NORM is an acronym for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material and it covers, well, all radioactive material that occurs is nature. Some of the main elements that make up NORM are Uranium Thorium and Radium. Traces of these elements can be found pretty much everywhere but sometimes their accumulation can result in radioactive contamination of materials […]
Introduction Today I want to show you an item that you can find in a hardware store and it is radioactive. Let’s take a closer look at the thoriated Tungsten electrodes! Main information There are three types of thoriated Tungsten electrodes with the only difference being the amount of Thorium in them. Yellow ones contain […]
Today we will take a closer look at a radioactive, soviet switch, the BH-45M! The production of BH-45M switches started in 1945 and continues till this day, this being said, not all of those switches are radioactive. Units produced until 1965 used radium paint but in later models, radium paint was replaced by a nonradioactive […]
Today we will explore the radioactivity and uses of Caesium 137! Caesium is probably best known for its high reactivity and low melting point of only 28.5°C and it was first discovered in 1860 by two German scientists, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff. It has atomic number of 55 and has only one natural isotope, Caesium 133 […]
Cobalt 60 is a radioactive isotope of Cobalt and it is produced by neutron activation of stable Cobalt 59 in nuclear reactors. Since it has a short half-life of only 5.3 years, it does not occur in nature and all samples that exist are synthetic. A single gram of Co-60 has an activity of 44TBq […]
History On July 16th, 1945 the United States tested its first nuclear weapon at the Trinity test site located in the Nevada desert, New Mexico. The bomb tested there was called the Gadget and it was a prototype of a Plutonium implosion-type bomb, similar to the one which was dropped on Nagasaki (Fat-Man). When the […]
Uranium and Thorium along with Potassium are the most common, naturally occurring radioactive isotopes but there are also many other, lesser-known ones. One of them is Lutetium, which will be today’s main topic. Lutetium is the last element in the Lanthanide series and it has been discovered in 1907 by French scientist Georges Urbain. Today […]
Introduction Small amounts of radioactive isotopes are often used in common household items. A good example of that would be 241Am in smoke alarms or 226Ra in watches but today, I want to focus on tubes (valves) and other less common electrical components containing radioactive isotopes! TG-36 Spark Gap Tube Isotope: 137Cs Activity originally: <1 […]
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 […]
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 […]