Nuclear Engineer Reacts to NileRed "Making Uranium Glass"

hi I'm Tyler fols I'm a nuclear engineer with little over 10 years of experience in the commercial nuclear power industry from engineering to operations to emergency response I don't claim to know everything there is nuclear but I can certainly share some knowledge today we're going to be looking at a video by Nile red on making uranium glass I've never even seen or held the uranium glass before worked with uranium a lot as far as a nuclear fuel but never in this capacity let's check it out last year was the first time that I heard about uranium glass and I thought that it was some marketing thing or something but it's actually real I mean it's not glass made entirely out of uranium but it is glass with uranium in it it's got me really interested in it and I decided to buy some and I got this cup of it off eBay pure uranium glass is normally yellow but this one is green and I think it's because they put some iron in close in the dirt regardless of that though that's not really what makes uranium glass special and it's what it looks like on or a black light yeah the uranium in it fluoresces and it makes this really nice green color the actual amount of uranium in it though is quite small so the glass itself is only minorly radioactive that's another thing okay I can see where people getting more of the green glowy uranium from maybe it's like glass it's all salts in another video I reacted to by styro pyro so yeah um it's when you do these little uh these little fun things which oddly enough have nothing to do with the nuclear industry it's kind of funny General glassware in cups like this this is super popular in the late 1800s and the early 1900s however during World War II the government started confiscating all the uranium and diverting it to nuclear research it's kind of killed the entire industry for Uranium glass until the late 50s when some restrictions on uranium were lifted I had no idea people did that much with uranium before World War II that's that's interesting other than like experiments I didn't know there was a consumer goods industry associated with uranium that's that's interesting a few companies started making it again but at that point the health effects of radiation were a lot more well known and also after the nuclear bombs the public perception of uranium wasn't exactly great nowadays there are he says that it's like it wasn't great back then but yeah imagine it's it's even crazier now as then you have people thinking that the uh water vapor coming out of cooling towers of a nuclear plants Radioactive It's he's right but it's even crazier now apparently still a few companies that make it but I wasn't able to find any of it for sale as far as I know if you want to get some uranium glass you really can only buy the old stuff I found this all really interesting and I've been wanting to work with uranium for a while so I decided to make some uranium glass cool my original plan was to buy some uranium ore and then refine it and use that purified uranium to put into some glass however a lot of equipment over on Cody's lab that the government doesn't really like it when you show how to refine Uranium on the internet I had to start with an already purified source and I was able to find some depleted uranium this means that it's missing the isotope to do things like generate nuclear power or make nuclear weapons I love this Pro's cons last up Pros easier to get cons no nuclear energy I agree that's a con can't make bonds that's a con [Laughter] I love this I love this but depleted uranium is actually used in weapons not not nuclear weapons but the A10 warthog it's uh ammunition that it uses to split tanks into half involves completed uranium armor on an Abram's tank involves depleted uranium so you can't make nuclear weapons but I guess you could make nuclear comma weapons however it's still good for making glass urinal nitrate is the nitrate salt of uranium and when it's pure it can form these nice yellow crystals that's cool besides just kind of looking pretty though it seems relatively mundane and that's something that I've always found interesting about radiation yeah uranium nitrate um again never will work with it mainly uranium oxide which is just a black little pellet and fresh uranium which is just a silvery metal so it's interesting that the uranium used in nuclear is actually more uh mundane than uh what this guy's using as this urinal nitrate just sits there it's shooting off thousands of extremely small particles but they're way too small to see or to feel so an alpha particle is a helium nucleus so yeah you you ain't gonna say that there's no way to naturally perceive that it's there and this was one of the biggest reasons why it took so long to discover radiation to know that it's there it has to be detected using some sort of instrument or setup and over the years many kids have been developed nowadays one of the easiest ways is to just use a geiger counter but before starting this project I didn't have one however when working with something radioactive like uranium it's pretty much absolutely necessary so I looked around online and I ended up getting this one off Amazon which wasn't very expensive but it was supposed to be decent yeah Geiger counters are very inexpensive probably one of the least expensive and very most user-friendly radiation counters protectors do you I turned it on and I let it stabilize for a minute and I saw that the natural background radiation was about 15 CPM CPM stands for counts per minute and it's a reading of how many radioactive particles it detects over a minute specifically how many ionizations uh it detects note that stuff like sunlight which is technically a form of radiation is it going to be detected but strictly ionization so natural ionizing radiation is what he's looking at radiation exists everywhere in the environment and you're always being bombarded by it naturally and this reading of 15 CPM is actually quite low time to test it with the uranium so I just put it