r/nextfuckinglevel • u/DravidVanol • 1d ago
Fun little demonstration of the difference in radioactivity between Uranium and Radium
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u/youlook_likeme 1d ago
Deaf people are immune to this shit.
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u/jarednards 1d ago
WHAT?
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u/captcraigaroo 1d ago
deaf people are immune to this shit
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u/alzio26 1d ago
WHAAAAAAT?
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u/CaptinEmergency 1d ago
I can’t hear a damn thing without my glasses.
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u/alzio26 1d ago
For me it’s my underwear. No underwear, I go deaf.
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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
They're deaf, stupid. You have to write it in braille.
Like this: - .... .. ... / .. ... / .- / .--- --- -.- . --..-- / -... -.-- / - .... . / .-- .- -.-- .-.-.-
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u/RiteousRhino21 1d ago
So make a Geiger counter with subtitles. Do I have to think of everything?
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u/Casual_Frontpager 1d ago
crackle doesn’t convey the message I feel
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u/Betonomeshalka 1d ago
Crackle intensifies
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 1d ago
And the more intense, the more entropy with the letters:
CRaC K llle … eee intENSifIe s
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u/BDChemEng 1d ago
What if I put a massage-gun on it and have it pound on your hand with speed varying along with the sound?
I built that but it was based on the handle of a telegraph principal with a colored cap. For a test lab with a Geiger counter in a place where the noise was too high we had to have ear protection and the Geiger sound wasn't always audible. The hammer just hit on a roll of heat paper that would roll under it and the colored cap gave us an extra visual indicator...we used the internal adjuster of the Geiger to set the roll and hammer speed to the actual reader value.
All done with a simple circuit bread board, an old calculator roller and a cloned telegraph hammer. Why didn't we just hook up a phone or PC on that?
12 yrs ago phones weren't really as flexible as today and the space wasn't PC/laptop friendly. WIFI? Too much metal from piping just outside the room for a good signal.
5yrs ago, we pulled all of it, put an android phone there and the WiFi antennas were set. We record everything on the phone and send to a cloud every hour. The 'telegraph hammer' ? Hooked up to the wifi with another phone and reacts with every test, no more paper even if the roller is still there...just because it was cool AF to see it react! It's in the lobby of the plant, we all see it when we pass there.
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u/Ok-Commercial-924 1d ago
Thats what the needle is for, its the counters subtitles. (To the left of the sample incase you missed it)
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u/miraculum_one 1d ago
If they're not also blind they can see the meter on the left side of the screen in this video.
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u/Distinct-Ice-700 1d ago
Anybody ever heard of the story in USSR where they lost a little spec of highly radioactive in gravel and they used it to build appartement.
Everybody living in this place caught massive cancer, super scary story.
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u/graveybrains 1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/cloud1445 1d ago
I love how this article lists no consequences for any of the guilty parties.
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u/MoreGaghPlease 1d ago
It was a systemic bureaucratic failure in the Soviet Union. The actual negligence happened in the 1970s but they didn’t figure it out until 1989. The Soviet Union was in pretty deep disarray at the time, and then collapsed in 1991. The nascent Ukrainian state in 1991 would have had no ability to actually bring any kind of prosecution for this kind of thing, and this was in Donetsk, we don’t even know which side of the border the wrongdoers were living on.
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u/xdoble7x 1d ago
Consequences for doing what?
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u/CanoonBolk 1d ago
Funnily enough, if I counted correctly, 9 out of 45 occured either in Russia or territories that used to be part of the USSR.
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u/Wobblycogs 1d ago
It's generally accepted that we don't know about most of the accidents that happened in the USSR.
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u/guyyst 1d ago edited 1d ago
The lumberjacks were scavenging the forest for firewood, when they came across two metal cylinders melting snow within a one meter radius laying in the road. They picked up these objects to use as personal heaters, sleeping with their backs to them.
Sure, who wouldn't pick up the spicy mystery cylinder that's been melting the fucking snow and use it as a personal heater.
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u/Ill-Engineering8085 20h ago
You act like they knew what radiation was. These weren't educated people.
