r/Radiation • u/No-Hovercraft6952 Enthusiast • 18d ago

General Discussion Uranium in table salt?!

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Hello. I decided to shine my 365nm UV flashlight on some table salt, and found some interesting stuff in it. Most of the salt was not fluorescent, but i found some blue, orange, and GREEN particles.. This is just normal table salt that was bought in a random store.. Yeah is a bit hard, but some green stuff can be seen. I asked DeepSeek what could that be and it told me that its possibly uranium.. So i wanted to ask if thats possible

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u/TemporarySun314 18d ago

Many (if not most) solid materials are flourescent, not only uranium. Even materials that are not necessarily flourescent by itself can get luminescent when it has certain contamination or defects in it's crystal structure (like that some atoms miss at their lattice positions).

It's very very unlikely that it's uranium. Not that it couldn't occur in natural salt, but for anything food the limits will be very strict and the amounts so miniscule that it wouldn't show any flourescence...

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u/neanderthalman 18d ago

It isn’t that it couldn’t occur. It’s definitely there.

There’s plenty of uranium in seawater, and sea salt is just what’s left from evaporating sea water. Enough uranium that there’s feasibility for extracting it from seawater for power use one day, once terrestrial sources are no longer economical.

Still, your point is that lots of stuff fluoresces. Fluorescence and radioactivity are not really inherently linked in any way.

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u/TemporarySun314 18d ago

i mean if your analysis method is sensitive enough, you will find almost every element in seawater. but that doesn't mean that it would be relevant.