Someone told me that in a recent (past year or so) “Readers Digest” a story was printed relating a person who bought a bunch of clocks (containing some type of material) and “did something” with that “material” that caused some type of radioactive contamination.
Does any of this ring a bell?
I’m afraid not, Mjollnir. But most glow-in-the-dark stuff contains either radium (which is mildly radioactive) or phosphates (which are not).
I read that story. Some twerp kid concocted a radioactive device. And I do believe he obtained the radioactive material from an old brand of watch or clock, but I can’t remember the details nor the exact date of the mag. I don’t know if RD has a web-site, but you may want to try searching it and see if they have any archives.
It was actually in Harper’s…
“The Radioactive Boy Scout: When a Teenager Attempts to Build a Breeder Reactor”, by Ken Silverstein. Harper’s Magazine, November 1998, p. 59
It’s one of those things where a little bit of knowledge becomes can be very very dangerous
Here’s the url
http://www.readersdigest.com/rdmagazine/specfeat/archives/taleoftheradioactiveboyscout.htm
Kurt Vonnegut is fond of telling the story of how one of these early glow-in-dark clock companies operated, one manager told the group of 20 women that licking the end of the paintbrushes that they were using to paint the numbers in was a good idea. They all later died of radiation posioning.
This kid is going to get the Nobel prize someday.
They did use radium on the dials of clocks and watches. Bt radium isn’t “mildly” radioactive.I used to think so, too. I recommend Claudia Clark’s book “Radium Girls” (UNC Press, 1997). Clark tells the story of the women who painted the lumnous dials on clocks and watches in the 1920s. The story has been told before, but not in as much detail. Ms. Clark also manages to avoid sensationalism and pathos. But there’s a lot that can get you worked up. She tells, for instance, how they could expose film by wrapping it around the legs of the women. The radium in their bones was supposed to have caused the exposure. If so, that means that the radioactive paint was emitting gamma radiation, since alpha and beta rays should have been stopped by the skin. (See, for instance, p. 197)
Scarier still, the practice did not cease in the 1920s. Despite the adverse publicity of the case, radium paint continued to be used on clocks and watches and on aircraft instrument dials. It was heavily used in WWII. Nor did it stop there. Luminous Processes operated a plant in Athens, Georgia until 1978. “We slapped radium around like cake frosting,” recalled one worker. Workers reported that they hadn’t been told the daners of what they were wrking wth. The sites of the luminous dial companies in New Jersey, Connecticut,Illinois, and Georgia were highly radioactive and finally cleaned up with Superfund money.
A quick Internet search shows antiques ealers still selling radium dial clocks and watches. There’s no regulation against buying and selling these. But be aware that the aging paint can flake off. Removing a clock glass cover or a watch crystal can release a dangerous cloud of flaked paint.
Please tell me this was a UL. Please?
In addition to watches, etc., orange FiestaWare is also radioactive from the uranium that was used in the colored glaze.
Oh, please, Cal. Get real!
Democritus said
Or maybe the Cher-Nobel prize:D
No, that was not an urban legend. We can all thank God that that kid realized the dangers himself, and turned himself in. What he actually had, as of when he turned himself in, was a primitive breeder reactor. Any idea what we’d do if an Iraqi made one of those?
Glow-in-the-dark clock dials weren’t his only source, either. He also got americium from smoke detectors and thorium from propane lantern mantles. It scares me, that nobody noticed the pattern behind his “collections”.
I know a clocksmith who hands shook when he was in his 70s. He said it was from the radium that he was in contact with all the time on watches when he was younger.
Back when I was I kid, I used to read the Alfred Hitchcock collections. One short story used this “licking the brush-radiation clock” legend as the starting point of one story. But I never thought it was based on fact. (Was it?)
Truth is stranger than fiction, I guess. Or at least equally as strange. I remember in Bloom County, Oliver Wendall Jones once made a nuclear bomb for show-and-tell by scraping the glow-in-the-dark material off watch faces. I guess we should be glad that it took almost a whole decade for this feat to be duplicated by a real person.
Parts of this story sound pretty bogus to me. Aluminum-27 (the only kind found in aluminum foil, or in nature, for that matter) would, if its nucleus were bombarded with alphas, generate phosphorus-31, a stable isotope. I’d have to see some data to support an Al27(a,n)P30 reaction; the only way that one can get P30 that I known of is by bombarding silicon-30 with high-energy protons.
Am-241 is fissionable in itself, but spontaneous fission has a probability on the close order of 4E-10%. I’d have to get a more expert opinion on its use as a fissionable material and as a radiation source.
Radium-226 has both a weaker decay energy and a longer half-life than Am241; it doesn’t sound like the way to go to produce a better alpha gun to me. Ra226 is not, of course, fissionable.
Be9(a,n)C12 is a well-known, well-documented, and useful reaction, but I question how effective using either Am241 or Ra226 as an alpha source would be. Alphas are darned heavy, and, what is more, carry a charge +2; electrostatic repulsion by the beryllium nucleus would be considerable.
I’ll see if I can get some more expert commentary on this story, but it seems most improbable.