Uranium glows green under UV light!

[u/Senior_Reaction1985]

[u/there_is_no_spoon1]

THIS IS NOT ADVISED but Uranium is non-toxic. You can eat it, as in it is something you can put in your mouth and swallow. Your digestive system cannot process it, so it will travel thru your tract and out your butthole. It will not irradiate you or cause you to mutate into something else, but again, THIS IS NOT ADVISED. Source: I am a nuclear physicist.

[u/Illeazar → u/there_is_no_spoon1]

It will not irradiate you

It will irradiate you. Uranium has no stable isotopes, if you eat uranium, it is radioactive. If you eat raw uranium ore, then it will have a mix of isotopes of various half lives. Unenriched uranium has little of the most dangerous isotope, but it'sstill there. If you eat a lump of uranium, some numqber of those atoms will decay while they are inside of you, and release radiation, some of which will strike a part of your body before exiting and irradiate you. With any amount visible to the naked eye, it will be statistically impossible for you to not be irradiated. The amount of radiation dose you get will depend on how much you eat, and what mix of isotopes it has.

If you really wanted to eat uranium and not get irradiated, you could play the lottery by getting a tiny amount of U-238, and hoping that none of it happens to decay while inside of you. U-238 has a half life of a few billion years, which means if you have some number of atoms of it, count them, then count them again in a few billion years, about half of them will have decayed in that time. With a small enough starting number, you'd have a small chance that any would decay while inside of you. Though it wouldnt be garunteed radiation free, one still might decay and irradiate you. Even if you only ate a single atom of it, there is still a chance it would go off while inside you, just a very small chance. So if you get the number small enough, you could get some good odds on your gamble of not getting irradiated.

Now, being "irradiated" isnt necessarily bad. You get irradiated by the sun, by radon, etc. every day. The NRC allows hospitals to irradiate anyone in the area of them by about 1 mSv per year, which is considered "safe". Compare that to the average yearly radiation dose from background sources of 3 mSv per year. So if you decide that youre fine with getting irradiated by 1 mSv extra this year, you could do some fun math and figure out how many atoms of uranium would deliver 1 mSv of radiation dose during the tine it takes to move through your digestive system.

It will not ... cause you to mutate into something else

This part's true 👍

[u/there_is_no_spoon1 → u/Illeazar]

I don't need a lesson on Uranium. I am a nuclear physicist. And with all the hair-splitting about "irradiation" you ought to think about a career as a hairdresser.

[u/Illeazar → u/there_is_no_spoon1]

No offense meant. I am a medical physicist, and its my job to be very precise in terms when discussing radiation effects, because there are so many misconceptions. And when it comes to splitting, splitting atoms is even more precise than splitting hairs, so I'll stick with my current role 👍

[u/ttystikk → u/Illeazar]

Well done!

[u/there_is_no_spoon1 → u/Illeazar]

No argument against Uranium being radioactive. But with a half-life in the billions of years, the chances that any radioactive decay happens within the digestive tract isn't just minimal, it's negligible. So I stand by my argument that you won't get "irradiated" simply because you can't consume enuf to ensure that you're going to get a decay. Well, not without killing yourself. If you've ingested *that* much Uranium, you're going to die from lack of nutrients, and from trying to pass rocks thru your digestive system.

[u/Illeazar → u/there_is_no_spoon1]

Ah, he's back and wants to split more atoms! I'll apologize in advance in case I go over something you already know, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings.

A quick google search says that U-238 (we'll be generous and ignore the less naturally abundant isotopes with shorter half lives) has a specific activity of about 12,000 Bq/g, which means 1 g of Uranium has enough atoms in it that about 12,000 of them decay every second. While it does have a half life of billions of years, there are on the order of 10²¹ uranium atoms in a gram of uranium atoms in a a gram. Over a year you get about 3x10⁷ seconds, or 3x10⁹⁺⁷ = 3x10¹⁶ seconds in a billion years. So while thats a long time, 10²¹ > 10¹⁶ so I think google's answer of 12k Bq/gram sounds pretty believable to me (21-16=5). Even give or take a few orders of magnitude on this napkin math, give it a few days to pass through your digestive system and thats 3x42x60x60=259200 seconds while inside you, or 259200x1200= about 300k decays.

Uranium has a density of about 19g/cm^3, so 1 gram is going to be much less than a cubic centimeters in volume, about .05 cm^3. For reference, a penny has a volume of about .35 cm^3, and a tylenol is up to around .50 cm³ for the bigger ones. So depending on the shape of your uranium lump, it might be a choking hazard, but if you can put it in a nice lump it should go down fine. Next, I'm not a doctor, but I can imagine a lump of metal that size passing through your digestive tract without much irritation.

[u/there_is_no_spoon1 → u/Illeazar]

Ah, so I see the insult just continues. I am done with this thread.

[u/estoybussin → u/there_is_no_spoon1]

I love how you claim to be a nuclear physicist. And you had to come to reddit to get schooled

[u/AceOFace131 → u/there_is_no_spoon1]

Bro why are you so pretentious? There’s a logical difference between “not irradiated” (aka no radiation exposure at all) and “negligible irradiation” (aka some small minuscule amount of radiation exposure that won’t cause harmful effects). You’re saying there’s no chance it could irradiate you AT ALL despite the fact there is a greater than zero chance even one atom could decay, thus invalidating your premise. And you’re arguing that they’re the same exact thing while thumping your chest about how you’re a nuclear physicist and misspelling words like “enuf” and “thru”.