next to it there was clearly an effect and this geiger counter was going to be more than usable for this project but it unfortunately wasn't going to be super accurate this was so part of it is alpha particles have a very short range um and even that little casing of that little vial he has there that's going to stop some of those alpha particles so this thing's actually written pretty low because most of the radiation that's let off by uranium is in the form of something called alpha particles and this counter's not even able to detect them it's only able to pick up the beta and the gamma rays that it's letting off which are significantly less than the alpha despite this though it's still going to be really useful because I don't actually need a super accurate reading I just have to know whether or not it's there net is the exact purpose of a geiger or Geiger Mueller counter it's just to tell you if radiation is there you mainly we mainly use it to scan and for contamination not discriminate between what type of radiation you have you can see why so for Geiger Mueller detectors the voltage is significantly High and the device is simple enough that it's not going to distinguish between what type of radiation there are whether it's Alphas betas Gammas and regardless of what energy level they are it's all going to do the same thing one bit of incident radiation is going to ionize the entire chamber now for different types of uh counters like a um proportional counter like a gas that filled ionization chamber or something it can discriminate between um what type of radiation you have you can even graph it to see where the Peaks are and how much of its Alpha how much of its beta if you have a next source and you're trying to figure out what it is but that's not he doesn't need that for what he's doing you're just trying to find out what's radioactive and what's not now before getting started I just wanted to try one other thing urinal nitrate was supposed to be fluorescent under UV so I put some on a dish turned off the lights and shot it with my black light and well it was definitely fluorescent this made me think that maybe to make the uranium glass I could just directly throw the urinal nitrate into some molten glass however when I looked it up it didn't seem like that was the case so the main Hazard associated with handling uranium itself is internal um dose so don't eat it don't inhale it um it'd probably be good for him to be to have a fume Hood nearby just in case honestly is wearing a face mask or not but you can you can touch it and be fine you can put it it won't it won't penetrate the skin and like you said betas and Gammas are Trace they're not even much above background radiation at this point I mean I could barely find anything about making uranium glass in general but out of all the info that I did find it always mentioned using something called sodium di urinate based on this and considering the fact that I'd never heard of uranium glass before I figured that it was probably best for me to use that as well now though this meant that the project was gonna be a bit more fun because they'd have to do some uranium chemistry to convert the urinal nitrate into the sodium diorenate to get this started I had to add the urinal nitrate to a beaker and normally I would have just quickly waited out on some paper and then dumped it in however this time I was working with uranium compound so I had to be a lot more careful this is because the dust that it had let off is not only Radioactive It's also toxic and it can lead to heavy metal poisoning that's true so to be as safe as possible yeah I carefully weighed everything directly in the beaker and in total I used about 15 grams that's one instance and this is was actually happened during the uh some of the Chernobyl cleanup was when they used lead as his lead is stable not radioactive to extinguish some of the fires up mixed with sand and Boron and a bunch of and a bunch of other materials I talked a little bit more about that in my review of the uh Chernobyl series but the lead itself can melt and and even boil when it gets that hot when it gets that hot and it can become an Airborne Hazard and basically that thing could that thing turned out to be just as deadly as the radiation from from the accident just because of all the uh because of all the lead poisoning and most uh most radionuclides eventually of the heavy stuff like uranium eventually Decay to lead over a very very long period of time but just because it decays to lead doesn't mean it's um doesn't have the potential to be hazardous when it's LED then on top of this I dropped in a magnetic stir bar and I poured in some water which should have been enough to dissolve all of the urinal nitrate I turned on the stirring and I waited for it all to disappear but unfortunately it ended up staying a little bit cloudy wow I tried adding some more water just in case there wasn't enough but it didn't seem to do very much this was unfortunate because it now meant that I had to clean things up a bit and I didn't really want to have to work with a solution of uranium yeah thankfully however cleaning it up wasn't exactly going to be super difficult and I just had to do a quick filtration I did this by passing it through some cotton and some sea light which is is kind of like super fine sand the stuff that initially passes through tends to still be a bit cloudy so I let it run for a bit and then I swapped it out for a new Beaker and put the other stuff through it again after this it was perfectly nice and clear but there was still a bunch of uranium solution all over the funnel and in the cotton and sea light so I washed it out with a bit of water when all the water had eventually passed through I took away the funnel and the solution was pretty much good to go now so on the subject of nuclear waste if this um has never done these sort of this sort of work in a um in a nuclear power plant but if we did anything with uranium in it we're going to be conservative and treat that as nuclear waste this would