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1950s Toy That Included Actual Uranium Ore Goes On Display At Museum
hypnosec writes: The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab — dubbed the world's most dangerous toy — has gone on display at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. The toy earned the title because it includes four types of uranium ore, three sources of radiation, and a Geiger counter that enables parents to measure just how contaminated their child have become. The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab was only available between 1951 and 1952 and was the most elaborate atomic energy educational kit ever produced. The toy was one of the most costly toys of the time, retailing at $50 — equivalent to around $400 today.
Every time I see a reference to this thing as being the most dangerous toy a lot of people speculate that it would be impossible to get today with today's safety and litigious oriented economy... except that is pretty wrong. When I was a kid in the 90s, I was able to get radioactive sources and uranium for use in a cloud chamber I built. Those things are still available today as I just purchased some sources a year ago for an educational display (price went up, would not be affordable to a middle school student now though, but maybe a determined high school student with a job).
Everything in that kit is available today, just maybe not all packaged together in the same combination. And a lot of it is still sold for educational purposes.
linky: http://www.amazon.com/Images-S...
It is a valid catalogue entry, the comments are hilarious tho.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
What about United Nuclear?
http://unitednuclear.com/index...
You don't have to go far - just take the americium for a smoke detector and you've got a radiation source.
Or you can buy it from the US Atomic Energy Commission for $1500 per gram. Or you can order (really) small amounts online, exempt from USNRC and State licensing. They produce sufficient count-rate to check survey meters or conduct most nuclear science experiments in normal lab periods using standard Geiger Mueller counters or scintillation detectors, yet low enough so as not to present any radiation hazard.
Or you can order directly from the government. Now that I've done all those searches for "radioisotopes for sale" I'm probably on a few watch lists :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This toy is incredibly dangerous because uranium is toxic. While it is only 1/10th as toxic as something like arsenic, it is almost as toxic as aspirin. A child ingesting that uranium may very well die. On a completely unrelated note: uranium is radioactive too.
Data:
LD50 of arsenic: 15mg/kg
LD50 of uranium: 115mg/kg
LD50 of aspirin: 200mg/kg
Sources:
http://whs.rocklinusd.org/docu...
http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...
Lawn darts -- lots of fun, only a few deaths, but lots of non-fatal injuries.
Mini Hammocks had 12 fatalities and quite a few non-fatal.
Austin Magic Pistol -- shoot a flame up to 70 feet (calcium carbide and water).
But the true winner has to be the trampoline. Deaths sure, but the thousands of serious injuries per year (visits to the E/R) is without parallel
NOTE: While it's not VERY radioactive is still IS radioactive. Don't plan a long camping trip there, or decide carry a piece of it around in your pocket. Ummm... I guess unless you like having tumors.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
If you want a really awesome chemistry set, you can buy one:
http://hms-beagle.com/heirloom-chemistry-set/
This was a KickStarter project. He was trying to raise $30K and he raised almost five times that much.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1742632993/heirloom-chemistry-set
If you can't afford the full set, contact the store; the web page says they can sell any subset of the kit.
Hmm, if I ever make it to Kansas City I will try to go check out the H.M.S. Beagle science store.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Carrying it in your pocket could become the latest birth control technique :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
People are scared of radiation because they don't understand it. [..] I would be interested in how many banana doses of radiation this kit contained.
You do understand that the overused pop science "banana equivalent dose" can be highly-misleading when used as a comparison with other forms of ingested radioactive materials- right?
Background- bananas are radioactive because they contain potassium and a very small- but fixed- proportion of naturally-occurring potassium is the radioactive isotope, Potassium-40.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, the amount of potassium in the body remains relatively constant (assuming you're consuming enough to maintain it), and hence so does the amount of radioactive potassium-40 . Any excess will be eliminated via the usual channels. So you're not going to "build up" any more over the long term by stuffing your face with bananas- it'll either replace/displace existing potassium or be got rid of.
This makes it very misleading to compare with other radioactive substances which can remain in the body and build up over time, i.e. the more of that source you ingest, the more that you'll have within you (and hence the radioactive dose that you constantly receive from having those within your body will *increase*).
While this shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of the "OMG! RADIATIONS WILL KILL US ALL!!!!111" lunatics, it's an indication that radiation- and its safety- isn't always as simple or as harmless as those on the other side believe either. The "banana equivalent dose" (or rather, its overuse and oversimplification) is one example.
(Disclaimer; I'm not an expert either- but I don't claim to be. Please correct any of the above if it's felt to be misleading).
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According to this article lawn darts killed 4 people (3 of them children) and injured 6700 before they were banned. The article ranks them as the most dangerous toy.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Raw uranium ores are a lot more radioactive than pure uranium oxides like yellowcake (U3O8) because of all the shorter-lived isotopes that have built up in the ore bodies from a billion years or so of decays of U-235 (700 million years) and U-238 (over 4 billion years). The other thing is that solid lumps of uranium are a good shield against radiation and the alpha particles resulting from decay events a millimetre or two under the surface are unlikely to escape the lump of metal and be dangerous.
A few kilos of uranium would be no worse than sleeping over a pile of bananas.
A kilo of pure U238 would still be about 12 MBq of activity, while a banana is about 15 Bq. So to get equivalent activity, you would need nearly a million bananas, or at ~120 g per banana, almost 100 metric tons of bananas. If assuming they were about the density of water (an overestimate), that is larger than the volume of a 40 ft shipping container, which to most people is a bit more than "a pile of bananas."
And that is a conservative estimate, as you wouldn't have a pure block of U238 very long. U238 decays to Th234 which has a 24 day half-life, then Pa234m with ~1 minute half-life, then Pa234 with a ~7 hr half-life, before finally getting another long lived isotope, U234. While U238 decays by alpha decay, the rest of the steps are almost are beta decays (some at almost twice the energy of K40's beta decay). Plus beta and alpha decays produce a bunch of lower energy gamma rays too, as they don't always decay into the ground state of a nucleus.
So one kilo of U238 that has reached a relative steady state decay into U234 will have a total activity of ~50 MBq, now up to several shipping containers worth of bananas to get equivalent activity. If you wanted an equivalent amount of energy released, you would need ~3.5 times as the 100 metric ton quote above, so now up to 350 metric tons of bananas.
U235 at least decays into a long lived isotope after two steps, and the intermediate product is only a low energy beta decay, so despite having six times quicker direct decay, it is closer to about twice as active and has much, much less non-alpha energy than U238.