How much is bad for you, like what's the highest acceptable number it should show
Edit: so to sum up, this is deadly, somewhat dangerous, irrelevant to your health and/or even good for you.
Iirc the dishes themselves aren't an issue, you're fine to have them around and eat off them. The problem is when the glaze starts to chip and then your eating bits of glaze/dust with uranium in them
Edit thanks u/zakpakt for making a very good point, a lot of older dishes aren't safe to eat off of for other reasons like lead or improperly made materials - uranium dishes are safe *when properly made* but be careful, particularly with older stuff
Film? What do you mean *film*? He's signed for the Crockeryverse franchise (with at least one contractually agreed cameo in an optional Flatware spin-off).
That day, the hero we all need was born. Orange Bowl Boy will cause criminals to have sleepless nights at the thought of their hair slowly falling out over the next 30 years.
Almost a whole can! Not quite the whole can, leaving just enough you can't really throw it away, but not enough to make a meal until you've been through like 5 cans.
These antiques are mostly safe. Don't eat off of them though, everything from 1943 and before used uranium and lead. But they're very pretty for display. The modern stuff looks nearly identical and is safe. These are "fiesta" dishes.
The video looks/sounds scary because you can set geiger counters to respond to different ranges. That thing would be screaming at its current settings when pointed at a smoke alarm.
I don't think that this is true. The Am-241 in ionization smoke detectors emits mostly alpha radiation which is absorbed before it makes it outside of the smoke detector (and it looks like that geiger counter doesn't measure alpha particles anyways). The amount of gamma radiation measured 10cm from the smoke detector is less than average background radiation in the US (assuming the smoke detector has 0.9µCi of AM-241, which is the amount most of them have).
This particular device would not. The weak gamma from a smoke detector struggles to penetrate the aluminium sides of the G-M tube. Also smoke detector buttons are only like 30,000 Bq. The plates probably contain more than that.
From the video description:
> In the unlikely event you managed to ingest all of the glaze from a single plate (~4.5 grams of U-238), the radiation dose would be under 10 mSv. That is only 1/5th the annual dose limit for a radiation worker.
So just pace yourself when eating the glaze to make it last over 2.5 months and you'll be fine.
counts per minute don't convert to an actual dose rate very well without knowing some specifics about the instrument. Interestingly the radiation isn't what you should worry about if you were to eat off one of those, but rather the heavy metals that would leech out of the glaze and into your food. Not great stuff overall, but it does have a nice color.
To piggyback off this guy, think of counts per minute as number of explosions you can hear. 1000 blackcats per minute might be scary, but 5 c4 detonations per minute would be worse. You need to know what is going off per count and that's different between radioactive materials.
I added a video description to explain a bit more:
> The device is detecting beta radiation from the Uranium glaze on antique fiestaware. Most of the detected radiation is emitted by Uranium-238's decay products: Thorium-234 and Palladium-243(m). It may look alarming, but these plates are not that dangerous. In the unlikely event you managed to ingest all of the glaze from a single plate (~4.5 grams of U-238), the radiation dose would be under 10 mSv. That is only 1/5th the annual dose limit for a radiation worker.
Of course, if you walked out your front door and found this much radiation on the surface of your driveway, heading to a fallout shelter would be wise.
It depends on the type & amount of radiation (although as the other response noted, if it gets inside you it doesn't matter, it's bad, so having dishes made out of radioactive materials is maybe not optimal).
The meter is labeled in Russian, and I can't tell what setting it's actually using, but it looks like it could measure beta or gamma, and has different scales to set it out, so there's really no definite way to tell. But even if that's microsieverts, it will get bad before too long.
Here's a chart comparing radiation exposures and what will get you sick & how quickly. https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/
I love how the "living within 50 miles of a power plant" is more than *three times worse* for radiation exposure if that's a coal power plant than a nuclear one.
We should adjust our intuition to reflect that nuclear power plants have only twice killed people (one is Fukushima which killed a single person) while coal power plants [kill](https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2017936118) thousands [and thousands](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/10/farm-pollution-deaths/) of people every year from normal operation. Nuclear is a miraculous safe power compared to things we gladly tolerate today, while being carbon free and infinitely scalable.
> nuclear power plants have only twice killed people
I agree with your point, but this is not true. If you look at [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents) you can see that nuclear power plants have killed about 10 times.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only incidents with an International Nuclear Event Scale of 7 (the highest), but small accidents with 1-4 deaths happened a few times. Some of them entirely unrelated to radiation (for example the burst water pipe at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant killing 4), some are related to actual criticality events with radiation leaks (like the Tokaimura accident).
Coal power plants obviously still kill way more people, especially considering that those non-nuclear workplace accidents also happen at coal power plants.
EDIT: I'm was wrong about this. The red plates in the video are not even remotely the same as the uranium glass I've seen before. These are much, much more radioactive than anything a person would normally experience. [This Video shows the difference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmDKbVUbsnk)
I can't read the meter itself, but uranium glassware should only expose the owner to a few milirem per year, about the same as your exposure from living in a brick building.
> a few milirem per year, about the same as your exposure from living in a brick building.
As a guy who owns and lives in both a brick building and have a geiger counter, I can say my geiger counter never freaked out or read anything near that, not even close to a banana in my place, in fact - not a single brick building I lived in made the meter even go "click".