be low level waste and would just involve would just involve cleaning but people talk about nuclear waste and how difficult it is to dispose over well over 90 95 even is easy to clean and some bits you need to wait for it to Decay way not the K not the case with uranium the like the little bits on his funnel if you can't get it off would technically be considered nuclear waves which is which is interesting convert this to the sodium di urinate I had to react it with something called sodium hydroxide this is also known as lye and it's often sold as drain cleaner and that's where I get all mine from for this reaction it also all had to be dissolved into water but the exact concentration of it didn't really matter I figured that something around 30 by weight would probably be good so I measured out about 70 mL of water and dumped in roughly 30 grams sodium hydroxide is I mean at the nuclear plant we use it uh just for for pH control it's it's caustic no not really any different than pH control in any big industrial place that has a lot of pipes that you just gotta you have to eventually worry about corrosion um pH conductivity things of that nature and this is one just one of the chemicals that you use to uh control the water chemistry it's just water related stuff it all dissolves relatively easily into water but it also generates a lot of heat so in the end the solution is usually pretty hot however I wanted it to be closer to room temperature or maybe just slightly warm so I put it in the fridge to cool it down when I felt that it was good I took it out of the fridge and I started slowly adding it to the urinal nitrate almost immediately it started forming these weird solid kind of donut looking things and this was all sodium di urinate the reason this happened was because unlike the urinal nitrate and the sodium hydroxide the sodium diorenate is practically insoluble in water so the moment that it Formed it separated out cool what I had to do now was basically just keep adding the sodium until it stopped making the DI urinate at this point it was still pretty simple because the solution was nice and clear and it was really obvious to see however I eventually started stirring it and the whole thing got a bit murky so I couldn't just rely on looking at it instead to know when it was done I had to keep testing the pH I did this just using some cheap pH papers and I kept that in the hydroxide until it turned blue which told me that the pH was about 10. after this I just let it sit there for a bit to make sure that it all fully reacted and then I filtered It Off I just did this by pouring it through a simple coffee filter and when most of the water had passed through I washed it a few times with distilled water I then let it sit there until all that water passed through as well and now it was all still wet and goopy though and I'd have to dry it out but it was going to take forever just sitting here in the strainer with other chemicals I'd usually just set up a fan of coffee to help speed things up but that would probably end up shooting a small amount of dust into the air and I didn't really feel comfortable doing that with uranium so instead you don't I carefully took out the coffee filter and I put it in a bowl and I pulled a vacuum on it under a vacuum water vaporizes a lot more and this makes it dry a lot faster in a closed space though like in this vacuum chamber there's nowhere for the water vapor to go so to fix this problem drying salt at the bottom which would constantly pick up the water vapor I pulled it out about five hours later and it was mostly dry I purposely didn't let it dry completely because I wanted to avoid as much dust as I could by keeping it slightly wet and a bit pasty I was able to pretty safely scrape it all off without making any death clouds also besides the safety issue I was worried that if I let it dry completely that it would just stick to the paper and become impossible to separate I was able to get almost all of it and put it into a small bottle but there was still some stuck to the paper getting this last bit was a lot sloppier than she wanted it to be but I'd say little mac and cheese scraped it all off and then everything that even remotely came into contact with the uranium was put into a special waste container everything that I took off was transferred to the same small bottle and I did it as carefully as I could but it was still a bit messy there was a bit of uranium that managed to get on the outside of the bottle and I of course had to clean that up and I did this by just wiping it down a few times with some wet paper towel now with all the uranium safely in the bottle and none of it on the outside to poison me when I touched it I was ready to finish drying it to do this I put it into the same vacuum chamber that I used earlier and I pulled a really strong vacuum on it I wanted it to be as absolutely dry as possible so I left it in there for three or four days so I came back to it a few days later yeah they pressurized the chamber and took it out and well it worked it was really dry yeah when it's dressed like this though it has a tendency to give off dust and powder which is obviously really horrible to breathe in this was why I only dried it completely in the final container that I was storing it in so I wouldn't have to move it around or handle it that's smart I went ahead and weighed what I had here and it came out to be nine grams which was about what I expected just for fun I decided to test it with the geiger counter and you can see that the glass was able to block most of the radiation the reading that it had was only barely above the normal background level but that totally changed when I moved it over the top yes oh yeah the reason this happened was that most of the radiation that was being let off here was in the form of Alpha and beta particles and they just couldn't make it through the glass beta would be stopped by the glass um something about this with the thickness of your credit card could probably stop a beta could stop um normal beta