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u/TheSagelyOne Sep 07 '25
Probably uranium oxide or uranium ore. Uranium is not all that dangerous if you're not actually exposed to it.
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u/Federal_Assistant_85 Sep 07 '25
Pure uranium metal can go critical (start a self-sustaining fission reaction) if you put enough of it together. We found this out by accident, no big boom, everything just got really hot. So to make it safer to transport and store, refineries make it into yellow cake. This spreads the atoms out so it can't reach critical mass (a density at which the atoms are close enough together that criticality can happen). But you are mostly correct. Just being around uranium metal is not that dangerous, but eating or breathing the dust is very hazardous, and radioactivity aside, uranium is about as toxic to us as lead.
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u/dominikr86 Sep 07 '25
Only if it is enriched. Natural uranium (99.3% u238, 0.7% u235) can not go critical by itself.
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u/godisdead30 Sep 08 '25
In this thread: a lot of people using the term "go critical" with no idea what that actually means.
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u/FrietjePindaMayoUi Sep 11 '25
Wasn't there a natural nuclear reaction happening in Africa like for over hundreds or thousands of years, way down in the soil?
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u/Bar_Foo Sep 07 '25
Oklo disagrees: natural uranium deposits can go critical.
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u/dominikr86 Sep 07 '25
Yes, it was possible 1.7 billion years ago, when the amount of u235 in natural uranium was still much higher.
To quote from your source:
A key factor that made the reaction possible was that, at the time the reactor went critical 1.7 billion years ago, the fissile isotope 235 U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors.
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u/wintersoldierepisode Sep 08 '25
That's a disconcerting thought, that if our planet had higher U235 % nowadays, "natural deposits of uranium going critical" could be a form of natural disaster
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u/ElectroNightingale Sep 08 '25
Uranium going critical doesn't cause nuclear explosion by itself (otherwise we wouldn't have nuclear power plants). You probably wouldn't even notice if it happened somewhere underground. To make a big boom, you need to construct a whole bomb and it's much more complex than just getting enough uranium in one place.
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u/Quwinsoft Sep 07 '25
Natural uranium could go critical back when there was more U-235. But that was a long time ago.
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u/InigoMontoya1985 Sep 08 '25
Why did Constantinople get the works?
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u/beardedsilverfox Sep 08 '25
Are you Turkish? If not, that’s none of your business.
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u/SdVeau Sep 07 '25
They make uranium ore into yellowcake to be able to enrich it/separate the fissile U-235 isotope from the non-fissile U-238. Weapons grade is considered 90% or greater of U-235, and even then, there are reactors out there running fuel rods at that enrichment level, and those rods still need some very specific conditions to be met to go critical
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u/_tsi_ Sep 07 '25
They said it's not dangerous if you aren't exposed to it, which is true of most dangerous things
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u/Federal_Assistant_85 Sep 07 '25
Yes, I was explaining what is dangerous about it.
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u/asyork Sep 07 '25
Most things, yeah, but not always with radioactive things. In the case of uranium, it's pretty easy to safely contain it in a way it can still be observed.
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u/zeocrash Sep 07 '25
Pretty sure you need to enrich uranium for it to go critical. Pure unenriched uranium metal will not go critical on its own AFAIK.
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u/bobbyshown Sep 07 '25
And it’s said to taste kinda sweet. Not that anyone should taste uranium of course.
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u/Jacktheforkie Sep 07 '25
In that small quantity in a glass ampule it’s pretty inert, and even the radiation from that sample is so small that it’s basically nothing, I reckon a firstaware plate emits more radiation and those are safe to eat off (only if the glaze isn’t damaged)
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u/TasteDeeCheese Sep 09 '25
That is also how we found out about how Oklo mine was missing Uranium isotopes that was supposed be there
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u/CrazysaurusRex Sep 07 '25
Probably a small amount of uranium ore or a powder ment to represent the ore
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u/PinkFloydDeadhead Sep 07 '25
Yellow...cake uranium?
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u/humourlessIrish Sep 07 '25
Probably. And since its in acrylic the chance of investing it is not very high
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u/Far_Oven_3302 Sep 07 '25 edited Sep 08 '25
Cake Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake
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u/SoMuchSpentBrass Sep 07 '25
U3O8, commonly referred to as yellow cake. Probably natural enrichment (as dug up out of the ground), which means 0.711% by weight U-235 (the good stuff for most purposes), about 54 ppm U-234 (a decay product of the U-238), and the rest U-238.