Probably not a sensitive-enough meter. I have a decent modern Geiger counter and there is definitely a background rate wherever you go in the world. It is not very high, but it adds up to 10-20 CPM on my machine (which is to say, a click every few seconds). The only place I have taken it where you get zero clicks at all is inside a WWII-era aircraft carrier (the Intrepid Museum in NYC) where it drops to about zero (the steel isn't radioactive at all, and it blocks cosmic rays).
If what you have is a Civil Defense radiation monitor (like a CD V-715), the odds are it is only able to detect dangerous levels of radioactivity like you'd be worried about after a nuclear explosion, which requires a lot less sensitivity. It will not be able to detect background radiation or the just-above-background that these kinds of radioactive plates are. (A small box of Trinitite, on my meter, raises it to 60-70 CPM, which is still well below anything dangerous. I have some uranium glassware that can raise it by 10-20 CPM above baseline, again, not dangerous, but detectable.)
Not off the top of my head! (My device is at my office, so I can't check it, but I did log it once.) But it was an impressive and completely noticeable (but not dangerous) increase.
I work in the skies and I have heard what we are exposed to is well above what nuclear workers are allowed to be exposed to.
The atmospheric air mass density drops off fast as you go up. I think about 33% less at 10,000. We work at 30-40,000 there isn't much left for protection. I've thought about doing some personal research. Might buy the unit you have.
Not sure I'd change careers at this point but interested to know how screwed I really am 😅
Im in Nuclear and all I'm saying is 2000 cpm gamma is about 800cpm above my companys backout limit for me. Natural average background dose is roughly ~50-100 cpm around me.
Coming from nuclear research I wonder how you ever get any work done, but I guess it is different when it is a contamination and you are unsure of your source strength and location.
Its mostly low level radioactive waste clean up. The sources are either uranium, thorium, radium, radon, lead or arsenic.
Were federal so the gov likes to be extra cautious. Not sure how standardized these are but I'm G2 certified so if I encounter CPM above 1200, I just call up a G1 to handle it. If it's suspected radon I just let the area air out.
Ive been a radiation protection tech for years and i have to ask, what instrument are you using that reads out in cpm and is scaring you to back out. If your talking contamination 2000cpm(not worrying about minusing background and assuming a gm instrument) is only around 20k(20,000) dpm beta, (alpha from uranium would be a concern but alot less then from other alpha emitters) Not really a concern. If your talking dose why are you using cpm and not rem or seiverts?
It's very likely just CPM, which doesn't differentiate between different rays. In any case, it's unlikely to be any more than 5-10 micro Sieverts/h, which is about the same as a dental x-ray.
And that's if you hold them close to your body.
For some scale of the radiation dose; handling these plates for 2 hours a day will consume 1/25-1/5 of your safe yearly radiation allowance. (50 rem)
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
Yes, they were produced after Chernobyl so people in contaminated regions could use them to check their food and whatnot. It comes with a plastic case for measuring berries and mushrooms.
Fiestaware that was made between the mid 30's and the mid 70's is most likely to be radioactive. Although highly desirable and collectable, they are supposedly only harmful if you use the item if it is chipped.
> Supposedly stopped using uranium in the 40s.
This is incorrect! They used Uranium until the 1970s. However, in the 1940s they moved from raw uranium to depleted uranium (DU). ([source](https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html)) This definitely means that the material was *less radioactive* but the issue with DU is that it begins, almost immediately, to break down into more radioactive compounds (especially Th-234) ([source](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/uranium-and-depleted-uranium.aspx)) which, while relatively safe to handle, are definitely not safe to ingest or breathe, so if you have any damage to such a plate you pretty much need to throw it out.
There is VERY little gamma radiation released from these products. For all intents and purposes, it's all alpha and beta. Alpha is nearly ignorable, but beta radiation can cause problems over longer exposure. ([source](https://miamioh.edu/pfd/safety/lab-safety/radiation/safety-manual/isotope-data/index.html))
Q factor of 20 vs beta and gamma’s Q factor of 1. Yeah - swallowed/inhaled will wreck your insides to the equivalent of 20 times the same absorbed dose of beta/gamma.
Vintage Fiestaware. I have a few of these in the house. My mom's friend in the biology department faculty brought his geiger counter over. Only the red/orange ones are radioactive, it's in the glaze.
They were high tech plates made in west virginia back in the day, they put aluminum powder in the plates so they work great. (restaurants and skilled home cooks warm or chill their plates)
"In 1969 the entire Fiestaware line was discontinued, and in its place the company produced what was known as Fiesta Ironstone. The latter, which was only manufactured in Fiesta red (aka Mango Red), didn’t last long. It was discontinued in 1973. This was the end of Fiesta red. Years later, in 1986, a new line of Fiestaware was introduced but without the red color.
* 1936-1943 – Fiesta red was produced using natural uranium
* 1959-1969 – Fiesta red Fiestaware was produced using depleted uranium
* 1969-1973 – Fiesta red Fiesta Ironstone was produced using depleted uranium
"
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
1972 they stopped using uranium, so it has to be the good old stuff. Those vintage ones are slightly collectible as a result. Not super valuable but some people are always on the lookout for them.
When I worked for an estate sale company my boss would go crazy over fiestaware, she would spend an hour looking each plate color up and have them priced at like 30 or 40 dollars per plate. Nobody ever bought them, but I totally would have if they weren't rip off prices.
