A Nuclear Jockstrap

The Radiendocrinator with its gold-leaf and velvet-lined case.

Radiendocrinator, a profoundly radioactive radium quack remedy sold from 1922-1929 by William J. A. Bailey.

Radiation from a Radiendocrinator causes a medical fluoroscope screen to glow. Some blue light is emitted from the Radiendocrinator itself and may be seen behind the wire mesh. The source of this light is unknown, but could be scintillation, air ionization, or Cherenkov light emitted in the celluloid source covering.

Note: Click on any image for a larger version and a caption.

William J. A. Bailey (1884-1949) was a quack-cure huckster.  After dropping out of Harvard without a degree, he briefly engaged in mail fraud, served a prison term, and then entered the lucrative and minimally-regulated patent medicine trade with a fraudulent European doctorate.  His chosen specialty was “male enhancement.” (As anyone with an email account will attest, this dubious market has survived the intervening century and all attempts at regulation.)  Bailey’s first boner pills contained strychnine.  He entered business at a time when popular enthusiasm for radioactivity was ascendant, and he is mostly remembered today for his lethal radioactive quack cures, including Radithor and the Radiendocrinator (above).  Most hucksters did not actually include radioactive ingredients in their products; they lied.  On this matter, though, Bailey was deadly honest.  Evidence suggests he used his own products, believed in them, and in all possibility, died from them (bladder cancer).

The Radiendocrinator is a credit-card-sized radium source of spectacular activity (originally 100 microcuries of Ra-226 and 150 microcuries of Ra-228) intended to be stuffed into a man’s jockstrap and worn “under the scrotum” for extended duration. Production spanned 1922-1929, and with prices set in the thousands of dollars (1929 basis), only the Jay Gatsby set could afford these gilded nut-roasters. Users were instructed to orient the wire-mesh window towards the skin to ensure maximum beta dose to shallow tissues.  In measurements on my Radiendocrinator (and it must be noted that the Ra-228 is long gone now and only Ra-226 remains), the beta-gamma reading on a Fluke 451B ion chamber was 390 mR/h at 1/8 inch, and the gamma-only reading was 52 mR/h.  It is not straightforward to extract a beta dose rate from such measurements, but assuming a correction factor of ~0.1 Gy/R (dependent on beta energy, source geometry, and ion chamber geometry), a total scrotal skin and gonadal dose rate of 30-40 mGy/h is probably not unreasonable.  Far from causing a boost to male potency, wearing a Radiendocrinator according to the manufacturer’s instructions would have likely led to temporary sterility and, of course, elevated risk of cancer.  In other words, it was a male contraceptive of sorts.  As an unsealed radium source, the wearer’s clothing, nutsack, schlong, bedsheets, sexual partners, and probably anything in the vicinity would have been rendered contaminated by Pb-210, Po-210 and other radon daughters.  Lord, what a mess.

Modern owners of these radioactive collectibles should be cautious about proper storage, as they are among the hotter of the classic quack radium cures.  Most important is a hermetic container (e.g., a small dive box) to control radon daughters emitted from the source itself.  The blue velvet-lined Radiendocrinator case is likely to be roaring with radon daughter activity as well, and should be kept separately in a bag or other sealed container.  Shielding from the penetrating gamma radiation is strongly advised.  2-4 cm of lead is reasonably effective.  The source and its case should only be handled with gloves and the source itself should NEVER be opened except in a radiochemical glovebox facility, as there is a grave risk of airborne radium alpha activity being liberated.

