Hazardous radiation levels detected vital signs are dropping Hi everyone! In this video I am going to tell you about such a radioactive metal as thorium which has recently been found in most Along with uranium and bismuth, thorium is one of the three radioactive metals Which is quite abundant in the Earth's crust Because of having an incredible long half-life of more than 14 billion years we figured that almost all the thorium present on the Earth had been synthesized as a result of massive explosion of a supernova or a collision of neutron stars long before our Solar system appeared. Besides, because of thorium’s long half life it is three times as abundant as uranium in the Earth’s crust. However, this element was discovered fourteen years after the discovery of uranium because its concentration in its ores is very low. Because thorium has similar chemical properties to lanthanides. in nature it is frequently found in ores containing rare earth elements. For instance it is found in such minerals as monazite and gadolinite. Scientists have extracted at least 5 new elements from the latter mineral, including thorium. There is a thorium rich rock in an old mine near the village of Ytterby in Sweden. It contains thorium which is why background radiation around the rock is higher than normal, even being 300 times the normal level in some places. Nevertheless, it is fairly safe. Unless you live within ten centimeters from the rock. Unfortunately, thorium wasn’t discovered here it was discovered in another part of Sweden, in a copper mine in Falun. Basically, because of the last Ice Age ice removed most of the soil from the Scandinavian peninsula rare-earth metals are much easier to find in this region than in others. After a previously unknown black mineral, which became known as gadolinite, had been found, Jakob Berzelius Began studying it and he found unknown word impregnated traces in it. He named it thorium after a scandinavian god Thor, because Berzelius was Swedish. However, he took his time to study the element well and in 1829 he published his discovery. Also after the same year he extracted pure Thorium. Speaking of pure metallic thorium, it is a gray metal which easily oxidizes in air. It can easily be confused with cerum which similarly covers in a dark cerum dioxide layer. Purely from a chemical point of view, thorium is more like zirconium and hafnium because of having a wide atomic radius and having electrons on the outer shell. Thorium’s compounds are usually either white or slightly yellow. Of course for safety reasons I am not going to grind a piece of thorium against a grinding wheel and try to dissolve it in an acid. However, if to run imaginary chemical reactions, revealing thorium’s chemical properties, they may differ from those of rare-earth metals. Thorium can be dissolved in concentrated hydrochloric and nitric acids just like uranium can be dissolved in nitric acid. If it was possible to grind a piece of thorium against a grinding wheel, its small particles would self-ignite in air, glowing white and forming thorium dioxide. By the way, thorium oxide By the way, thorium oxide is the most is the most refractory oxide among all the known oxides, but that is not all.
At extreme temperatures, This substance can produce what’s known as candoluminescence, that is an effective conversion of thermal energy into light. That was the first use of thorium in the history of humankind. If to soak a thin knitted cotton mantle in thorium nitrate and heat it up with a burner, thorium nitrate will break down and the mantle will glow bright blue. To give it a more natural whitish hue, you can soak the mantle in a cerum nitrate. Such gas lamps were widely used in the 19-th century light up the streets when electricity was used only to show science tricks. In such street lamps wood gas was used as a fuel. It's flames are almost colorless but if to soak a mantle in thorium or cerium oxide, it will produce brighter light than that of gas or candles. By the way, such old street lamps can still be found in the streets of London. But you can no longer find thorium in them. Because of thorium’s high radioactivity, small thorium oxide particles, which are formed as a result of using such a lamp, can easily get into people’s lungs, bombarding the thin walls of alveoli with alpha particles, thus harming your health. In the beginning of the 90-th production of thorium mantles stopped and this radioactive metal was substituted with yttrium. Because of that brightness of such lamps decreased. However, such mantles have become significantly safer. By the way, speaking of the radioactivity, thorium, thorium 232 to be precise, decays following the pattern you can see on the screen. In general, this element is an alpha emitter which means that when thorium 232 decays, it creates alpha particles or a nucleus of a helium atom. Nevertheless, thorium decay can be observed with a naked eye in a so-called cloud chamber or as it is also known Wilson cloud chamber. I am using thoriated tungsten electrodes for TIG welding I borrowed from welders I know as a source of radiation. Thorium concentration in them is from 1 to 5%, Which makes it easier to produce an arc due to the low electron work function with the addition of thorium in these electrodes. Such electrodes can be distinguished by such red marks on them and also with the help of a radiation dosimeter. Background radiation produced by a bunch of such electrodes will be higher than normal, However in drops as we get further away. To make a cloud chamber, I took an aquarium and put a few dish sponges on the bottom of it, which I had soaked in pure ethanol. After that I turned the aquarium upside down and put it on a sheet pan, placing dry ice beneath it. As the ethanol vapours descent towards the cold sheet pan, their temperature drops below the dew point and they condense. However, at first this process almost didn't happen. So I added a few more napkins soaked in ethanol, it takes around half an hour to fully stabilize the system within the cloud chamber. After that roughly 3 centimeters above the cold bottom, there forms a layer of supersaturated alcohol vapour. When a cosmic ray or another charged particle passes through such vapour, it creates a so-called “track” made of condensed ethanol. If to put a few thoriated electrodes inside such a chamber, in some time you will start noticing tracks of alpha particles flying off the electrodes. These electrodes are very easy to use because they don’t have any coating which can hold back alpha particles with very low penetrating power. In air range of such particles is just a few centimeters, which can be seen from the length of the tracks. Of course my cloud chamber isn’t perfect and the ethanol vapours were excessively oversaturated, still it is very unusual to see radiation with a naked eye.