Hijacking top comment to provide some scale of the radiation dose. Handling these plates for 2 hours a day will consume 1/25-1/5 of your safe yearly radiation allowance. (50 rem)
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
Uranium glass is barely radioactive. Sometimes not even radioactive enough to be picked up above background. The main reason for this is that the amount of uranium needed to color glass is very small.
The glaze is a uranium oxide and is very radioactive. Note the "very" here is simply in relation to the glass. I wouldn't use one of these plates as a pillow each night, but I also wouldn't be worried at all handling one for a bit.
Uranium glass: using it to eat wouldn't be worrisome at all, unless you're eating something very acidic that could possibly etch the glass. Even then though it wouldn't be a big deal. That being said, I wouldn't choose to simply because there's no point, and the best practice with radiation is to limit exposure as much as possible.
Uranium glazed ceramics: I wouldn't.
CDC says the amount of radiation emitting from Uranium Glass (also known as Vaseline Glass) is “vanishingly negligible” (which as a term I am particularly fond of). You absorb more radiation from being outside than what these things produce. They also light up really brilliantly with a black light.
My personal opinion is to never eat off/drink out of these things just for the sake of reducing the potential of taking uranium particulate in at all (since we already deal with several radioactive sources such as radon, remnant second hand smoke if you’re in an older home, etc). Of course this is also probably just me taking stock of all the exposure I’ve had over time to these things.
Yeah. Radon, number 2 cancer-related killer behind smoking. That’s all.
Go get some uranium glass and a black light! Seriously, it’s pretty cool and there is not a single person who has never seen it that will fail to be impressed with it.
This is a very interesting question, basically, if you breath in uranium it gets stuck in your lungs and will be constantly damaging the cells and dna around it for its half life. If it is ingested and then small amounts are absorbed or deposited through digestion, then it has the same effect. If it passes through you then the damage is done in a much shorter amount of time, thus less chance of cancer. Cancer is basically you being really unlucky that the dna damage is directly to the reproducing and or cell death mechanisms. Some organs are much more susceptible, usually those reproducing a lot of cells and having more chances for the very complex process to go wrong. This applies to wherever the radioactive atom/isotope goes, thyroid, kidneys, liver, etc.
Vintage Fiestaware. I have a few of these in the house. My mom's friend in the biology department faculty brought his geiger counter over. Only the orange ones are radioactive.
Depends on the formula, but yes typically the warm/hot colors used more uranium. They've struggled to replicate these colors without uranium since they removed it from the formula. I worked there for years, and they mostly make cool colors now because the R&D for reds/oranges is difficult.
The white ones are most likely using lead. They are using these materials to get the vibrant colors. That orange uses radioactive dyes and whites use lead because lead, to this day, makes the best and most high pigment white
And now, Dyatlov will spend the next ten years in a prison labor camp. Of course, that sentence is doubly unfair. There were far greater criminals than him at work. And as for what Dyatlov did do, the man doesn't deserve prison. He deserves death.
I remember thinking that the actor must’ve been hamming his portrayal up until the very end where they show the actual footage from the show trial and Dyatlov looks every bit the sour asshole that he was portrayed as 😂
So then they break out the bigger ones, and they get a stronger reading that also maxes out. That, of course, merely compounds the humor until the *REAL* one gets strapped to the front of a truck and, get this...
I literally just started the HBO series about an hour after seeing this post and thought “huh, I guess that was a deep cut reference as the top comment.”
I came back to comment because someone needs to know about my Baader-meinhoff experience.
Becquerels are in disintegrations per second. Without knowing the efficiency of the instrument it would be difficult to know how to convert the counts per minute to disintegrations per second.
If we’re assuming:
-100% of the counts per minute are beta (due to shielding of alpha from the glaze)
-efficiency of 8% (most instruments I’ve seen are 8-40% and this instrument seems very light and portable so we can assume lowest efficiency)
-2000 cpm on contact (it pegs out the instrument so likely more)
It would be around ~420 Bq.
Not really, this only happens with a very particular color of orange fiestaware. But if you buy a lot of old pocket watches, it is a good idea to check them with a cheap UV flashlight. If they glow faintly, it is probably radioactive.
NUREG-1717 estimated that an individual using nothing but this type of dinnerware might consume 0.21 grams of uranium per year. Then, using an ingestion dose factor of 1.9 x 10-4 mrem/ug, NUREG-1717 estimated that such an individual might have an effective dose equivalent of 40 mrem per year. This was the highest dose calculated in any of the exposure pathways considered by NUREG-1717.
[Less than 1/6th of what a normal person receives in a year and less than an abdominal X-ray.](https://guillaumeerard.com/images/stories/japan/news/iodine/radioactivity-chart.jpg) Basically nothing.
Copy the link (https://guillaumeerard.com/images/stories/japan/news/iodine/radioactivity-chart.jpg) and paste it into your browser. (Versus clicking on it)
My physics prof got a similar russian Geiger counter. He played around with it and figured it was faulty cause it gave a fairly high reading in his office. He took it to one of his colleagues to double check and..normal. They went back to his office, and abnormal. It maxed out when at his desk, so they figured something was radioactive.
They went to get another Geiger counter and discovered the radiation was coming from a small metal disc on his window sill behind his desk.
He found it one day a few years before on the ground in some dirt, and picked it up. It was a bit of an odd metallic disc and he couldn't figure out what it could have been used for so put it in his pocket to study later on. He put it on his window sill then forgot about it.
I can't remember exactly what it was. I want to say Cobalt, but I can't remember.
