immediately died. Stupid dragons and their stupid plutonium.
That sounds fun
Which modpack was that?
Enigmatica 2 Expert. A fun mix of mods produced a Fire and Ice Dragon that had treasure loot from Industrial Craft 2… you’re supposed to handle radioactive materials with proper safety gear. Who’d have thought? Lol
Man, 1.12 really was the golden age of Minecraft mods
1.21 is a bit of a renaissance, especially with the amazing things the create family can do.
Kind of reminds me of my step-mother. It’s not the lifetime of heavy chain smoking that caused/causes her to keep getting cancer and worsening respiratory illness. It’s the chemicals “they put in everything”. It’s “they used to put mercury in our vaccines”. It’s “all the drugs they make you take these days”. It’s blamed on everything else and the 60+ years of almost non-stop cigarette smoking just contributed but didn’t cause it.
And, of course, plenty of common things besides cigarette smoke can cause cancer, so it’s not like I’m denying that. Just that Occam’s Razor being what it is, I’m going with the simplest and most obvious explanation that there’s evidence of to explain all the health issues.
My dad recently got bladder cancer fortunately they are well off enough financially that they are able to pay for treatments, thank God!
But I learned that the over 20 years of drinking was less likely to cause the bladder cancer than the fact that he smoked cigarettes. Belive it or not cigarettes have a higher risk of inducing bladder cancer whereas alcohol is more likely to destroy your liver and kidney directly.
He was also exposed to a shit load of chemicals throughout his entire life.
Cancer is a hell of a thing and I don’t wish it on anyone.
It’s such a common thing in medicine, mental health, weight loss, IT troubleshooting, etc. It’s not impossible that the answer is complex, but we always feel like we’re a special case and it can’t possibly be as simple as “eat less”, “get more sleep”, “turn it off and on again”.
This is the argument that cigarette companies used for a long time to avoid accountability. It wasn’t the fault of the cigarettes. It’s all those contributing factors.
I saw a lot of that during lockdown. “She didn’t die from COVID! She died of pneumonia!” Wow, a lot of people are dying from pneumonia this year! That isn’t normal, is it?
It’s denying the worst possible outcome of what’s right in front of them to stay positive. It’s a form of ignorance is bliss. Literally a boomer technique that’s able to be used but to us when things are so in front of us it’s hard to only give 1/10th of a fuck.
If it’s contained in glass or something and not just an open canister of powder, it’s actual fairly innocuous
You can take uranium rocks from the US and transport them in a commercial airline over the world.
And you’ll be exposed to more radiation from being at cruising altitude than from the rocks!
yeah because uranium actually decays so slowly that the radiation it gives off is barely worth mentioning. the actually hazardous stuff is what comes out of nuclear power plants spent fuel rods.
Part of it is the decay frequency but also how it decays. Uranium238 does an alpha decay that can’t penetrate the glass
It can’t even penetrate your skin
As long as you don’t ingest it, you’ll be fine
The decay products themselves decay through beta decay before arriving at a stable (at human timescales) U234 again. In the chain there is a bit of gamma radiation sprinkled in as well, but overall the decay chain, with the shielding provided by the glass, whatever other bedside obstacle there might have been and the probably small sample size should not have increased the obtained radiation dosage by a significant amount.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t u238 go down the full alpha decay chain ending in lead206 albeit with a few random beta minus decays thrown in that also shouldn’t penetrate glass?
I feel like the uranium in atomic bombs is also a bit of a health risk.
You can take uranium rocks from the US and transport them in a commercial airline over the world.
Probably shouldn’t, though, unless you have a good reason for doing so.
Look for thunderf00t on YouTube, a scientist who did exactly this. Went to the US to gather uranium rocks and took then back to the Czech Republic and he used them to grow and eat carrots to show that it doesn’t.do much, really
And yet, she’s 95 and has survived cancer multiple times…
By the way: same issue with alcohol and tobacco.
…I’m addicted to nicotine because there’s uranium somewhwre nearby? 🤨
Tobacco is low grade radioactive as well.
No, I meant with respect to being highly carcinogenic.
“You kids today and your bike helmets. We played with radioactive isotopes, and it toughened us by god!”
Or the fabled Fiestaware™©® relish trays lol.
My cousin collects old Fiestaware and is also a major hypochondriac. I made the mistake of mentioning the radioactive fiestaware thing and she freaked the fuck out. She does not collect it any more.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Dd2Bn_YshSA
Bring a Geiger counter to an antique store to find these spicy plates.
Uranium glass is relatively safe reddit assured me, for whatever that is worth.
Naturally occuring Uranium is, really, not very radioactive. You can even eat it and have it pass through your digestive system without any significant negative impact - there was a scientist who (slightly facetiously) used to do this in lectures to prove the safety of nuclear power and lived to a ripe old age. That said, it’s not exactly advisable.
We use it in power plants because it’s fissile, not because it’s radioactive, it’s easier to sustain chain reactions with constant output.
Spent nuclear fuel, however, is extremely radioactive because when we fission Uranium it splits into very radioactive isotopes of Caesium, Iodine, Xenon etc. plus a ton of minor actinides.
Well it was from an old chemistry set, I would be impressed if it had 95% purity and god knows what the other 5% are.
Also it depends a little bit on how big the vial was, a small HPLC vial may only have contained 100mg, the buttplug style vial they often use to showcase ores/salts may contain like 1kg of it. And also if it was properly sealed or just plugged.
Last factor would be time, a Prof swallowing 10mg once a year has contact with this stuff for 60 days, but lets say she got it from her brother when he was age 15 that would mean semi-close contact 8 hours a day for 80 years. Also the Prof hopefully didnt swallow more of it as uranium apart from being radioactive is also toxix although it takes like 8g to kill one, given the density thats not a too big pill to swallow.
Finally its still only a chance, every bit of radioactivity that hits you could be the one causing cancer.
Yup - most likely a small chunk of ore. The glass vial itself would block the vast majority of alpha emission so it’s very unlikely in this case that it had anything to do with the cancer I’d say
I don’t think this was uranium glass but a glass vial of uranium that was likely a part of those Atomic Lab kits they sold to kids in the 1940’s and 50’s.
So long as the glass doesnt have deep scratches or is chipped*
It scratches at a level six, with deeper grooves at a level seven.
Realistically if it’s in a vile in a draw the wood and glass probably blocks most of the radiation. It probably won’t be that high purity if it’s from a 1940s toy set