particles unless you threw them through a particle accelerator or something as I mentioned before though this counter isn't able to pick up alpha particles in general so what I was seeing here was probably mostly from beta particles now one other thing that I wanted to try was to shoot UV on it and I was surprised that it didn't fluoresce I mean maybe it was fluorescing and it was just super weak but as far as I could tell it was pretty dead I thought this was really interesting because logically you'd assume that if you wanted to make glass fluoresce you'd put something fluorescent in it however I guess that just isn't the case and glass chemistry is a bit more complicated than I thought but anyway now that I had the sodium diorenate I could start trying to make the glass however I'd never made glass before so I kind of had no idea how to do it I looked around online and one of the best things that I found was a video by Ben who runs the channel applied science he gave a lot of good details and tips and almost everything that I'll be doing here is based on stuff that I learned from him I also got a few tips from Andy who runs the channel called how to make everything when it comes to making glass it's not super straightforward and there are a lot of different ingredients that can be used for beginners though Ben just recommended to use a mixture of three different things sodium carbonate and boric acid so that's what I went with and all these ingredients were really easy to get and I just ordered them all from Amazon now boric acid is interesting because we actually use that in the pressurized water reactor that I worked at think of it as a liquid version of control rods because it contains Boron which has a high absorption rate of neutrons higher than that of uranium so it stops the uh the fission reaction so um another way you can borate which is adding boric acid to the reactor in order to lower reactive power or you can dilute it just add more pure water to the uh to the reactor and that will raise reactor power that's actually how in a pressurized water reactor you we say maintain temperature um colloquially and operations but temperature and power still kind of um is still follow but because you're really um what's what happens is you're using up more of the fuel and then you dilute to compensate like for instance at the beginning of Life at the pressurized water reactor I worked at the boric acid concentration is about 1400 parts per million and then at the end of life right before you need to shut down and refuel because you used up all the fuel the boric acid concentration is less than 30 parts per million it's another way to control reactor power in addition to control rods and one of the reasons why you have multiple methods of doing so is redundancy so you know in case you have one issue or one of your systems doesn't work you have another way to do it and two about uh Power peaking they change the power distribution in different parts of the core the boric acid versus the control rods so it's nice to have both for just a more uniformly distributed power level within a nuclear reactor I then got a jar added 60 grams of each and shook it up to mix it a bit like this it would probably work to make glass but in my opinion the powder was still too chunky so to fix this I put it all into a blender and I ran it for a few minutes this apparently worked pretty well and after this it was a super fine powder and it kind of looked like flour this was definitely way better than before and I hoped that it would give me a better quality glass before adding any uranium to it though it was a good idea to test it to make sure that it worked I had also never made a dance before and it was probably a good idea to get at least some experience making it before trying it with uranium in it the general Looking Glass was very simple and all I had to do was melt this powder so I added a bunch of it to this dish that I had which was normally used to melt things like gold and I put it into a small furnace by the fact that it was glowing orange it was obviously pretty hot and I set it to around 1100 C I wasn't completely sure that this would be hot enough to melt it but when I checked on it a few minutes later it looked like it was working and now because there was more space in the dish I decided to add some more glass at this high temperature the sodium carbonate was mostly just melting to give you a sense 1100 C you're getting into nuclear fuel temperatures normal nuclear fuel temperatures but the boric acid was breaking down into Boron trioxide and water vapor this caused it to Bubble a bit and you can see this if you look really closely the main purpose of these chemicals though was that they both have much lower melting points than silica and they help lower the overall melting point of the mixture pure silica only starts melting around 1700 C but at that point it's still way too thick to work with and you have to get it well over 2 000. yes one thing is during the uh Manhattan Project at the Trinity um Atomic detonation they since you're in a desert all that silica in the sand a lot of that turned into glass because of the extremely high temperatures of the atomic bomb the temperature this high is just very hard in general and because of this additives are almost always included melting point in my case because I used Boron trioxide the final result would be some sort of borosilicate glass in general borosilicate glass is a lot less sensitive to big changes in temperature and I hoped that this would help prevent the glass from cracking as it cooled down but anyway I let it sit like this for about 30 minutes and I waited for it to completely liquefy when it eventually looked like it was about ready I used to blowtorch to preheat a graphite Square then I carefully got the dish from the furnace and I poured out all the glass I let it cool over the next 15 or 20 minutes and it looked pretty decent it looked like just a regular piece of glass and I was actually pretty proud of it I really thought that it