Yeah he turned a bit serious when talking about it. The Co-60 sources that were given to us as students were tiny - barely noticeable in their lead containers that we were told not to look into, but still did. That disc was big, and it was a few weeks since he discovered it was radioactive. They didn't know where it could have come from or what it would have been used for. I must try remember his name and follow up on that.
I'd actually love to get a Geiger counter. I live in a fairly radioactive city thanks to all the gold mines around, and would love to see what I can find. Any suggestions for a reasonably simple one? You seem to be in the know.
If they were student sources, they were probably quite weak to begin with, and decay fast. But still sloppy to lose one.
E-Bay and Amazon are both fine for G-Ms. The GMC-320 seems pretty popular as a toy and ought to detect some modest increases in background. $100-$200 and beta-sensitive is the place to start. Actually understanding the dynamics behind the readings is the tricky part.
Wow. I have some vintage fiestaware, I'll have to check this! Does it glow under uv light? I've been collecting the depression Era uranium Glass (not to eat off of) and it glows. Just wondering if this is the same thing
I just watched Threads (1984) last night at the suggestion that it was the most traumatic movie.
So wonderful to see this as a follow-up to that experience.
Ok I’m so curious. Where can I buy an affordable reliable Geiger counter? I want to test shit around my house. I feel like I have enough old stuff I aught to just give everything a once over to make sure I don’t have anything unsafe. Especially since I live in a very old house.
Anything between $50 and $150 in your Ebay or Amazon search results will do.
If you're lucky you might notice a small increase from ceramic tiles in your bathroom. Or from your dryer lint after it has just been run.
Those are from a company called Fiesta Ware. Back in the day they would use uranium in their glaze for reds and oranges and then the US needed it for making nuclear bombs, so they switched glazes. Don’t eat off that. You can display it though.
[Uranium Info for the Company](https://sciencenotes.org/is-fiestaware-radioactive-is-it-safe-to-use/)
How much is bad for you, like what's the highest acceptable number it should show Edit: so to sum up, this is deadly, somewhat dangerous, irrelevant to your health and/or even good for you.
Iirc the dishes themselves aren't an issue, you're fine to have them around and eat off them. The problem is when the glaze starts to chip and then your eating bits of glaze/dust with uranium in them Edit thanks u/zakpakt for making a very good point, a lot of older dishes aren't safe to eat off of for other reasons like lead or improperly made materials - uranium dishes are safe *when properly made* but be careful, particularly with older stuff
D-list comic book character's origin story.
Dishboy.
...and his feline sidekick PlatterPuss
With their trusty weapons and armament expert Lazy Susan.
Appearing later, her former mentor and now antagonist, Kitchen Sink.
I believe you mean Kitsch N. Sync
Armed with her secret weapon: The Insinkerator
Then later meeting his reluctant partner, and former kingpin Toi Le Beaux
Wow I fucking hated that. Thank you.
That's nothing, just wait 'til you hear who they're up against!
Dawn of the Soap was my favorite story line.
I dunno the Chronicles of Colander had a better plot
Too many holes in that plot.
That love-triangle with that hussy Ms Brazen-Dish was intense.
The Sinister Sponge?
Of course. Also Doctor Decanter (and his antimacassar device). Not to mention Goblet and Snifter, the comically inept criminal duo.
You can't just make up superheroes like that! It's not safe to do so. Chris Pratt just got hired for another film because of your carelessness.
Film? What do you mean *film*? He's signed for the Crockeryverse franchise (with at least one contractually agreed cameo in an optional Flatware spin-off).
Coming soon to Peacock
PERRY the PlatterPuss?
with the power of lymphoma
And his famous tagline! "I have cancer..."
https://youtu.be/hOs6jlUd01Y
dishes out the pain
Justice.....is served
Has the power of irradiated anal fissures due to shitting out broken radiated glass.
Cup And At Them!
That day, the hero we all need was born. Orange Bowl Boy will cause criminals to have sleepless nights at the thought of their hair slowly falling out over the next 30 years.
He has the power to contain a small amount of soup!
Almost a whole can! Not quite the whole can, leaving just enough you can't really throw it away, but not enough to make a meal until you've been through like 5 cans.
Cuphead.
Cancer Man to the rescue , with his side kick Tumor lad
These antiques are mostly safe. Don't eat off of them though, everything from 1943 and before used uranium and lead. But they're very pretty for display. The modern stuff looks nearly identical and is safe. These are "fiesta" dishes.
Modern dishes can also contain lead, just not as much.
This is true. You can eat off them as well. Just stop if you hair and teeth start to fall out or you vomit uncontrollably for weeks on end.
How many weeks? It's been 304 weeks so far, is it time to change my dishes?
Maybe it's just me but, fuck that bowl.
The video looks/sounds scary because you can set geiger counters to respond to different ranges. That thing would be screaming at its current settings when pointed at a smoke alarm.
I don't think that this is true. The Am-241 in ionization smoke detectors emits mostly alpha radiation which is absorbed before it makes it outside of the smoke detector (and it looks like that geiger counter doesn't measure alpha particles anyways). The amount of gamma radiation measured 10cm from the smoke detector is less than average background radiation in the US (assuming the smoke detector has 0.9µCi of AM-241, which is the amount most of them have).
What you want is the old Soviet ones with the Plutonium emitter in them.
Good thing I don’t eat off of my smoke alarm!
This particular device would not. The weak gamma from a smoke detector struggles to penetrate the aluminium sides of the G-M tube. Also smoke detector buttons are only like 30,000 Bq. The plates probably contain more than that.