UPDATE: VARSKIN 4 model

The question of dosimetry from a Radiendocrinator continues to interest me because of how high the doses could potentially be from this particular device in its suggested mode of long-term use pressed against the skin.  To provide more insight into the doses, I downloaded VARSKIN 4, a deterministic radiation transport tool developed for the US NRC often used to model beta doses to skin, and I modeled the geometry and source activity of a Radiendocrinator at the peak of its beta-emitting powers (which occurs when it is 3.5 years old).  The model makes numerous assumptions, and some may not be very good:

• Source area is the Radiendocrinator’s front “window,” 6.23 cm long and 3.63 cm wide (measured).
• The source itself is 7 sheets of absorbent paper uniformly loaded with radium sulfate, 0.33 mm thick each, with a density of 0.55 g/cc.  The paper’s density and thickness are a total guess.  The number of source sheets is borrowed from Paul Frame’s online description of the innards of his device.  Note: NEVER TAKE ONE OF THESE APART (unless, like Paul Frame, you have the facilities to handle a loose alpha source of this intensity).  Initial activity of 100 μCi Ra-226 and 150 μCi Ra-228 were inferred from Kolb’s and Frame’s description in Living with Radiation: The First Hundred Years.
• At the time of peak beta intensity–when the source is 3.5 years old–it will contain the following important beta-gamma activities:
  • Pb-214, 100 μCi
  • Bi-214, 100 μCi
  • Ac-228, 98.4 μCi
  • Pb-212, 84.2 μCi
  • Bi-212, 84.2 μCi
  • Tl-208, 30.3 μCi
• Pb-210 and Bi-210 are omitted as they will not have had much opportunity to grow in at 3.5 years.  Alpha emitters are omitted.
• There are two overlain sheets of 16-mesh woven metal screen composed of 0.009-inch wire that are interposed between the source material and the human target.  VARSKIN does not model such geometries. I calculate a transparency of 53%, and assume the metal blocks 100% of intercepted beta particles and 0% of intercepted photons.
• There is a plastic sheet, probably nitrocellulose, over the front of the device that I model in VARSKIN as 0.5 mm thick with a density of 1.3 g/cc.  This is a total guess.
• I assume a 1-mm gap between the source and skin.
• VARSKIN’s default skin dose averaging area is 10 sq. cm., in recognition of the US NRC’s current rule for computing shallow dose equivalent in 10 CFR 20.1201(c).  I did not alter this in the calculation.

Results: In vintage condition (3.5 years old), the Radiendocrinator’s predicted shallow dose rate due to beta particles is 88 mGy/h, and with the gamma contribution added in is up to 91 mGy/h.  Deep dose rate (from gamma contributions only) is 2.0 mGy/h.  In the Radiendocrinator’s present condition, assuming the contributions of ingrown Bi-210 and the total decay of the Ra-228 chain, the beta-gamma shallow dose rate is 57 mGy/h, and the deep dose rate is 0.9 mGy/h.  So…what does this mean, practically, for the wearer?

• 2 Gy is the threshold for skin erythema: waves of redness and itching sensation over several months, culminating in skin death and replacement as in a sunburn.  The Radiendocrinator wearer potentially earns an itchy, inflamed scrotum with a few nights of wearing the device.
• 15 Gy marks the onset of painful burning with moist desquamation following browning of the skin, i.e. a “nuclear tan”, with the possibility of long-lasting ulceration.  This is a hardcore radiation burn.  If you wore the Radiendocrinator all the time, every day, for a week, this might be your reward.  As there are no records of gruesome and agonizing injuries associated with the device, I assume there were no users hardcore enough to “ride the radium” full-time.
• Temporary sterility can happen with doses of 150 mGy or greater to the testes.  With a deep dose rate of 2 mGy/h, it would take a guy three whole days on the nuclear pad to achieve temporary sterility.  Libido would not be impacted.
• Stochastic effects: using ICRP weighting factors, I calculate an effective dose rate of about 1.2 mSv/h from the skin (shallow) and deep (general tissue) dose rates given above.  The excess risk of fatal cancer is on the order of 5%/Sv.  Though the dose rate is on the higher side, your real problem with this source is the skin damage you would endure.

