Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / February 2008

Being shot by the FBI, Home Security, ATF.

Is it processed or still a rock?

a fair amount.  They give off gamma rays, Beta and Alpha partials.

Do not inhale any dust, as you would then have radioactive partials inside
you, and they do not come out.
Lung cancer later on.

Best to keep it in a sealed baggie inside a closed paint can.
The gamma rays will still come out easy.
you may want to put the paint can inside some lead as well if your going to
keep it around the house, and keep it labeled as such.

The dust is the problem

Beta- and gamma-radiation exposure from decay daughters.  Natural
uranium ore is a modest radiation hazard.  Ingested uranium is a heavy
metal poison (kidneys).

Jackbooted State compassion takes a very dim view of citizens
possessing uranium with natural isotopic content.

  Don't sleep with it.

In Victorian times you used to have a bath with it.

Hardy

You are in danger of anxiety.

The food you eat (carbohydrates, fats, proteins, roughage) contains
carbon that includes a trace (about 1 part in a billion) of
radioactive carbon-14, courtesy of cosmic rays.  Because your cells
naturally incorporate this carbon into proteins, fatty membranes, DNA,
RNA, etc. it acts at a much closer range than other radioisotopes.  In
particular, since 1 ppb of the carbon *IN YOUR DNA* is radioactive,
and when it decays there is a 100% chance of damage (read "mutation")
to your DNA, carbon-14 is far more destructive to your DNA than any
other random radioactivity.

Be sensible.  NORMs (naturally occurring radioactive materials) are
"mostly harmless" (with apologies to the late Douglas Adams) if you
limit your absorbed dose of radioactivity.  Just don't have your
dentures enameled with yellow cake.  Having a piece of uranium ore
knocking about your house is not likely to give you any more
radioactivity than moving to the High Plains (elevation 3600 feet).

Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA

Wear gloves, and don't keep it near your balls/ovaries if you are fertile.

It might be a good idea to spray it with some sort of plastic, as
ingested uranium is far more dangerous than uranium outside the skin. No
more is needed.

Even that much is being somewhat over-protective, but don't play with it
unnecessarily.

-- Peter Fairbrother

As others have already advised you, simply keep it in a sealed plastic
bag so that abraded radioactive particles will not stick to your skin
or be accidently inhaled or ingested. Also, it would be a good idea
not to carry the specimen around in your pocket. :-)

Otherwise radioactive minerals require no additional protection
because the radiation levels that they emit are relatively weak and
harmless. Their major use today is checking on the sensitivity of you
Geiger Counter.

To give you a comparison.  I restore old surplus CD geiger counters
and one evening when I was working on one it suddenly it went off-
scale for no obvious reason. As it turned out, my adult daughter had
just had a medical test involving the diagnostic injection of a
radioactive isotope. She was standing outside of the door to my
workshop about 6-feet away, and the geiger counter that I was working
on went off scale. She was unbelivably radioactive.  Next day we
repeated the same test, and detected no residual radiation. (Very
short half-lived isotopes)

So my advise to you would be to keep your uranium speciment in a
closed zip-lock platic bag, and not to handle photographic films on
the day that you have a liver scan performed.

Harry C.