would crack but apparently it didn't and I was still a bit skeptical of it so I left it overnight to see if anything would change and by the next day it was still totally fine as far as I could tell this glass mixture worked pretty well and the process seemed to be relatively simple after doing it just once I was definitely by no means a pro at making glass but I felt that I was ready to get the uranium involved to do this I just had to add some uranium to the glass mix but it was still a bit too chunky if I added it like this it wouldn't mix in properly and it would make some really uneven glass so far I had really done my best to avoid working with any powdered uranium but unfortunately I didn't really have a choice here I just did my best to grind it very carefully and to try to make as little dust as possible ball Orange when I was done I put it all back into the bottle and everything that came into contact with the uranium was put into my waste container now to actually add it to the glass mix the amount of uranium that I needed was super small however I didn't know exactly how much I had to add because from what I found online some recipes use as low as 0.1 percent I like those like yeah geranium recipes this concentration was all done by weight and I decided to go with a moderate 0.25 yeah I figured that this way if the final glass didn't glow well I could just add some more at 0.25 though barely any was needed and for what I had here I only had to add 0.4 grams to mix it in I shook it around for several minutes and when I was done it looked the same as it was before the uranium as far as I could tell it was still really white and I guess there just wasn't enough of it to noticeably change the color the dish from before was already in the furnace and I started loading it up with some spoonfuls I waited for this all to melt and then I added some more recipes spoons involving uranium uh also has never had that experience this was all being done in my fume Hood just in case it let off any uranium fumes good job good safety practice but it was obviously something that I had to be very careful with when I checked on it and it looked ready I preheated that graphite block again then I took out the dish and I poured out what was hopefully uranium glass while it was still red hot it was hard to tell but as it cooled it was definitely colored this time that's so crank a bit and when I felt that it was solid enough to move I picked it up and put it on some glass insulation with a white background the color was a lot easier to see yeah and it was a really nice and bright yellow this was exactly what I was hoping it would look like and so far things seemed to be going pretty well now the next thing to do was to test and see if it was fluorescent so I got up my UV lamp turned it on and I mean it was kind of working the glass was definitely a bit green but it wasn't very impressive to say the least my first assumption from this or is it was at 0.25 just wasn't enough uranium however then I thought maybe it was just still too hot and I had to wait for it to cool down so I decided to have some patience and to test it again a few minutes later this time it's still amazing but it was for sure better than before I then let it cool completely down to room temperature before testing again and this time it worked really well the point there's that green glowy uranium that a lot of people think of when they think of Uranus I wasn't going to have to add any extra there was still some glass left in the dish so I poured it out as well and I made another little flat glass thing this one also worked really well once it was at room temperature nicely under UV I'm really appreciating him showing us all the steps to make this uranium glass and this stereotypical view of uranium and it's there's quite a bit involved taking him I lost count at the time but it's probably it's taken him over a week at this point because I know he said that one that one step involving putting it drawing a vacuum and leaving it under there for several days so yeah that's uh it's pretty involved after making these it was getting late not as involved as enriching uranium but still come back in the morning unfortunately though when I checked on the glass one of them had spontaneously broken these pieces were a lot bigger than that first test run and it was looking like this might cause some problems one of them was still okay though and I thought that maybe only one of them breaking was just some bad luck then almost as though it somehow knew what I was thinking it responded by splitting in half right when it was sitting in front of me this was completely random so unfortunately didn't get it on camera but this made it clear to me that there was an issue this was happening because I had cooled down the glass quickly and unevenly and it had caused a lot of internal stress what I thought might work to fix this was to just insulate the glass and have it cool down really slowly the third result would still be under high stress but I was hoping that it would lower it enough just so that it would stop spontaneously falling apart for the this one I also decided to try making it a lot bigger and I loaded up way more glass foreign I then poured it all out and the moment that it looks solid enough I put it between some insulation after that I moved it to one of my benches to cool and it initially seemed to be working well however a few hours later I heard the sound of breaking glass and this was what I came back to a lot of stress had clearly built up and it was apparently enough to shoot some of it a couple inches the pieces that survived didn't seem to be too fragile at least when I was hitting them however shocking them with heat probably would have caused them to pop breaks when you walk away I decided piece of it with pliers and it was surprisingly difficult the moment that it did break though it just exploded from all that internal stress hope you got your safety glasses that's really cool but what I wasn't a fan of was all the powdered uranium glass