U.S. Radium, Then and Now

Many people know the tragic story of the “radium girls,” the luminous-dial painters of the flapper era who tipped their paintbrushes in their mouths, became sickened from internal radiation exposure, and had to fight for workers’ compensation as they died.  Although a large number of radium paint factories existed, one in particular is identified with this infamous episode: the United States Radium Corporation, sited on two acres at the southwest corner of High and Alden Streets in Orange, New Jersey.  This factory was built in 1917 for the combined purposes of radium extraction, purification, and paint application.  Two original buildings—including the paint application building—remained standing until the US EPA had them torn down as part of a Superfund remediation project in 1998.  Today, the site is a barren, fenced-in, field with no hint of radioactivity betraying its former capacity.  In this post I’ll share a few photos from my trip this month, from the Library of Congress’s archive of the recent past, and even one from the plant’s heyday.  I’ll share some quotes about the technical operation of this facility, and a pic of my samples of its product, Undark.

The former U.S. Radium site viewed from the southeast corner in 2012. A railroad track once paralleling the confined Wigwam Brook brought 100-lb sacks of carnotite from Paradox Valley, CO, as well as soda ash, to a siding here. Radium was extracted in a long-since-demolished building at this corner of the property before going to the crystallization lab and ultimately the paint shop on site.  Hydrochloric acid, the main extractive lixiviant, was stored in a tank on the opposite side of the property.

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Paint Application Building, exterior: About 300 dial painters, virtually all of them young women, came to work here between the years of 1917 and 1926.

South-easterly view of U.S. Radium’s paint application building from Alden Street, mid-1990s (public-domain photo from the Library of Congress). Grace Fryer and her dial-painting cohort probably ingested their fatal doses of radium on the second floor of this building.

A similar view today (2012): all that’s here now is an empty field behind a fence. A scintillation counter measures nothing above background levels of gamma radiation.

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Paint Application Building, interior: “Dial painting areas had four parallel rows of work benches, aligned with the building’s longer axis.  Both floors included large wooden, double-hung, triple windows, and at least one section of the upper floor appears to have skylights.”

Second floor of the Paint Application Building, interior view to the southeast in this 1922 photo belonging to Argonne National Laboratory. Note the open skylights.

The same room, late 1990s, Library of Congress photo. The skylights have been filled in, but their recesses and original plumbing are still visible.  The floor has been replaced.

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Crystallization Laboratory: From the element’s discovery well into the 1950s, the only practical chemical technique for separating radium from barium was arduous multi-stage fractional crystallization.  U.S. Radium used a chloride and bromide system, as described by Florence Wall, plant chemist: “…in the crystallization laboratory, large quantities of radium chloride solution from the plant progressed in stages from silica tubs, three feet in diameter and about a foot deep, into smaller evaporating dishes until, after conversion, the product appeared as a few crystals of radium bromide in a tiny dish, 1/2 inch in diameter.” 

The one-story crystallization lab as it looked from the northwest, in this mid-1990s Library of Congress photo. Behind it is the Paint Application Building.

In 2012, the grass covers all. (The same house can be seen in the background in both images.)

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The Product: U.S. Radium named its radioluminous paint Undark.  An article that was painted with this product was said to be “Undarked.” The formula of Undark varied with application and was a trade secret.  At the time of the “Radium Girls” poisoning, a single employee named Isabel manufactured a zinc sulfide base activated with trace quantities of cadmium, copper, and manganese.  Another employee, originally company founder S. A. von Sochocky, added a measured amount of radium to the base and fixed it in its insoluble sulfate form: “[D]epending upon the type of work the material is to be used for the element of radium varied from one part of radium element to 140,000 parts of the base—zinc sulphide, to one part of radium element to 53,000 parts of the base [about 20 microcuries per gram].  The radium element when added to the zinc sulphide […] is in an aqua solution.  When that is added to the zinc sulfide which is in the form of a dry powder, it becomes like a paste.  The radium element when mixed with the sulphide powder is soluble.  In order to make certain that it will become insoluble and also that it will be equally distributed in the paste and also to prevent the radium element from being dissolved later when water is applied to it, I converted the radium into radium sulphate which is insoluble by adding amount of ammonium sulphate also in an aqua solution.” 

Undark, dated 1940, made to Army Specification 3-99D, packaged in 1g vials. Each produces a gamma exposure rate of about 40 mR / hour on contact, broadly consistent with about 20 microcuries of Ra-226 activity per gram.