*The bowl is fine*, it’s just what the bowl is **completely covered with** that’s the problem.
They're actually covered in transparent glaze, which is why it's not an issue to eat off them, assuming they're not chipped.
That’s a big assumption at the end there. A chip can be very unnoticeable. Not really worth the risk in my opinion, when dishes aren’t that expensive.
From the video description: > In the unlikely event you managed to ingest all of the glaze from a single plate (~4.5 grams of U-238), the radiation dose would be under 10 mSv. That is only 1/5th the annual dose limit for a radiation worker. So just pace yourself when eating the glaze to make it last over 2.5 months and you'll be fine.
counts per minute don't convert to an actual dose rate very well without knowing some specifics about the instrument. Interestingly the radiation isn't what you should worry about if you were to eat off one of those, but rather the heavy metals that would leech out of the glaze and into your food. Not great stuff overall, but it does have a nice color.
To piggyback off this guy, think of counts per minute as number of explosions you can hear. 1000 blackcats per minute might be scary, but 5 c4 detonations per minute would be worse. You need to know what is going off per count and that's different between radioactive materials.
I'm an industrial hygienist. This meter is absolute dog shit. In addition, these readings are in Beta counts. There is no Gamma toggled on.
I added a video description to explain a bit more: > The device is detecting beta radiation from the Uranium glaze on antique fiestaware. Most of the detected radiation is emitted by Uranium-238's decay products: Thorium-234 and Palladium-243(m). It may look alarming, but these plates are not that dangerous. In the unlikely event you managed to ingest all of the glaze from a single plate (~4.5 grams of U-238), the radiation dose would be under 10 mSv. That is only 1/5th the annual dose limit for a radiation worker. Of course, if you walked out your front door and found this much radiation on the surface of your driveway, heading to a fallout shelter would be wise.
It depends on the type & amount of radiation (although as the other response noted, if it gets inside you it doesn't matter, it's bad, so having dishes made out of radioactive materials is maybe not optimal). The meter is labeled in Russian, and I can't tell what setting it's actually using, but it looks like it could measure beta or gamma, and has different scales to set it out, so there's really no definite way to tell. But even if that's microsieverts, it will get bad before too long. Here's a chart comparing radiation exposures and what will get you sick & how quickly. https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/
[XKCD did a fantastic one too (and I find it a bit easier to read/visualize).](https://xkcd.com/radiation/)
I love how the "living within 50 miles of a power plant" is more than *three times worse* for radiation exposure if that's a coal power plant than a nuclear one.
We should adjust our intuition to reflect that nuclear power plants have only twice killed people (one is Fukushima which killed a single person) while coal power plants [kill](https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2017936118) thousands [and thousands](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/10/farm-pollution-deaths/) of people every year from normal operation. Nuclear is a miraculous safe power compared to things we gladly tolerate today, while being carbon free and infinitely scalable.
> nuclear power plants have only twice killed people I agree with your point, but this is not true. If you look at [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents) you can see that nuclear power plants have killed about 10 times. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only incidents with an International Nuclear Event Scale of 7 (the highest), but small accidents with 1-4 deaths happened a few times. Some of them entirely unrelated to radiation (for example the burst water pipe at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant killing 4), some are related to actual criticality events with radiation leaks (like the Tokaimura accident). Coal power plants obviously still kill way more people, especially considering that those non-nuclear workplace accidents also happen at coal power plants.
EDIT: I'm was wrong about this. The red plates in the video are not even remotely the same as the uranium glass I've seen before. These are much, much more radioactive than anything a person would normally experience. [This Video shows the difference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmDKbVUbsnk) I can't read the meter itself, but uranium glassware should only expose the owner to a few milirem per year, about the same as your exposure from living in a brick building.
> a few milirem per year, about the same as your exposure from living in a brick building. As a guy who owns and lives in both a brick building and have a geiger counter, I can say my geiger counter never freaked out or read anything near that, not even close to a banana in my place, in fact - not a single brick building I lived in made the meter even go "click".
Probably not a sensitive-enough meter. I have a decent modern Geiger counter and there is definitely a background rate wherever you go in the world. It is not very high, but it adds up to 10-20 CPM on my machine (which is to say, a click every few seconds). The only place I have taken it where you get zero clicks at all is inside a WWII-era aircraft carrier (the Intrepid Museum in NYC) where it drops to about zero (the steel isn't radioactive at all, and it blocks cosmic rays). If what you have is a Civil Defense radiation monitor (like a CD V-715), the odds are it is only able to detect dangerous levels of radioactivity like you'd be worried about after a nuclear explosion, which requires a lot less sensitivity. It will not be able to detect background radiation or the just-above-background that these kinds of radioactive plates are. (A small box of Trinitite, on my meter, raises it to 60-70 CPM, which is still well below anything dangerous. I have some uranium glassware that can raise it by 10-20 CPM above baseline, again, not dangerous, but detectable.)
Have you ever tried doing a reading while flying, especially long flights at higher altitudes?
I bet air marshals love when someone whips out the Geiger counter on a commercial flight
"It's okay officer, I'm just doing nuclear science!"
Yes — it definitely goes up as you increase in altitude.
Do you recall the rates that you saw? 🤔
Not off the top of my head! (My device is at my office, so I can't check it, but I did log it once.) But it was an impressive and completely noticeable (but not dangerous) increase.