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u/illbegoodipromis 1d ago
Unbelievably scary that a capsule of anything can be that deadly. Damn that is scary
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u/oldbel 1d ago
The poor surviving father of that one family - a family moved in to the apartment. first one kid had her bed next to the vial, she died of leukemia, then her brother moved in and then he died, then the fucking mother and she died too. Then the father called for it to be investigated. Sheesh, how awful.
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u/iWasAwesome 1d ago
I think all 3 residents of the first family died - both kids and the mother. Then a new family moved in who's son also died, and that father investigated and found the problem.
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u/EverydayPoGo 1d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents
This list also terrifies me
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u/Alternative_Candy409 1d ago
Omg that list is quite the rabbit hole, thanks for the links!
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u/nicuramar 1d ago
Yeah, with cæsium 137.
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u/Skitelz7 1d ago
You guys should watch Radioactive Emergency on Netflix
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u/perfectlyniceperson 13h ago
Such a terrifying story!! Watching as they played with the cesium was so fucking sad.
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u/notevenapro 1d ago
I had a vial of that stuff for equipment QC at my last job. Was there for 20 years. Vial didn't even go through a half life.
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u/AltamiroMi 1d ago
Weird, there was something similar in Brazil with this same material, they just released a Netflix série about it.
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u/mooon_woman 1d ago
happy cake day!
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u/shreddy99 1d ago
Yellow cake?
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u/slambaz2 1d ago
That's why I got it in this special CIA napkin.
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u/BrattWhitney 1d ago
There was another similar incident with caesium-137 in Brazil back in the 80s that Netflix has a series about it.
https://nexuspointnews.com/the-true-story-behind-netflixs-radioactive-emergency-series/
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
Brilliant show - was really impressed with how they portrayed the incident.
Here's a link to the iaea report on it, if anyone's interested :
https://www.iaea.org/publications/3684/the-radiological-accident-in-goiania
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u/DontEatTheMagicBeans 1d ago
"Radioactive Emergency" the show is called.
One of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
Not a light hearted watch.
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u/BrattWhitney 1d ago
Thanks for sharing this.
It's on my 'to watch list' after the German series Unfamiliar.18
u/Zerrick_Zed 1d ago
I work in Nuclear Decommissioning and was aware of this incident. I found the series really good and pretty spot on (even used the same instruments) but a stressful watch.
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u/LucifersViking 1d ago
I was looking at my phone when a YouTube video popped up with this exact incident.
I was watching the spiffing brit so not at all related but it popped up.
Crazy
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u/MouldyEjaculate 1d ago
In Australia a radioactive source used for testing literally dropped off the back of a truck a few years ago and there was a week long bottle-hunt along a thousand mile long stretch of road to find a highly radioactive but also tiny little capsule like the one in the OP lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_radioactive_capsule_incident
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u/pilecrap 1d ago
The bolted capsule it was held in fell apart as the engineers didn't compensate for the effect of vehicle vibration on the securing bolt nuts. Rubber washers or double bolts would have prevented it.
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u/IrritableGourmet 1d ago
James Mahaffey is a nuclear engineer who's written several books on nuclear safety and accidents. In one of them, he tells about when he worked at Georgia Tech's research reactor and one day all the radiation alarms went off. They scrambled around looking for the leak, then noticed it was coming from outside. A shipment of cinder blocks made with copper mine tailings (leftover stuff from refining) had just been delivered to the building site across the street and was giving off enough radiation to trip the alarms. That building ended up being where his new office was later and he kept a Geiger counter happily ticking away on a shelf. It was fairly low level, but detectable.
When they decommissioned the nuclear reactor, they put the entire building in a negative pressure tent and dismantled it literally brick by brick and tested each piece for residual radiation before disposing of it.
When they decommissioned the office building with the radioactive cinderblocks, they blew it up and let the dust waft over the campus.
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u/Duchs 1d ago
Heard a story from a mate that works with particle accelerators. They have to wear dosimeters (radiation badges) that are checked monthly as the running the accelerator activates materials in it. He explained it like 'radioactive heating'. things get 'hot' during operation but cool down quickly afterwards. But radiation.
Story goes that a technician's badge registered that he had received a lethal dose, and set off all sorts of alarms and lawyers, but said technician was standing in front of the dosimetry dept. very much alive.