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The Waste: Anything that was not radium—i.e. the vast majority of the ore that entered the plant—was waste and had to find a new home!  This included the uranium content of the ore; preceding the discovery of fission, uranium was effectively worthless.  One common application for U.S. Radium tailings was infill for construction projects in nearby Glen Ridge, Montclair, and Orange.  Contaminated fill was identified, dug up, and replaced throughout the 1990s.

Carteret Park (e.g. Barrows Field), located in Glen Ridge, was originally filled with waste tailings from U.S. Radium. Third base was rumored to be particularly “hot.” The entire ballfield was dug up, trucked away in drums, and restored with clean fill in 1998.

The hottest spots at Barrows Field today are along the concrete fence wall. Whether the minor detected radioactivity is owing to natural occurrence in the concrete materials, or un-remediated residues from U.S. Radium, is impossible to say.

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References:

Historic American Engineering Record HAER NJ-121, National Park Service (1996)  (All quotations in italics above are from this source.)

Photographs from above record by Thomas R. Flagg, Gerald Weinstein, 1995-1996, at the U.S. Library of Congress

Nuclear Collection (Part V)

Today’s long menu includes more radioactive pottery, more radioactive vacuum tubes, smoke detectors, a couple lesser-known radioactive elements, and a few interesting odds and ends. As always, if you have something radioactive and in need of a good home, I buy and trade all the time.  Enjoy!

Uranium-glazed artistic pottery is hard to come by, in contrast to the mass-produced (and mass-collected) Fiestaware and similar.  Here are two examples of handmade ceramics.  Especially interesting is a vase made in 2010 (left) that is representative of the work of crystalline-glaze artist William Melstrom, who has a studio in Austin, Texas (photo courtesy of Mr. Melstrom).  Melstrom is one of very few contemporary artists who have gone to the lengths required nowadays to work with uranium.  His adventuresome report on obtaining uranium compounds in France to formulate his glazes is a must-read.  The fluorescent light yellow glaze on this vase clocks in at 2200 CPM on a 2″ pancake GM tube.  At right is a hand-thrown and hand-glazed  decorative bowl from an unknown artist containing a typical “uranium red” glaze.  It registers 38,000 CPM on a 2″ pancake GM tube, making it among the hottest pieces of pottery in my collection.

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These raw ceramic underglazes containing uranium are a gift from William Melstrom, who made the vase pictured above.  Before Melstrom owned them, they were in the possession of a radiation safety officer at the Texas Department of State Health Services, slated for official disposal as radioactive waste.  Because so few artists use or even know about uranium glazes now, old bottles such as these sometimes present surprise disposal problems when studios are cleaned out.  Both are products of Thompson Enamel and both read about 12,000 CPM on a 2″ pancake GM tube.  At left is a “531 Burnt Orange” (when fired, of course), and at right is a “108 Forsythia.”

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This is a 6″ Corning uranium-glass optical filter I recently obtained on eBay.  The uranium concentration is through the roof: it emits 11,000 CPM into a 2″ pancake GM tube, making it more than twice as hot as the hottest decorative vaseline glass items I own.

Some other interesting properties of uranium glass are dramatically demonstrated with this example.  In the second photo, ultraviolet light from a distant Sun-Kraft lamp (an electrodeless quartz-mercury discharge tube) excites the uranium glass, provoking the characteristic green fluorescence.  Based absorption of the  lamp’s harsh 254-nanometer UVC radiation, it’s easy to distinguish a quartz crucible (casting the central shadow) from the nearly-opaque borosilicate tube (left) and soda-lime glass vial (right).

Uranium glass is also apparently a fair scintillation medium.  In the lower photo, a thin face of the Corning filter abuts the output window of a commercial x-ray machine, where exposure rates are on the order of 1000 roentgen / hour.  The glass glows its characteristic green color as the x-ray beam expands across its surface.