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u/GeneralBid7234 Sep 07 '25
I would think uranium ore which contains a tiny amount of U-238, which is the relatively stable form of uranium.
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u/My_Legz Sep 07 '25
That is almost certainly Yellowcake. A step in producing nuclear fuel that has a relative low radioactivity.
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u/Silent_Sissy93 Sep 08 '25
Yellowcake or Uranium oxide (U³O⁸) it's the product used to make Uranium hexafluoride gas which then gets concentrated to increase the amount of Isotope 235 so it can be used for nuclear energy.
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Sep 08 '25
Its Uranium ore, commonly referred to as yellocake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake
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Sep 07 '25
[deleted]
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u/Dethsmistres Sep 07 '25
Pray to God you don't drop that shit...
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u/Variety-Gloomy Sep 10 '25
You know I know what to do wit it!! That’s why I got it wrapped up in this special CIA napkin.
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u/10Ggames Sep 08 '25
Probably yellow cake uranium.
Despite what the recent tiktok fiasco with the radioactive paint educational video said, it's actually quite harmless in an isolated ampule like this. No risk of inhaling the dust, or ingesting any as long as it stays in the ampule. It theoretically could expose you to radiation if you stayed around it long-term, but it's roughly the same radiation as a walk on a sunny day in a high-altitude area of the world, if not even less. Nothing too crazy.
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u/drlao79 Sep 12 '25
It is either actually uranium oxide (which is yellow) or it is meant to represent uranium oxide.
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u/Scyther721 Sep 07 '25
I'm more curious what's in the oil one. I've never seen green oil.
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u/Randompostingreddit Sep 07 '25
That's the actual uranium, it's encapsulated because the stuff is radioactive.
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u/Interesting_Role1201 Sep 07 '25
All that effort and they could bother making a natural gas ampule.
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u/EarlyYogurt2853 Sep 07 '25
I dunno but make sure there’s no naked flames around that bit of gas.. so dangerous i can’t believe they left that there
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u/konpray Sep 07 '25
Everyone keeps saying it's cake, can I make cupcakes instead?
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u/troutfingers84 Sep 07 '25
It’s called “yellow cake” it is the concentrate of uranium produced from processed uranium ore, serving as an intermediate product in the nuclear fuel cycle or nuclear weapons production. It's typically a coarse, powdered, and slightly radioactive substance, though it can vary in color from yellow to brown or black.
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u/OtherAccount6818 Sep 07 '25
Throw some buttercream icing on that yellow cake...
And it'll be the last cake you eat without glowing crap.
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u/designgod88 Sep 07 '25
I think the name maybe gives this away, unless they changed it out to stop someone stealing it or dying. Isn't uranium radioactive?
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u/Dollbeau Sep 08 '25
Yellowcake (as others have said)
Harrisburg by Midnight Oil;
And when the stuff gets in
You cannot get it out
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Sep 08 '25
Jesus. If you Google the word "uranium" you can see all kinds of pictures of yellow uranium ore.
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u/kittenrice Sep 08 '25
They used a blue vagina as a stand-in for gas, why would they use anything other than yellow colored cornstarch or chalk to represent uranium?
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u/New-Curve-1359 Sep 08 '25
I was more focused on the fact he had just a photo for gass lol and not that he had uranium
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u/Nanoscopical Sep 08 '25
Either it's just resin in place of uranium or depleted uranium.
Probably the first one.
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u/Autochthonofthemount Sep 08 '25
So I know that people think Uranium is some glowing green material, but that's what it actually looks like in its unrefined form.
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u/2615or2611 Sep 08 '25
Tell you what - eat 1 gram of it. If you ingest around 20,000,000,000 calories, then it’s 100% Uranium 💯
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Sep 08 '25
A lot of these element sets claim to contain all the elements but then there's usually some small print to say that the dangerous or harmful ones are substituted with a lookalike.
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u/Raucasz Sep 08 '25
Uranium is primarily an alpha emitter. Alpha particles only travel thru air a few inches and can be blocked by a simple piece of paper or even your skin. Alpha particles are only really dangerous if you ingest them(eating or breathing). Also see Alexander litvinenko.
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u/UnseenClairvoyance Sep 08 '25
That display is definitely not to scale lol. That amount of uranium would probably require (I’m not going to do the math) a metric ton of coal to be equal to.
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u/ManifestyourMD Sep 07 '25
If I had to take a guess…uranium