The third is a rather large tritium light, but it’s past its half-life, yet while it’s not very bright any more it is still easy to detect. I hadn’t seen KCl crystals before, but a good image search shows that they can be striking when grown in the right conditions.
It might be more radioactive per volume, since it would be entirely KCl with no air trapped inside to reduce its density.It would be more radioactive than the same weight of “Lite Salt” or a similar salt substitute since these are about half KCl and half sodium chloride (table salt). And while beta is also blocked by the walls of the vial containing the tritium, the glass walls then emit secondary radiation (bremsstrahlung x-rays). You can get food grade on Greedbay cheaply and simply mix some DI water and make a supersaturated solution. Uranium Glass Geiger Counter Check Source - & 1 UV Light (000024)This amount includes applicable customs duties, taxes, brokerage and other fees. It’s still a sealed source – the tiny amount of Am-241 is still sealed up inside it and doesn’t get out.If you put the exposed Am-241 sealed source right up to the GM tube, and the tube is sensitive to alphas, it will count the alphas, and not just the lower-abundance gammas from the source.If you ever have to get a radioactive bone scan done, you’ll be excitingly radioactive for about a day – enough so to get you into trouble at airports and border crossings even. I suspect a source that strong would saturate the SBM-20 geiger counter tube used in my kit!I found out how to enrich potassium-40 if anyone is interested, my technique uses differential crystalization in an electric field.As others have mentioned, Potassium-40 is slightly radioactive. C $14.18; or Best Offer ... 1955 Print Ad Precision Radiation Geiger Counter for Uranium Los Angeles,CA.
Though Thorium is an α emitter, its daughters are an interesting witch’s brew starting with Th-232 ->Ra-228-> Ac-228 -> Th-228-> Ra-224-> Rn-220->Po-216 and so on. Not alpha. I’m not sure whether it’s possible to purify KCl out of a mixture like this using selective crystallization… the solubility of those two salts is almost the same, so I doubt that this would work.Well at the very least growing KCl crystals from Lo-Salt ™ sequentially did get very nice somewhat mechanically robust crystalline forms.There is another antique that is quite a bit hotter than any of these my Geiger counter only reads in micro sieverts per hour, but for a comparison, background radiation is about .10 to .20 micro sieverts per hour near me, the fiestaware plates you mentioned read between 25 to 35 per hour, the aircraft instruments that I have handled read 60 to 90 per hour, and finally, a World War Two paratrooper luminous disc that I own; they were used on D-day so when jumping in the dark paratroopers could easily re group on the ground as these discs glow, it is roughly one inch in diameter and reads just over 1,000 per hour on my counter.
1930s) I have a frisker and and old CD dose rate meter. Concentrations of potassium naturally contain a small percentage of radioactive isotope, potassium-40.
So you may have some good potassium sources in your kitchen already!BTW, granite usually contains potassium feldspars, so even if uranium is absent you should get some signal.Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
The end result is that radiation from those little tritium keychain lights available on ebay are quite easily detected even through their glass walls and thick plastic cases.I have a small Tritium keychain (from Dealextreme) and I can’t detect any radiation from it.With my Inspector Alert, I measure (β+γ) ≅ 30.01 μSv/h at the surface of the vials.I uploaded a short video to YouTube showing the relative activity of three different tritium light sources. Standard Postage (Royal Mail International Standard) The alpha particles from the Am-241 source won’t escape from the smoke detector’s casing, but the low-energy (60 keV or so) gamma rays from the Am-241 will.If you were to dismantle the unit and remove the Am-241 sealed source, that’s technically illegal in the USA because it’s a violation of the NRC’s General License for those devices, but it’s not dangerous – certainly less dangerous than an unsealed lump of uranium ore or a (sometimes very hot) radium-painted clock or instrument. Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing. The betas hit the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass vial, exciting the electrons, which then release that energy in the former of photons.Ruben – Thanks for pointing this out, I’ll update the post.Also relevant, I am applying for a patent on “Method of selective enrichment of potassium-40 by high voltage and electrochemical means”Thoriated optics are not as rare as you think.