dust that was flying everywhere yeah ooh the dust yep after doing this I realized my only real option was to anneal it to do this I'd have to hold the glass at around 450c for several hours at this temperature the glass is solid but it's still liquid enough that its atoms are able to move around this happens really slowly which is why it takes several hours but it lets them move to new positions and reduce the overall internal stress this is the proper way to do things and it's what I ideally would have done before but I was trying to avoid it because I only had one furnace this makes it much more difficult and slow to do things but I figured I would try it out I still really wanted to make a big disc of it so I melted the rest of the powder that I had and I poured out another one then as it was cooling I quickly changed the furnace temperature to 450c and I put it in to anneal this it would take at least several hours and I was planning to leave it overnight in the meantime I collected all the broken glass that I had and because now I didn't have a furnace I melted it with a torch now what I wanted to try here was to do some glass blowing with it but I had no idea what I was doing and it was a total failure instead I just made I have the beads that I thought I like this guy's determination though I really had annealing them however at the last minute I got the genius idea to anneal them just in case I knew it was a bad idea to open the furnace but I did it anyway and it was well a bad idea I try to put it in quickly but where the beaker touched the desk it started oh no I then tried to move it around to get a better look at it and cracks formed everywhere that I touched uh I actually thought that this was pretty cool but now I was worried that it would just end up exploding again so I took it out and I blasted it with a torch to heat it up again and to melt the surface this way I was hoping that even if there were cracks if I sealed the top it could prevent it from falling apart after this I put it back into the furnace and I let everything anneal overnight the next day I was worried that I'd open it up and just see a disaster I was initially a bit disappointed that the big piece got so cracked but I actually ended up liking it I think having it like this made it a bit more interesting that's so cool I think the small beads that I made also turned out really well and none of them were cracked or falling apart nice the question that I had now though make uranium marble radioactive were these pieces of glass considering the amount of uranium that I put into it it was definitely quite low but I still wanted to test it the geiger counter that I had though wasn't the best for this and I decided to invest in a better one this one is much more sensitive and has a bigger detection area wow and it can also detect alpha particles to test it out I did interesting that's okay he those are more expensive wow the biggest piece and with the uranium concentration of only 0.25 I assume that the reading would be really low however it was more than what I got with the pure urinal nitrate because it was now actually seeing the alpha particles the detector also has a detector went in shape and a much larger surface area which let it pick up many more particles as a unit CPM only shows the strict number of particles that it detects and it doesn't differentiate between things like Alpha Beta or gamma Yep this is important like I said I'm trying to judge how dangerous are radioactive sources because they aren't all equal for this reason it's sometimes better to go with a different unit like sieverts which will take this into account in that's good not this is a pretty high-end uh geiger counter most of them that do the conversion aren't pure pure geiger counter it would have to uh discriminate between the two take the energy into account as well and do a little and do a little calculation up here this is beyond the level of a a pure geiger counter receivers per hour this gave a reading of about 5.5 that's actually more than a figured uh five micro sieverts per hour is comparable to that of a dental x-ray or eating about 50 bananas and according to this which I got from the Canadian nuclear Association it means that if you held your cheek against it it would be like getting a dental x-ray every two hours now for one of the beads I got that it was only about 1.3 micro receivers per hour and this was just because it was a lot smaller in either case though at this level of radiation this glass is generally safe to have around and to occasionally handle however it would be a very bad idea to fill your pockets with them or something and to carry it around all the time it might be okay to occasionally wear it as a necklace or something for a short period of time but I don't think it's the greatest idea now the philosophy of um Health physics radiation protection try to keep radiation does as low as reasonably achievable and I can totally understand the reason for not wanting to have to have it on your purse that was really cool um I've like I said never done anything with uranium glass it was cool to see that green glow and something realistic and I guess they it was actually more radioactive than I thought it was which is just fascinating that you can you can make something like that still I knew it was still going to be in a relatively safe level you certainly don't want to eat it and you certainly don't want to have or even eat out of it like make it into a glass cup and drink out of it now I wouldn't recommend doing something like that either but it was really cool to see someone go through all the processes and see how laborious it is to do something like that it's very very fascinating thank you very much for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: T. Folse Nuclear

Views: 408,442

Keywords: nuclear, engineer, reacts, nilered, uranium, glass, climate, change, energy, power, green, alternative, sustainable

Id: YiLWZcMHAf8

Length: 38min 53sec (2333 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023