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Lanthanum and lutetium are two of the lesser-known natural radioactive elements.  Although there are other natural, primordial radioelements (e.g. V-50, Rb-87, Sm-147, Re-187, In-115), these two stand out (along with good old potassium) for their usefully high gamma activity.   Both could be used as check sources or energy calibration sources for scintillation detectors.  La-138 (0.09% abundance, T1/2 = 1.02E+11 y) decays by electron capture or beta emission, unleashing gamma rays in either branch.  A ~50-g specimen of the metal (inset, left) racked up 7.2 counts / sec above background into a 2″ NaI:Tl detector.  Lu-176 (2.6% abundance, T1/2 = 3.78E+10 y) undergoes beta decay with a high yield of several gamma energies, most notably at 202 and 307 keV.  The peak at 509 keV in the spectrum is not a real gamma energy, but rather a “sum peak” caused by 202- and 307-keV gammas simultaneously entering the detector (this happens to be an “anomalous” sum peak, larger than would occur by random summation, precisely because the two radiations involved are frequently part of the same decay sequence).  The 23-g chunk of lutetium in the right inset veritably boils a 2″ NaI:Tl detector with more than 120 counts / sec above background.

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More radioactive vacuum tubes. At right are three similar radar TR switches and their packaging (left to right: Bomac JAN-CBNQ-5883 from 1961 originally containing 0.3 µCi of Co-60; a Westinghouse 1B37 from 1952 containing several µCi or Ra-226; a GE 1B35 containing a small amount of Co-60.  At left, a spark gap (in hand) originally with 5 µCi of Cs-137 and a dual TR switch originally containing less than 0.7 µCi of Co-60.

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Ionization smoke detectors contain an alpha emitter, typically Am-241.  The left-most pic shows industrial smoke detectors from ca. 1960, each containing a total of 80 microcuries of Am-241.  These detectors measured the current imbalance between an exposed “sense chamber” and a sealed “reference chamber,” both of which contained alpha sources.  In front of the detectors are examples of their sense-chamber sources, which hold the greater amount of activity (~60 microcuries).  Left is a Pyrotronics F5-B4 with its annular source holder bearing six thin sealed sources; at right is an F3/5A and its pedestal source, containing a single foil covered by a screw-adjustable bonnet.  More modern detectors are shown in the upper-right image: At left is a Simplex 2098-9508 with 4.5 µCi of Am-241, manufactured in 1980, and at right a run-of-the-mill modern detector with the typical  1-µCi source.  The lower right photo shows a Ra-226 foil source from a batch of smoke detectors, make unknown, that was intercepted on its way into a Pennsylvania junkyard.  Approximate activity is 1 microcurie.

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Tritium glow-in-the-dark devices include emergency exit signage and the button at right.  Self-luminous exit signs are undoubtedly the most radioactive items in peoples’ everyday experience, but few probably realize it.   They can contain up to 20 curies of H-3 (tritium) gas in the glowing phosphor-lined tubes, as does the example shown here.  They are regulated under a General License by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (see yellow sticker in right image).  Though initially costly, these self-powered signs easily deliver value over the life of a building by eliminating the need to conduct tests and change light bulbs.  Numerous outlets sell them on the Internet; they can also frequently be found at bargain prices on eBay (when the NRC isn’t looking).   The lower pic shows an old luminous button that originally contained 0.1 Ci of tritium.  This item replaced more hazardous predecessors containing radium.   Common consumer goods containing tritium today include “Traser” keychain lights (technically illegal in the USA as a “frivolous use” of radioactive material) and Trijicon gun sights.

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Kodak 8-mm film projector (left) and camera (right) with radioactive thorium lenses. High refractive index and low dispersion justified the use of thoria in optical glass formulations.  The film projector’s 22-mm, f/1.0 Projection Ektar lens clocks in at 1200 CPM on contact with a 2″ pancake GM tube, while the camera’s lens only reads about 250 CPM.

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Radium postcard, ca. 1930, from Luther Gable quack outfit. Ah, the good old days when you could just send loose radioactive contamination through the freaking mail! This postcard bearing a dollop of glow-in-the-dark radium paint (11,000 CPM on a 2″ pancake GM tube) promoted Dr. Luther Gable, the man responsible for the notorious Gable Ionic Charger.  A number of these cards were found in a collection of magician’s tricks.