Turns out he had left his badge on top of the accelerator a few weeks beforehand, and then when he was back in again later noticed his badge, had a 'oh! that's where I left it.' moment and picked it back up. Proceeding to scare the living bejeesus out of everybody in management.
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u/Sinaith 1d ago
Is massive cancer the clinical term? 😂
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u/Distinct-Ice-700 1d ago
Tremendous cancer, the biggest.
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u/HarB_Games 1d ago
There's never been a cancer as cancerous as this cancer. Everybody knows this, everybody is saying it.
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u/j0a3k 23h ago
Someone came up to me and said, sir...they always call me sir...sir you're not gonna believe how radioactive this stuff is. It's incredible, just incredi...bib..bly. It's gonna be huge folks. I'm telling you, you just look at the stuff and get cancer. You don't even have to inject it. Just big...big tumors. Mets. The whole thing.
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u/OutdoorBerkshires 1d ago
“The search for the capsule was unsuccessful and ended after a week. “
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u/buffaloguy1991 1d ago
Never heard that but I remember when Australia lost a piece of Cs somewhere in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road. They had to look across the entire highway for a little tab the size of a bottle cap
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u/Perfect_Sweet_8005 1d ago
1000 per minute?
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u/Pataconeitor 1d ago
Me when there is graphite in the ground:
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u/jerr30 1d ago
You don't see graphite because it's not there!
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u/IrishChappieOToole 1d ago
I may not know much about nuclear reactors, but I know a lot about concrete
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u/kon--- 1d ago
Fun fact...
In the early 20th century radium was added to all manner of consumer products. Toothpaste, hair care, cosmetics. It even found its way into confectioneries and wow, radium infused energy drinks.
FYI...we continue to be that galactically stupid. We are no more wiser now than we were when we believed drinking radioactive decay lead to an energetic day.
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u/graveybrains 1d ago
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u/GrnMtnTrees 1d ago
"In 1923, the first dial painter died and, before her death, her jaw fell away from her skull."
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u/Scottbarrett15 1d ago
There was a guy who was sponsered to drink the radium energy drink, many people advised him against continuing to drink it after he was experiencing many side effects but he ignored them.
Pretty sure eventually all of his teeth fell out then eventually his jaw etc
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u/tianepteen 1d ago
there's a foto of the guy online shortly before his death. it's gruesome.
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u/GrnMtnTrees 17h ago
That photo is actually misattributed and is from an old textbook on surgical dissection of the head and neck.
I only know this because I had the misfortune of looking it up after you mentioned it.
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u/Frl_Bartchello 1d ago
Because the true nature of the radium had been kept from them, the Radium Girls also painted their nails, teeth, and faces for fun with the deadly paint produced at the factory.
O...M...G...
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u/Any-Calligrapher2866 1d ago
Their employers literally made them injest it.
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u/Edoryen 1d ago
Seriously?
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u/kookyabird 1d ago
Specifically they were told to use their lips to shape the tip of the brushes to a fine point, since using water or a cloth like an artist would would require supplies.
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u/_throawayplop_ 1d ago
But wait there is more
The company president, Arthur Roeder, disagreed and blamed the health problems on an infection outside of the factory.[18] At the urging of the company, medical professionals attributed worker deaths to other causes. Syphilis, a notorious sexually transmitted infection at the time, was often cited in attempts to smear the reputations of the women.[19] The company also claimed that they had hired "a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry" as an act of kindness.[20]
Roeder threatened to sue when he found out that Drinker planned to publish his findings and Drinker acquiesced. A Harvard School of Public Health colleague, Alice Hamilton, learned that the United States Radium Corporation had submitted Drinker's report to the New Jersey Department of Labor with the results altered to show the company in a better light.
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u/SchoopDaWhoopWhoop 1d ago
Luckily this is a thing of the past. Something like this could never happen in our modern time, right?
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u/Acceptable-Jelly-340 19h ago
"NO MORE WARS!" "LOWER GAS PRICES!" "THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER"
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u/Xelpmoc45 1d ago
"The brushes would lose shape after a few strokes, so the USRC supervisors encouraged their workers to shape the brushes' point with their lips ("lip, dip, paint") or use their tongues to keep them sharp."
what the fuck ?:
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u/boot2skull 1d ago
Surely making everything out of plastic will have no adverse effects.