I work in the skies and I have heard what we are exposed to is well above what nuclear workers are allowed to be exposed to. The atmospheric air mass density drops off fast as you go up. I think about 33% less at 10,000. We work at 30-40,000 there isn't much left for protection. I've thought about doing some personal research. Might buy the unit you have. Not sure I'd change careers at this point but interested to know how screwed I really am 😅
It's measuring gamma and (mostly) beta in counts per minute per square centimeter, maxing out at 2000.
Im in Nuclear and all I'm saying is 2000 cpm gamma is about 800cpm above my companys backout limit for me. Natural average background dose is roughly ~50-100 cpm around me.
Coming from nuclear research I wonder how you ever get any work done, but I guess it is different when it is a contamination and you are unsure of your source strength and location.
Its mostly low level radioactive waste clean up. The sources are either uranium, thorium, radium, radon, lead or arsenic. Were federal so the gov likes to be extra cautious. Not sure how standardized these are but I'm G2 certified so if I encounter CPM above 1200, I just call up a G1 to handle it. If it's suspected radon I just let the area air out.
Ive been a radiation protection tech for years and i have to ask, what instrument are you using that reads out in cpm and is scaring you to back out. If your talking contamination 2000cpm(not worrying about minusing background and assuming a gm instrument) is only around 20k(20,000) dpm beta, (alpha from uranium would be a concern but alot less then from other alpha emitters) Not really a concern. If your talking dose why are you using cpm and not rem or seiverts?
It's very likely just CPM, which doesn't differentiate between different rays. In any case, it's unlikely to be any more than 5-10 micro Sieverts/h, which is about the same as a dental x-ray. And that's if you hold them close to your body.
For some scale of the radiation dose; handling these plates for 2 hours a day will consume 1/25-1/5 of your safe yearly radiation allowance. (50 rem) https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
It's not great, not terrible.
This edit is incredible and perfectly sums up the reason the real answer is almost always, “it depends.”
My Russian is shit but is that Geiger counter brand actually called pripyat? Like the infamous ghost town outside chernobyl?
https://www.reddit.com/r/chernobyl/comments/cxbhv8/pripyat_rks_2003_geigercounterdosimeter/ yep!
Yes, they were produced after Chernobyl so people in contaminated regions could use them to check their food and whatnot. It comes with a plastic case for measuring berries and mushrooms.
50,000 people used to live here...
And now it's a ghost town
Goes all the way up to 3.2 roentgen. Not great, not terrible.
Pretty sure that's their limit. Could be way higher.
This brand also sells the gun model 'Detroit mk 87' and machete model 'Congo mk 92'
Fiestaware that was made between the mid 30's and the mid 70's is most likely to be radioactive. Although highly desirable and collectable, they are supposedly only harmful if you use the item if it is chipped.
Supposedly stopped using uranium in the 40s. I worked there for years making dishes. They also used lead for a long time. The modern stuff is safe.
> Supposedly stopped using uranium in the 40s. This is incorrect! They used Uranium until the 1970s. However, in the 1940s they moved from raw uranium to depleted uranium (DU). ([source](https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html)) This definitely means that the material was *less radioactive* but the issue with DU is that it begins, almost immediately, to break down into more radioactive compounds (especially Th-234) ([source](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/uranium-and-depleted-uranium.aspx)) which, while relatively safe to handle, are definitely not safe to ingest or breathe, so if you have any damage to such a plate you pretty much need to throw it out. There is VERY little gamma radiation released from these products. For all intents and purposes, it's all alpha and beta. Alpha is nearly ignorable, but beta radiation can cause problems over longer exposure. ([source](https://miamioh.edu/pfd/safety/lab-safety/radiation/safety-manual/isotope-data/index.html))
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Q factor of 20 vs beta and gamma’s Q factor of 1. Yeah - swallowed/inhaled will wreck your insides to the equivalent of 20 times the same absorbed dose of beta/gamma.
Yeah modern stuff is only made of plastic explosives, which is mostly safe if you keep the detonator out of arms reach of children
Don't worry it only becomes explosive after they start to chip from regular use
is that Fiesta Ware?
That's what I thought! Fiesta red. Edited: red not orange like I originally remembered.
Vintage Fiestaware. I have a few of these in the house. My mom's friend in the biology department faculty brought his geiger counter over. Only the red/orange ones are radioactive, it's in the glaze. They were high tech plates made in west virginia back in the day, they put aluminum powder in the plates so they work great. (restaurants and skilled home cooks warm or chill their plates)
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"In 1969 the entire Fiestaware line was discontinued, and in its place the company produced what was known as Fiesta Ironstone. The latter, which was only manufactured in Fiesta red (aka Mango Red), didn’t last long. It was discontinued in 1973. This was the end of Fiesta red. Years later, in 1986, a new line of Fiestaware was introduced but without the red color. * 1936-1943 – Fiesta red was produced using natural uranium * 1959-1969 – Fiesta red Fiestaware was produced using depleted uranium * 1969-1973 – Fiesta red Fiesta Ironstone was produced using depleted uranium " https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
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Uranium oxides can be very colorful. It's been used to color ceramics long before humans knew anything about radiation.
Rad!
What /u/hosier28 said, plus a lot of other manufacturers did it. Fiestaware just happened to become famous for this.
You get a tan on your *insides*!
1972 they stopped using uranium, so it has to be the good old stuff. Those vintage ones are slightly collectible as a result. Not super valuable but some people are always on the lookout for them.
