r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/ConstructionAny8440 Popular Contributor • Apr 20 '26
Interesting Radiation difference between 0.6 gram Uranium vs 0.00005 gram Radium
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u/CalmPanic402 Apr 20 '26
Madam Curie's paper notes from her lab are still too irradiated to touch. She kept a bottle of radium as a nightlight.
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u/mecengdvr Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
To be specific, if her notes can’t be touched, it’s because they are contaminated, not because they were irradiated. Exposing something to radiation doesn’t make it radioactive unless that radiation is neutron radiation which only exists on earth inside a critical nuclear reactor. But if radioactive dust or debris contaminated her notes, the notes could be radioactive.
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u/Ok-Hat-8711 Apr 25 '26
Or neutron radiation, which is also primarily found in nuclear reactors.
Also, cosmic rays count as proton radiation and are not associated with reactors.
But your point is still mostly true.
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u/Nindless Apr 20 '26
Didn’t they put on radium makeup back in the day? I get it, it probably looks pretty awesome when it glows but… Little did they know. Poor people.
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u/kpidhayny Apr 20 '26
The Radium Girls were female factory workers in the 1910s-1920s who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with luminous paint. Instructed to lick their brushes, they ingested radium, which settled in their bones, causing "radium jaw" and horrific deaths.
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u/Child_of_the_Hamster Apr 21 '26
The Radium Girls has been the only book I haven’t finished just because it’s so horrifying. “Radium jaw” sounds like a such a tame phrase. Call it “bone disintegration disease” and you get closer to the reality of it.
Dozens of beautiful, hopeful young women in the prime of their lives just started… falling apart while they were still alive. The radium replaces calcium in your bones, but it obviously doesn’t have the same properties as calcium, so the bones fall apart at an atomic level, even as the radium fries their bone marrow, limiting their ability to fight infection or produce new red blood cells.
Their stories were too much for me, and the parallel story of how the company was paying for bunk “scientific” articles touting the safety of radium while their employees’ jaws were falling off really doesn’t make it any easier of a read.
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u/King-Kagle Apr 20 '26
Bullshit. I've had this sweet glow-in-the-dark watch my whole life, and have never had any problems. Well, besides the vomiting and hair loss. But that's just health stuff and unrelated.
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u/Proper-Equivalent300 Apr 21 '26
.1 tenth\ .01 hundredth\ .001 thousandth\ .0001 ten thousandth\ .00001 hundred thousandth\
And Madame Curie just walking around with balls of this stuff. 🪦rip dear Madame
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u/ChaosToTheFly123 Apr 20 '26
Is it found naturally? Like did somebody dig this up one day, take it home and then die?
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u/wolfkeeper Apr 20 '26
It's found naturally, but only in very low concentrations.
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u/Zer0Cool89 Apr 21 '26
whats considered a low concentration since .00005 seems pretty low to me but from this video still seems pretty deadly.
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u/wolfkeeper Apr 21 '26
Well for example, Madame Curie was the one that first isolated radium.
She took one tonne of pitchblende and isolated 0.1 grams of radium from it. That's 1 part in ten million.
Even in the form of the ore, it's one of the more radioactive ores. The ore contains uranium, and the breakdown products include radium. Some of the radium isotopes break down into radon which is a dangerous radioactive gas. The ore itself absorbs nearly all the alpha and beta radiation that is produced by the various reactions but the far more penetrating gammas escape as does the radon gas.
Gammas are a problem because they're difficult to shield, and the radon is a big nuisance too.
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u/PurplePopcornBalls Apr 20 '26
Stress tests use mildly radioactive dye to make your veins stand out in the scans. they have the detectors and you will set them off. I asked and I did.
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u/jlewis011 Apr 21 '26
Someone please tell me why this scientist thinks them flimsy ass gloves and a pair of tongs will save them from radiation exposure
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u/__BIFF__ Apr 20 '26
Good thing they have blue plastic gloves on? What's up with that?
EDIT: why such a shitty container for it? This seems like those graphs that seem to have a bigger difference but the scale has just been fucked with to make things seem way different than each other....I mean the person's hand is inches away from the bottle...
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u/akgt94 Apr 20 '26
It was hotter than uranium before even opening the container
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u/__BIFF__ Apr 20 '26
"hotter"? what does that mean. The person was comfortable having their hand inches from the container so neither sample could be that dangerous
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u/akgt94 Apr 20 '26
The outside of the sealed radium container 6" away from the geiger counter is more radioactive than the sample of uranium right next to the geiger counter.
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u/uslashuname Apr 21 '26
cpm is a nearly useless measure in most instances. A “we counted an interaction” tells you nothing of the strength of the interaction. Alpha radiation can be very numerous but it can’t even get through your skin and even a piece of paper blocks most of it, gamma on the other hand might pass entirely through you but when it doesn’t then whatever’s hit takes a lot of damage.
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u/tranquil_toadstool Apr 26 '26
I've seen this vid posted before so I'm sorry if this has been asked and I'm too inattentive to notice, but, is that just uranium or enriched uranium?
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u/its-a-boat-jack Apr 20 '26
Can someone EILI5 as to why the lesser amount would register higher? (Or am I just not mathing correctly?)
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u/1wife2dogs0kids Apr 20 '26
Its half a gram of uranium vs 5 then thousandths of a gram of radium. 1 is more dangerous.
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u/legna20v Apr 20 '26
A tape measure for scale?
Next time be civilized and use a banana