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The “Becquerel Chemicals” educational kit manufactured by Damon contains six small plastic boxes labeled A through F.  The contents of three are yellow powders, the contents of the other three are white crystals.  Students were intended to exploit physical and chemical properties—including radioactivity—to identify these unknowns from a list consisting of uranyl sulfate, sodium sulfate, uranyl nitrate, sodium nitrate, thorium nitrate, and sulfur.

Nuclear Collection (Part II)

Here are some more photos of my radioactive material collection. Featured today are radioactive vacuum tubes, radioactive optics, radioluminous items containing radium, and some recently-acquired resistors containing uranium.  I collect and buy radioactive material (duh!).  If you have some, and it’s in need of a good home, let me know!

Many types of electronic tubes contain radioactive material. Click on the thumbnail for a larger, numbered image. The purpose of adding a radioisotope to a vacuum tube is usually to ionize residual gas in gas-filled types, improving the timing characteristics or helping to “strike” a discharge.  Uranium glass saw much use in the metal-to-glass seals for tubes of all kinds.  Its coefficient of expansion more closely matches the metal than the regular soda glass of the package, and the slight radioactivity is merely incidental.  Various isotopes are found in tubes: these can include artificial H-3, Ni-63, Kr-85, Co-60, and Cs-137; and natural Ra-226 and Th-232.  The activity is usually internal to the tube, but some of the examples shown here feature external radium sources.

Some lenses contain thoria (ThO₂) to improve the refractive index while keeping dispersion low.  The thorium content can range from barely-detectable to major constituent of the glass.  Along the back row, left to right:

• Unknown first-generation image-intensifier tube from a military night-vision system.  The output optic on this tube is, as far as optics go, the most radioactive thing I have encountered–it reads 50 kcpm on a pancake GM tube, and about 1.5 mR / hr on an ion chamber.
• Kodak Pony 135 Model C camera (mid-1950s), with thoriated Anaston lens.  Not all Ponies have radioactive lenses.  Reads 4500 cpm on a pancake GM tube.
• Angenieux zoom lens for television or film, Type 10 x 15 B.  Reads 350 cpm on a pancake GM tube (the radioactive lens itself is buried deep within the assembly).
• In front are some small lenses salvaged from a variety of ’50s-’60s-vintage still and movie cameras.  Hottest among these is a Kodak 3″ f/2.8 Ektar lens, reading 10 kcpm on a pancake GM tube.

Radium paint was used for glow-in-the-dark applications from the 1910s through the ’60s.  Many people know of the tragedies suffered by early watch dial painters due to ingestion of radium.  The articles in my collection were probably all machine-painted, however.  The glow from these devices is feeble today, the result of radiation “burnout” of the zinc sulfide phosphor and NOT because the radium has decayed.  It remains virtually as radioactive as it ever was.

• In the back are WW-II / Korean War vintage military aircraft instruments: gyrocompasses, a radio compass, fuel gauges, an “oxygen flow indicator” and a small pressure gauge.  The latter item was sold in large quantities in 2002-2003 by various surplus dealers.   The larger dials probably contain a few microcuries of Ra-226.
• Lower left: radium-tipped toggle switches.  Radium content is probably a few tenths of a microcurie.
• Right: some consumer timepieces with radium–Westclox “Pocket Ben” watch and a Phinney-Walker travel alarm clock.  The older Westclox “Big Ben” clocks are also reliably radioactive and still inexpensive and commonplace collectibles.
• Center: two instrument knobs with external radium paint: “Pull out before preset tuning” and an illuminated on/off knob
• Center right: 10 ampere circuit breaker with radium strip that is visible when breaker is open
• Center foreground: two radium drawer pulls (or glowing eyes for a radioactive teddy-bear?)

Radioactive power resistors obtained at “The Black Hole” in Los Alamos.  The activity appears to be due to uranium and its daughters as determined by gamma spectroscopy.  At first I thought the uranium was in the black vitreous glaze, but it actually appears to be distributed throughout the volume of the resistor material (also black in color).  The activity is relatively mild–only about 300 CPM above background on a pancake GM detector.