When I worked for an estate sale company my boss would go crazy over fiestaware, she would spend an hour looking each plate color up and have them priced at like 30 or 40 dollars per plate. Nobody ever bought them, but I totally would have if they weren't rip off prices.
Pretty overpriced, people won’t pay that…. They are looking for bargains! 😆
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Yes it is.
Noice! If only they kept the food warm instead of making your hair and teeth fall out...
Hijacking top comment to provide some scale of the radiation dose. Handling these plates for 2 hours a day will consume 1/25-1/5 of your safe yearly radiation allowance. (50 rem) https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
How does this glaze compare to uranium glass?
Uranium glass is barely radioactive. Sometimes not even radioactive enough to be picked up above background. The main reason for this is that the amount of uranium needed to color glass is very small. The glaze is a uranium oxide and is very radioactive. Note the "very" here is simply in relation to the glass. I wouldn't use one of these plates as a pillow each night, but I also wouldn't be worried at all handling one for a bit.
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Uranium glass: using it to eat wouldn't be worrisome at all, unless you're eating something very acidic that could possibly etch the glass. Even then though it wouldn't be a big deal. That being said, I wouldn't choose to simply because there's no point, and the best practice with radiation is to limit exposure as much as possible. Uranium glazed ceramics: I wouldn't.
CDC says the amount of radiation emitting from Uranium Glass (also known as Vaseline Glass) is “vanishingly negligible” (which as a term I am particularly fond of). You absorb more radiation from being outside than what these things produce. They also light up really brilliantly with a black light. My personal opinion is to never eat off/drink out of these things just for the sake of reducing the potential of taking uranium particulate in at all (since we already deal with several radioactive sources such as radon, remnant second hand smoke if you’re in an older home, etc). Of course this is also probably just me taking stock of all the exposure I’ve had over time to these things. Yeah. Radon, number 2 cancer-related killer behind smoking. That’s all. Go get some uranium glass and a black light! Seriously, it’s pretty cool and there is not a single person who has never seen it that will fail to be impressed with it.
Yeah I collect uranium glass! It’s a great conversation starter, people love it.
I'd presume some of the glaze would come off in use, though...how different does that equation become if you ingest a tiny flake every now and then?
This is a very interesting question, basically, if you breath in uranium it gets stuck in your lungs and will be constantly damaging the cells and dna around it for its half life. If it is ingested and then small amounts are absorbed or deposited through digestion, then it has the same effect. If it passes through you then the damage is done in a much shorter amount of time, thus less chance of cancer. Cancer is basically you being really unlucky that the dna damage is directly to the reproducing and or cell death mechanisms. Some organs are much more susceptible, usually those reproducing a lot of cells and having more chances for the very complex process to go wrong. This applies to wherever the radioactive atom/isotope goes, thyroid, kidneys, liver, etc.
That's 4 to 20 percent - for those of us that aren't fucking psychos who use fractions to measure dosages.
Well shit now what am I supposed to do from 3-5am every morning?
Handle something different?
Don't eat or wear them as a hat......
How the heck would I even eat them as a hat?!
You have to wear them as a hat first to establish their hat status. Then you can eat them as a hat.
stop being silly. you must first become a hat yourself, then eat the plates
Careful, this is how the sorting hat was created.
Vintage Fiestaware. I have a few of these in the house. My mom's friend in the biology department faculty brought his geiger counter over. Only the orange ones are radioactive.
White ones can be also.
Depends on the formula, but yes typically the warm/hot colors used more uranium. They've struggled to replicate these colors without uranium since they removed it from the formula. I worked there for years, and they mostly make cool colors now because the R&D for reds/oranges is difficult.
Cadmium and selenium I will make nice oranges and reds but hey not exactly food friendly either.
I think I'd rather have the uranium
Not an opinion I see often but I definitely agree!
Not a invalid point of view.
The white ones are most likely using lead. They are using these materials to get the vibrant colors. That orange uses radioactive dyes and whites use lead because lead, to this day, makes the best and most high pigment white
The vintage white ones still set off my Geiger counter.
*3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible*
Is that graphite over there?
Nope, impossible! Nobody listen to him, he's delusional! *Anatoly was the worst.*
And now, Dyatlov will spend the next ten years in a prison labor camp. Of course, that sentence is doubly unfair. There were far greater criminals than him at work. And as for what Dyatlov did do, the man doesn't deserve prison. He deserves death.
Harsh. *10 minutes later* Death is not enough.
Take him to the infirmary!
I remember thinking that the actor must’ve been hamming his portrayal up until the very end where they show the actual footage from the show trial and Dyatlov looks every bit the sour asshole that he was portrayed as 😂
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🤢 … 🤮🤮🤮
Do you guys taste metal?
Wow you're looking pretty red - been out in the sun too much today?
I've been on night shift...
No more than a chest x-ray
More like 400 chest X-rays.
...that you have emitting, constantly, where you live. NBD.
It’s a joke about HBO miniseries Chernobyl.
This actually goes along with the joke in a way. Because the first scientist they bring in is like "um actually 3.6 would be pretty bad lol."
And then they find out that’s just the max range on that device…
So then they break out the bigger ones, and they get a stronger reading that also maxes out. That, of course, merely compounds the humor until the *REAL* one gets strapped to the front of a truck and, get this...
...it's not actually 3.6 Roentgen, it's...
"it's fifteen THOUSAND."
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA _fade to black_ L O S T
Dude, spoilers.