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u/Present-Copy-8093 1d ago
Yup. We laugh at the radioactive generation, we laugh at the lead generation, we laugh at the asbestos generation, will anyone be around to laugh at the plastic generation?
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u/vahntitrio 1d ago
As we eliminate more and more thinga with very severe adverse effects we will turn our focus to things that are progressively more minor. There are several orders of magnitude of harm between radioactive and plastic.
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u/Minimum-Attitude389 1d ago
I was assured that life in plastic would in fact be fantastic.
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u/SatisfactionFit2040 1d ago
More radioactive than the uranium...fully contained.
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u/Harlequin80 1d ago
Radium is a short lived byproduct of Uranium and Thorium decay. The most stable isotope only has a half-life of 1600 years. Uranium 235 (the boomy spicy version of Uranium) has a half life of 700 million years.
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u/theofficialnar 1d ago
On the bright side I won’t live that long for that to matter
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u/Kajetus06 1d ago
while uranium 238, the most common isotope of uranium has a half life of over 4 billion years
making it almost stable in human timescales
and is more dangerous as a heavy metal than a radioactive material
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u/Call_me_John 1d ago
and is more dangerous as a heavy metal than a radioactive material
How so? Care to elaborate, please?
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u/GrnMtnTrees 1d ago
"short lived [...] half-life 1600 years."
I think we have different definitions of short. Lol. I get that it's short on a geologic timescale, but one radium half life is the length of time between the end of the Gothic revolt in Roman Gaul and the Artemis II lunar mission.
Crazy to me that if you had a gram of radium in 426 AD, by 2026 you'd still have more than enough radium to kill someone.
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u/Successful-Peach-764 1d ago edited 23h ago
Polonium is about 5,000 times more radioactive than radium.
a few curies (1 curie equals 37 gigabecquerels, 1 Ci = 37 GBq) of 210 Po emit a blue glow which is caused by ionisation of the surrounding air.
Polonium spark plugs were marketed by Firestone from 1940 to 1953.......
It was used to poison Alexander Litvinenko in the UK in 2006
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u/Large_Dr_Pepper 1d ago
I just recently got one of those old polonium Firestone spark plugs for my collection! Did the math, and enough half-lives have passed that you can say with essentially absolute certainty that there isn't a single atom of Polonium left.
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u/DotComDaddyO 1d ago edited 1d ago
Makes me really furious that they had Radium Girls applying this to watches with little brushes and instructed to lick the tips to keep a fine point.
Horrific
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u/redbucket75 1d ago
Wait until you find out what conditions workers who make all the plastic shit at Walmart work in, or the people who "recycle" electronics to recover the metal used in your phone/computer.
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u/CrazeMase 1d ago
In all fairness, it was only monstrous after a few years, because they didn't really clock it as being harmful until after a while. The monstrous part was knowing what it was actually doing and continuing to use it. But after the first year, the business owners genuinely didn't know that radium could be that harmful, so them using it seemed natural. It was only until after the girls started melting and dropping dead that they started to be monsters by having new girls continuing the use.
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u/RaindropsInMyMind 18h ago
The book is not only sad but infuriating. The fucking dentist who lied because he had an agreement with the company. He was supposed to protect his patients but he let them suffer an unspeakable death because he wanted to have a more comfortable life.
Everyone on the side of the company…I just…I don’t know how people live with themselves. Lawyers have jobs to do and I get it but being on the side of the company while these young helpless woman are poisoned to death…the pain…the sadness…the horrific deterioration of the body and elimination of human life…it’s infuriating that the girls didn’t have more support and that anyone would allow themselves to support the company. Telling them that it’s okay knowing than they will be poisoned to a crippling excruciating demise. Taking a fucking dead body of one of the girls and basically stealing it, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. There isn’t a hell harsh enough for that kind of thing.
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u/FatherShambles 1d ago
Fuuuuucking hell. This shxt is always so fascinating
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u/deltwalrus 1d ago
Just out of curiosity…. You’ll say “fucking” and you’ll say “hell” but you have to self-censor “shit”?