Nuclear Collection (Part I)

Here are some relatively recent additions to my collection of radioactive and nuclear-related items. Some of them I don’t know nearly enough about! Take a look, and if you have some information to add, please contact me. I will post other galleries as I get the chance. Also: I collect this kind of stuff (obviously), so if you have something radioactive and you’re not a big fan of radioactive stuff, let’s make a deal: send it to me. You get rid of the hot stuff that’s gonna harelip your kids and give you leukemia and whatnot, and I’ll pay you money for it.

Click on a photo for large size. Descriptions are at bottom of post.

Graphite from CP-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, built under the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago in 1942. This 25th Anniversary memento popped up on eBay not long ago and I paid dearly for it. However, there’s not much of this stuff left; all but a couple bars of this famously pure graphite went on to be incorporated in CP-2 and thereafter entombed in concrete under a nondescript field in Illinois. The eBay seller would only say “I do know that my grandfather worked on the building of the atomic bomb but other than that I don’t know much else.” I have a feeling that the human story could be interesting, but on account of the seller’s reluctance to share so much as her grandfather’s name and other “personal information,” there’s nothing more to say right now. Tips appreciated…

More Graphite from CP-1. This example was also obtained on eBay, but bears slightly different markings (the additional Argonne National Laboratory label on the side of the graphite piece) and different dimensions. Also, no notecard or box came with this one.

Worker’s badge from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, dating from 1987 (the year after the catastrophe at Unit 4). Anyone able to read Russian shorthand? The back of the badge contains addresses and perhaps a description of what this man did at the plant. This badge is not discernibly radioactive.

Uranium glass memento from the “Conference Nucleaire Europeenne” of 1975, held in Paris. The box also came with a slip of paper informing the recipient that “Ce verre est colore par un sel d’uranium” (“This glass is colored by a salt of uranium”). A present from a good friend, James Thiel. Shown at right under light from a mercury vapor discharge.

“Ionium thorium nitrate” from Marie Curie’s lab. At least that’s the provenance claimed by the previous curator of this fascinating and rather radioactive vial. Ionium was a name for Th-230, the naturally-occurring parent of radium (Ra-226). Today, the vial contains 8.6 +/- 10% microcuries of radium as determined by careful gamma radiation measurements. If it’s indeed as old as the Curie lab, then there should be a couple hundred microcuries of alpha-emitting Th-230 present, in addition to a rather inconsequential activity of Th-232 carrier. The vial is contained in a test tube that has some rather cryptic markings on it. Take a look at the full-size pic and let me know if this means anything to you…

This late-model Walkie-Recordall contains a 4.8 microcurie radium source. An expensive dictation recorder in its day (ca. 1950s and ’60s), the battery-operated apparatus came in a discreet suitcase with hidden microphone—perfect for industrial espionage. Radium was used to discharge static on the “sonoband” embossing medium. This specimen was found by scintillation detector in a flea market in Ohio. The included sonoband, containing a medical lecture, was heavily damaged by radiation in the place where it sat in front of the radium source for years. The band still plays (video coming shortly). I pay $50 per Walkie radium source; taking out this radioactive strip does not impact operability of the recorder.

Back in the good ol’ days of 2004, an average joe could still buy uranium oxide from MV Laboratories in New Jersey, with nary a question asked. Those days are history! This 30-gram quantity of greenish-black U₃O₈ remains sealed in its bottle, an emblem of American freedom that has been eroded by the drumbeat of irrational fear. Something about “islamofascists” I think.

This is an interesting alpha check source kindly given to me by Taylor Wilson. On the backside is a bare surface deposit of black UO2, evidently reading 700 CPM on the Nuclear Chicago Model R6 survey meter. Perhaps the UO₂ was electrodeposited?

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Another interesting check source from Taylor, this one an “ionotron” type radium foil (probably about 0.1 microcurie) on a card that was last calibrated in 1955 at the height of the golden age of nuclear. It’s hard to see on the photo, but radiation damage has denatured and cracked the plastic right over the source strip in the lower right-hand corner.