Cleaning up my uranium waste

a few days ago I posted a video about uranium glass on the main channel and I originally wasn't planning to do a cleanup video for it because I honestly didn't think that there was much to show however there have been a lot of comments asking for one so I decided to do it anyway most of the mess in this project came from when I made the sodium diary it left me with a bunch of stuff contaminated with uranium as well as dirty paper towels and gloves in this shot it looks like there's only two pairs of gloves or something but off-screen I had another bag full of them there also might be a couple things missing here and it's because I cleaned them while the project was going on to deal with all this paper and gloves there really wasn't much that I could do I probably could have tried to chemically recover the uranium from them but it just wasn't worth it so instead I just threw it all into a bag then with everything taken out I rinsed the bowl in the container with some water and I wiped it down a few times this got rid of any uranium that might still be there and I threw all this paper towel into the same waste bag to clean the rest of the stuff it was pretty much the same thing and I just shot it with a bunch of water and wiped it down after that I dumped all the water in the beaker into the bowl and I took out the stir bar that was in there this bowl now had all the water from the original reaction and all the washings from the cleanup most of it was just water though so I decided to get rid of it by just letting it evaporate I don't remember how long it took but all the water did eventually disappear and I was left with this crust at the bottom I usually do my projects in parts so this was all done before I even started making the glass when I did finally get around to making it though I had to grind the uranium and this left me with some more contaminated glassware to clean this I wasn't able to just wipe it all off and I had to convert the in soluble sodium dye your innate back into urinal nitrate I did this by adding a small amount of concentrated nitric acid and then I diluted it with a lot of water I then added a bit more acid and I let it sit for about an hour to make sure that it all reacted after that when it looked good I all into the bowl from before I washed it thoroughly with a lot more water and I also washed a glass funnel and some pipettes and some spatulas all of this water was again evaporated by just letting it sit there and this was the final waste I think most of it was actually see light which was all that white stuff and I used it as a filter when making the sodium dye your innate there probably was a small amount of sodium dye your innate in there though and there was definitely some urine l nitrate to test how radioactive it was I used my Geiger counter and it really wasn't that bad just for fauna then shot a block light at it and it did end up fluorescing because of the urinal nitrate that was there after this I wiped down the entire room and I made sure that there were no residues left anywhere and in the end this was all the waste that I was left with a few bags of dirty paper and gloves and a bowl of minorly radioactive crust all of this was then put into a lead-lined cabinet that I used to store all my radioactive stuff for now it's probably just gonna sit there indefinitely but eventually I do plan to pay someone to deal with it properly besides all this stuff that I just showed you I did have some other waste which was all the broken uranium glass and the things that I used to melt it in as the glass it was probably okay to just throw this all in the garbage but I didn't really feel comfortable doing that I also thought these pieces looked pretty cool so instead I just decided to keep everything that was basically it though and in terms of cleanups it wasn't anything too crazy and a lot of the other cleanups I had the ability to mess around which was what made it fun but there wasn't much room for that here I made an exception for this one because so many people asked but in the future I'll probably only post cleanups for things that I personally had a lot of fun doing or thought were particularly interesting but anyway that's about it for cleanups and now I have a few non cleanup things that I want to mention first of all I'm working on expanding this channel and posting more than just cleanups I'm working on doing a lot more behind the scenes stuff and also posting projects that I just don't feel fit on the channel the style of these videos will be quite different and later this week I'll be hopefully posting the first one of this type and you guys can let me know what you think of it I've also decided that because I'll be dedicating more time to this channel I want to change the name of it to be more closely related to Nile red I personally do really like the name Nile blue but there's already been a bunch of confusion about the two different names and I feel like in the long run it's just gonna end up getting worse I don't really like the idea though of just doing something like Nile red - and I want to make it a bit more interesting this channel is also going to involve my brother and a friend that I hired as the camera guy so it's a bit more of a group thing - and not just me right now I'm kind of with no ideas but if you guys have any suggestions I'd love to hear what you have to say and now just one final thing to mention is that I started a proper merch store and I have some stickers and pins for sale I think they all turned out really well and if you want to pick some up for yourself there's a link in the description we're also working on having some cool little keychains made and those should be up in the next month or so

Channel: NileBlue

Views: 1,000,552

Rating: 4.964581 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, uranium, waste, cleanup, glass, uranium glass, nileblue, blue

Id: 7ZUqSncJ5U0

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 23 2020