Yeah, it’ll mostly be alpha sources, which are nearly harmless unless they get inside of you somehow. Then, alpha sources are the worst form of radiation.
That is very cool indeed 
No can do.
I just dropped $1k on car repairs, & I’m gonna replace the Little Red Jellybean next year.
So, economize.
In my first week at university, at my first physics lab, at the first hour of the school day, we turned up and found the door open. We wandered in and settled at the benches. There was a small metal object on the otherwise empty bench: I picked it up and looked inside. I didn’t see anything.
Soon after, a lab demonstrator came in, introduced himself, and handed out lab excercise documentation. Which contained radiation safety instruction and told me that the small metel object contained an Alpha Radiation source which was basically pretty harmless except to the eyes, because the radiation was blocked by the skin.
Still stands as an example of radiation safety incompetance.
I visited the Trinity Site a few weeks ago. There were several groups selling Trinitite along the road as we drove up. I assume those are legal, as neither the Army nor other officials were challenging their business.
I was surprised how easy it was to find Trinitite around the site.
Interesting. I’ve never been but want to go.
I’d have assumed it had mostly been scavenged up years ago by souvenir hunting visitors & locals intending to sell it to souvenir hunting visitors. And that the authorities would’ve prohibited scavenging only after 99% was gone.
I believe the location was classified for a number of years, maybe into the 1960s, and that visits onto the actual site are restricted to a few times a year. Not completely sure how true/still true that might be. But yeah, it would be a definite stop if I am ever in that area.
The remaining glass and trinitite was bulldozed away and buried in the late 1950s, and it was made illegal to take any more from the site. That’s why it’s rare and why fakes are not unknown.
Oh wow, yes what could possibly have gone wrong…
That reminds me of the story told by one of the people on site of the Chernobyl accident in the book ‘Ablaze’ by Piers Paul Reid, I can’t recall if he was a worker or a fireman but he told how he and his colleague got right next to the exposed core. His colleague looked over the lip and directly into it, asked what he could see he could only say that it was beautiful. The first person went to take a look but his colleague wouldn’t let him, pushing him back and away from the edge, naturally he was pretty angry and annoyed at this.
However the second man had received a massive and fatal dose of radiation from the short time he spent looking at the core, by refusing to let him do the same he had literally saved his life.
For some reason that story has always stuck with me.
A fictional aside, but Greg Benford’s novel Artifact deals with a singularity trapped in stone and found by some ancient peoples (not Egyptian… maybe Akkadian?) The stone has an amber horn on it so the king can look into the blazing heart of things and be entertained.
When found, the king’s skeleton has massive bone rot around the eye sockets from radiation exposure and cancer…
I have no opinion, but clearly there’s a mismatch here.
Sorry LSLGuy, just now revisited the thread.
It’s true that they do not allow Trinitite to be removed (I did not take any). According to the guides it’s OK to pick it up and photograph it, just put back where you found it.
There were lots of small green Trinitite samples (crystals?) around the site, particularly near the fences. It only took a few minutes to find them, but I had to get down on my knees and paw through the grass. This was probably distasteful to many due to the substantial population of really large ants. They were everywhere.
Also, (to Amateur Barbarian) they only open the site twice a year.
Students, to your feet.
Everyone, look to your left.
Now look to your right.
By the end of this class, one of those people will have died of radiation poisoning.
No, false. No blue flash from the corium. The people who got near the corium first did receive eye injuries from short exposures, eg 30 seconds. It was actually difficult to remain near the corium without feeling sick, those who only just started to feel sick survived, some of those got cancer or leukemia /bone marrow disorder, though and die from that… and a few workers ignored the feelings of burning and sickness until they collapsed - if you collapse then you were certainly dying.
The one who was exposed to the blue flash died. But he was in the collapsed category anyway.
Its been a very long time since I read the book so I may be mis-remembering the details, but I’m certain there was a passage like that, where one person prevented the other looking in and saved his life. If I can find it again I’ll check to see.
This year there was a table with an awning just outside the inner fence, where there were various radioactive items on display, along with counters. You could bring a piece of possible Trinitite that you found to them and they’d check it for you. If it was Trinitite, it got put into a plastic bag with other pieces and they kept it.
I found many small (1/4" to 3/8") pieces on the ground overy by the no-longer-useful protective covering of the remaining non-bulldozed area. (The Trinitite under there would no longer be visible even if they opened the viewing panels, due to dust and other debris collected over the years).
The outside Trinitite vendors are out in force on those open house days. They’re on both sides of the road at the Stallion Gate as well as others for several miles up and down 380. I obtained a pair of nice specimens from a vendor this year - one with copper inclusions and another that was very light green with a frothy whiteish surface. Both were probably from very close to the detonation. Due to the cost of testing, the vendor only had a gamma spectroscopy report per (largish) box of specimens, not per-specimen tests, so I can’t confirm that.