The danger from Uranium is from inhalation. Ingestion is also a concern, but elimination is efficient.
Your skin can, and will, absorb most alpha radiation, which is just ionized helium if you will recall.
The problem with ingesting radioactive material is that you bypass the protection afforded by your skin and you also place the source of the radiation in your body, so it will continue to decay inside of you until it is eliminated.
I would not recommend ingesting any of the glass, but serving off of it would be fine, as would using it in the microwave (the microwave energy is presumably not tuned to a wavelength that will vibrate or rotate [good lord, imagine how long the lambda’d be on that puppy] the doped silicate lattice)
So I’m wondering, how many people here think that drinking a Coca-Cola out of a U-glass is more harmful than flying from Boston to New Orleans?
I would actually call the radioactive Fiesta Ware orange. My grandmother had some of it. I took a nuclear science class in high school, and we borrowed a bowl to measure. It was hot enough that it was technically supposed to be stored in a lead container according to our guidelines, though I don’t think the incidental exposure from it was really dangerous. It’s not like you’re going to wear the bowl on your head all day, and it’s primarily an alpha emitter anyway, as observed. Yeah, I ate cereal out of the damned things at my grandmother’s house as a kid.
As to why uranium in depression glass? Well, it’s pretty. And in the 1930s, nobody knew much about radiation hazards. It was also cheap to make, and in an era where a lot of people were struggling economically, it was a very attractive inducement for business promotions.