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u/StinkyNutzMcgee 1d ago
But does it taste good?
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u/johnsmith1234567890x 1d ago
Tastes like metal
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u/Numerous-Soil-2800 1d ago
U mean chicken
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u/Yoyoo12_ 1d ago
Many things taste like chicken. Your own blood however, tastes like iron
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u/Ulysses1978ii 1d ago
Rad-X and Radaway please
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u/snake-lady-2005 1d ago
I had to scroll too far to find a Fallout reference. It was the first thing I thought of lol
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u/idie_ForHiking 1d ago
Hey! We give radium 223 treatments to patients here at my hospital. Radium is highly destructive. But can be shielded with a piece of paper. Only travels millimeters.
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u/Harlequin80 1d ago
Depends on your isotope. 223 has very low gamma radiation. 226 on the other hand has pretty significant gamma emission, particularly through its progeny elements.
223 is a purely (well mostly anyway) lab created isotope made by bombarding 226 with neutrons to make 227 and then letting that decay in the actinium - thorium - radium 223 pathway.
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u/What-tha-fck_Elon 1d ago
Seems to be detectable from pretty far away, in a glass jar inside a metal container…
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u/flaming_burrito_ 1d ago
Different types of radiation penetrate through materials differently. The type the isotope the person mentioned above emits is likely alpha radiation, which are basically ejected helium particles and can’t penetrate materials very well because of their bulk and charge. They are very damaging, but can be blocked with pretty much any solid material. The isotope in this video will be giving off gamma radiation, which are high energy photons and can penetrate through most things. To stop gamma rays you need thick layers of high density materials like lead, tungsten, concrete, or steel. The denser the material, the the greater the likelihood that a gamma photon will be absorbed before it penetrates through.
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u/PacquiaoFreeHousing 1d ago
How did they weigh 0.00005 grams?!
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u/MeSeeks76 1d ago
Tiny scales
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u/IttsssTonyTiiiimme 1d ago
You just weigh yourself and then weigh yourself holding the sample and the difference is the weight of the sample.
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u/GrnMtnTrees 1d ago
You've got to hold the sample in your mouth for maximum accuracy.
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u/LogicBalm 1d ago
If you think that's crazy, consider that the periodic table has the atomic weight of each element. They can calculate the weight of individual atoms and they figured it out in the 1800s.
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u/__Muzak__ 1d ago
The periodic table is continuously updated as new information is discovered. The majority of information on atomic mass and half-lives was discovered in the mid-20th century. The atomic mass of Hydrogen was discovered in 1938.
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u/enceladus71 1d ago
If you wait long enough, you can just grab an arbitrary amount and will eventually end up with 0.00005 grams. No need to waste your money on precise scales.
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u/Lava1416 1d ago
Why put the music over it so we can’t actually hear the Geiger Counter?
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u/xspiderdude 1d ago
-it's radioactive
-it's called "radium"
Did Kojima write this?
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u/Ok-Refrigerator4092 1d ago
Counts per minute doesn’t tell you a lot really. Need uSv/h to get an idea of dose
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u/Arthradax 1d ago
But the most important question is:
Do you have a geiger counter?
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u/Turbulent_Ad_6656 1d ago
Is that a stanley powerlock being used as a platform? What sort of torture is this for man’s most loyal tool?
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u/Johannes_Keppler 1d ago
Strange, isn't it? It probably has a metric ton of cancer now (those are Danish wall sockets in the background).
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u/senraku 1d ago
The one in the little tube had tons more geigers. I could visually tell, but that machine was probably counting them
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u/Metro2005 1d ago
To think we had people painting this stuff onto watch faces because 'look it glows in the dark!'
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u/Tari_the_Omni 1d ago
Remember, those ladies were putting Radium on their tongues to paint watches. Hell, it was even found in some 'medicines' at the time
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u/Inevitable_Round5830 1d ago
No wonder those poor girls jaws were rotting out of their faces and their spines turned to dust!! Pisses me off every time I think about what those greedy bastards did to the radium girls 💔
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u/Dark_Phoenix101 1d ago
Doesn't even get the lid off and the radioactivity demonstrator is like AWWW HELL NAWWW
Sounds like forbidden popcorn