However, because the use of such electrodes is linked to high radioactivity and emission of toxic thorium dioxide particles, manufacturers have recently begun adding a mixture of rare earth metals, such as lanthanum, cerium or yttrium to tungsten instead of thorium, which makes such electrode much safer. About 20 years ago besides electrodes and mantles, thorium was also used in expensive camera lenses with thoriated glass and laboratory crucibles. As you can understand, nowadays thorium doesn’t have that many applications, which is why it is becoming more useless. Nowadays, it is a major problem because thorium dioxide is a useless byproduct of rare-earth metals production. and their extraction from such minerals as monazite and bastnasite. The problem is especially severe in China where more than 80% of the global rare earth metals production is concentrated, because China has become a global electronics hub where these metals are used.
I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence but today you can purchase quite unusual radioactive products on well-known Internet shopping sites. I am thankful to my subscriber, Vladimir, who has given me such a product for my new edition. It looks like a pen for writing but for some reason it doesn’t have an ink cartridge inside and it is not clear how to write with it. Description to this pen on the website where it was purchased says that it can be used for hand massage, You can massage sensitive spots on the palms of your hands or to do pen spinning with it. Earlier Oleg Aizon did a review of the pen on his channel and he found out that besides supposedly having healing properties, this pen is also radioactive. My sample turned out to be no exception. When placed next to a radiation dosimeter it shows that background radiation is 10 times the normal level but when it is placed 5 to 7 centimeters away from it, radiation almost doesn’t exceed the normal level. Oleg Aizon even managed to take apart such a pen and saw some yellowish powder inside it, which most probably is thorium oxide. Never try this at home, because you can easily contaminate the whole building with radioactive dust, which will harm you, if it gets into your lungs. As if that was not enough, you can also find a lot of other strange products on Aliexpress, which as retailers claim, are enriched with some magical scalar energy and irradiated with some magical rays. For instance such a medallion, which Vladimir also kindly gave me. It looks like a glass disk in a metal frame, the green colour of the glass makes it look like uranium glass. Most probably cunning Chinese manufacturers add thorium oxide to this glass, because they have nowhere else to use it. If to view alpha rays as the strange scalar energy, then there is more than enough of it in this medallion. The chinese manufacturers should have come with a better name for it, though. It is noteworthy that such glass glows faint green in the ultraviolet light, which is quite unusual. Of course I by no means recommend you to mail order such radioactive products in order for you not to be forced to prove that you are not a terrorist. Thorium, however, might have potential future uses. For instance it may be used at nuclear power plants along with uranium. The problem is that the naturally occurring thorium 232 doesn’t decay spontaneously but can catch neurons well and turn into thorium 232 which doesn’t exist long and is susceptible to beta decay. After its decay there forms protactinium 233, which radiates electrons and antineutrino after that there forms uranium 233. This isotope can be used at nuclear power plants because it is already succeptible to spontaneous fission. However, currently, there are no any thorium fuel cycle reactors, because at this point it is still not more cost efficient than uranium fuel, besides production of uranium 233 is quite complicated and upon chemical refining produces a lot of radioactive waste. Please follow the link in the description to read more about it. So, how could such an element as thorium end up being useless rare earth production waste and not be used in the industry? The Chinese manufacturers are going to great lengths to find some applications for it, because the process of disposal of radioactive Thorium oxide is quite costly. We’ll see what happens in the future but as for now thorium is a metal that no one needs. and also for the provided tourim sample for the experiments I will thank the company novaelements. I'll put a link to their site in the video description If you liked this video don't forget to give it a thumbs up and also support channel on patreon and Also thankful to all of my patrons who have supported the production of science videos on this channel
