Radioactive Stuff // 2011 edition

I have been collecting radioactive items and minerals for almost two years now so it is time to share it with you and all the other collectors on Youtube.

A good source of other radioactivity videos is Bionerd23's channel:
   / bionerd23  

Best radium based collection I have seen on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ALARAiswi...

Captions to help you understand my danish accent :o) :
OK - after that disclaimer let's take a look at my radioactive collection as of July 2011. It contains small samples with relative low activities but I still take precautions with these because of the radioactivity.
Mishandling these can be dangerous and even lethal in long terms.

Let us start with the thorium-based part of my collection.
This includes thoriated welding electrodes and gas mantles, euxenite, polycrase, thorite in different sizes, aeschynite and iron rich thorogummite.

Here I use my Gamma Scout to measure the activity of the thorogummite.
I have set the alarm quite high at 50 microsieverts/hou so the Gamma Scout will start to tick over this level.
This time it peaked at 89 microsieverts/hour. My normal background level is .12 microsieverts/hour so this piece of thorogummite measures 744 times normal background level - not bad.

Next I'll show you my special thorite sample which is cut like a gem stone.
If the grim reaper ever were to wear jewelry this would be it.
Dark and deadly - but quite beautiful actually. The camera doesn't do it justice.
The seller did point out that this is not suitable as jewelry. He wasn't kidding...

Next up is the radium based part of my collection.

These are radium painted watch hands. I hate them. They caused so many deaths amongst the women that painted them, they emit a lot of radon and even a tiny speck of paint that falls off these loose spare hands is highly active.

Much safer are the sealed vacuum tubes used in radars during World War II. I have a single Westinghouse 1B45 and two Western Electrics 1B22. It is the 1b22 tubes you see in the video.
As you can see one of the boxes is still sealed. It has remained unopened since June 1945 - that's over 66 years.

Moving on to the americium based sources.

I have a total of 9 americiumoxide discs in various stages of the extraction process from smoke detectors.
Three with an amount of 37 kBq and 6 with 33 kBq.

When I turn on the ticker in the Gamma Scout it starts screaming from all the alpha-particles hitting it... and then it passes out. Too much for it to handle.

Luckily with only the alarm turned on it manages to get a proper reading.
The radiation is almost entirely alpha-particles which can't even penetrate the outer layer of dead cells in your skin so it is relatively safe radiation.

Last but not least: my colorful uranium based collection. What you see is uranium glass, phurcalite with zippeite, betafite, uraninite, torbernite, samarskite, boltwoodite, autunite, samarskite with ytterbium, uraninite with gummite and more torbernite.

I also have some of the famous uranium glazed pottery. This is not the Fiesta Ware brand. It is marked GMBC and the other ones in my collection are from Vernon Kilns.
They are actually orange in real life but my camera picks them up as red - sigh.

Here is a ½ gram sample of the infamous depleted uranium. It emits almost only alpha-particles which are stopped by the glass so I'm not picking up that much activity from it.
I am not taking it out of the ampule though since it's also toxic.

Sorry for the bad lighting but it peaks at 2.0something microsieverts/hour.