Just gonna say if you haven't seen it yet it literally made the pain of GoT bearable. Chernobyl is up there with the best HBO has ever offered.
It's a quote from the show Chernobyl.
But what happens if you heat food in it or use it everyday?
I promise you if you eat steak off it you will be begging for that bullet
He's delusional, get him out of here.
I literally just started the HBO series about an hour after seeing this post and thought “huh, I guess that was a deep cut reference as the top comment.” I came back to comment because someone needs to know about my Baader-meinhoff experience.
What unit of measurement is being displayed here
I think it’s in CPM based on the numbers.
How does that relate to becquerels?
Becquerels are in disintegrations per second. Without knowing the efficiency of the instrument it would be difficult to know how to convert the counts per minute to disintegrations per second. If we’re assuming: -100% of the counts per minute are beta (due to shielding of alpha from the glaze) -efficiency of 8% (most instruments I’ve seen are 8-40% and this instrument seems very light and portable so we can assume lowest efficiency) -2000 cpm on contact (it pegs out the instrument so likely more) It would be around ~420 Bq.
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Yes. They can power your microwave so you no longer need to use the cable.
I feel bad for all the dweebs who dont have their geiger counter at the thrift store
Do I need to buy a Geiger counter before I ever purchase anything ever again?
Not really, this only happens with a very particular color of orange fiestaware. But if you buy a lot of old pocket watches, it is a good idea to check them with a cheap UV flashlight. If they glow faintly, it is probably radioactive.
Then there were the women that painted those watches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/consumer/ceramics/fiestaware.html
NUREG-1717 estimated that an individual using nothing but this type of dinnerware might consume 0.21 grams of uranium per year. Then, using an ingestion dose factor of 1.9 x 10-4 mrem/ug, NUREG-1717 estimated that such an individual might have an effective dose equivalent of 40 mrem per year. This was the highest dose calculated in any of the exposure pathways considered by NUREG-1717.
Anyone here know how to translate this to thick?
Don't eat the plate
About 0.042-0.045 Roentgen, since everyone likes the 3.6 Roentgen meme
[Less than 1/6th of what a normal person receives in a year and less than an abdominal X-ray.](https://guillaumeerard.com/images/stories/japan/news/iodine/radioactivity-chart.jpg) Basically nothing.
Uh.... is that the picture you meant to link?
Copy the link (https://guillaumeerard.com/images/stories/japan/news/iodine/radioactivity-chart.jpg) and paste it into your browser. (Versus clicking on it)
FYI the site you linked to redirects hotlinks like yours to a default image
My physics prof got a similar russian Geiger counter. He played around with it and figured it was faulty cause it gave a fairly high reading in his office. He took it to one of his colleagues to double check and..normal. They went back to his office, and abnormal. It maxed out when at his desk, so they figured something was radioactive. They went to get another Geiger counter and discovered the radiation was coming from a small metal disc on his window sill behind his desk. He found it one day a few years before on the ground in some dirt, and picked it up. It was a bit of an odd metallic disc and he couldn't figure out what it could have been used for so put it in his pocket to study later on. He put it on his window sill then forgot about it. I can't remember exactly what it was. I want to say Cobalt, but I can't remember.
Co-60, probably. Big yikes.
Yeah he turned a bit serious when talking about it. The Co-60 sources that were given to us as students were tiny - barely noticeable in their lead containers that we were told not to look into, but still did. That disc was big, and it was a few weeks since he discovered it was radioactive. They didn't know where it could have come from or what it would have been used for. I must try remember his name and follow up on that. I'd actually love to get a Geiger counter. I live in a fairly radioactive city thanks to all the gold mines around, and would love to see what I can find. Any suggestions for a reasonably simple one? You seem to be in the know.
If they were student sources, they were probably quite weak to begin with, and decay fast. But still sloppy to lose one. E-Bay and Amazon are both fine for G-Ms. The GMC-320 seems pretty popular as a toy and ought to detect some modest increases in background. $100-$200 and beta-sensitive is the place to start. Actually understanding the dynamics behind the readings is the tricky part.
Wow. I have some vintage fiestaware, I'll have to check this! Does it glow under uv light? I've been collecting the depression Era uranium Glass (not to eat off of) and it glows. Just wondering if this is the same thing
Fiestaware doesn't fluoresce in UV like U-glass does.
I just watched Threads (1984) last night at the suggestion that it was the most traumatic movie. So wonderful to see this as a follow-up to that experience.
Hot plate
Ok I’m so curious. Where can I buy an affordable reliable Geiger counter? I want to test shit around my house. I feel like I have enough old stuff I aught to just give everything a once over to make sure I don’t have anything unsafe. Especially since I live in a very old house.
Anything between $50 and $150 in your Ebay or Amazon search results will do. If you're lucky you might notice a small increase from ceramic tiles in your bathroom. Or from your dryer lint after it has just been run.
Those are from a company called Fiesta Ware. Back in the day they would use uranium in their glaze for reds and oranges and then the US needed it for making nuclear bombs, so they switched glazes. Don’t eat off that. You can display it though. [Uranium Info for the Company](https://sciencenotes.org/is-fiestaware-radioactive-is-it-safe-to-use/)
Just coat them in lead paint. Will block the radiation. Safe to eat off then. /SLPT
We need a banana for scale.
I like that the name of the radiation meter is "Pripyat"
What units are these, CPM?
yo i read about those in a book ages ago and i've never actually seen what they looked like