This is NOT Uranium Glass!

Items generating “Negative Ions” are no strangers to this channel. In fact, my first proper video was on one of them! Today we take a closer look at another pendant but this one is pretty special!

Unlike the old pendant, this one is made out of green glass which also glows under black light and is radioactive so my first assumption was that it must be uranium glass.

Uranium glass (aka vaseline glass) was produced mainly during the age of atomic madness however because of the nuclear weapons, people got scared of radiation and as a result, they stopped buying products containing uranium. Today, Uranium glass can be mainly found in antique shops but also in the Czech Republic because it is one of the very few countries producing Uranium glass!

Uranium glass under the black light

Anyhow, back to the pendant. My first guess was that it was made out of Uranium glass but just to be sure, I did gamma spectroscopy of it. To my surprise, gamma spectroscopy revealed that the pendant did not contain uranium but Thorium meaning that this Thorium glass! When compared to Uranium glass, Thorium glass looks a little bit darker and it doesn’t glow so brightly under black light. It is also much more radioactive (U-Glass X CPM, Th-Glass 3 000 CPM)

Mysterious Green Glass Pendant Gamma Spectrum.

After making a video on my first negatrive ion pendant, many people pointed out to me that the authenticity card is also radioactive but sadly I could not detect anything. Who knows, maybe they are running out of Thorium?

If you got any suggestions for future post, feel free to post them in the comments section below!

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Bismuth – An element you didn’t know was radioactive!

Today we will take a closer look at an element that you most probably did not know was radioactive, Bismuth.

Bismuth was first discovered in 1753 and is probably most famous for its very characteristic crystal structure and absolutely stunning colours. In nature, it has only one isotope, 209Bi, which is also one of the primordial elements.

Primordial elements are elements that have existed in their current form before the Earth was formed. As of right now, there are 252 stable and 34 radioactive primordial isotopes.

Bismuth crystal

From the moment of its discovery, scientists believed that Bismuth was a stable element but in 2003, it was found out that Bismuth 209 undergoes alpha decay into Thallium 205 with a half-life of 2.01×1019 years which is over 1 billion times the age of the universe! The reason why Bismuth’s radioactivity was discovered so late is because of its very low activity, 3 Bq/1000kg, making it extremely hard to detect. Due to an extremely long half-life and very low activity, Bismuth is often treated as a non-radioactive element.

Today, Bismuth is mainly used in the production of cosmetics and medicine so theoretically, every time you apply makeup, you put radioactive material on your face!