deltawars
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Storing radioactive and hazardous elements in a bed room?
I have a element collection and I have the following radioactive elements, Tritium glow stick, Americium pellet, Radium watch hands, thorium lantern
mantle, uranium beads, uranium glazed pottery and thoriated rods.
I keep them in a spare room and all the samples are stored in plastic test tubes behind a 5mm thick cardboard and 3mm thick lead shield that I made.
when measuring with my alpha beta and gamma Geiger counter I get an average of 40CPM directly in front the shield and 13cm away from the shield I get
about 20cpm which is normal background radiation.
I also have elements like mercury which i store in a glass ampoule in a plastic test tube.
Question:
I'm thinking about getting a wooden periodic table mounted on my wall to display my element collection in my bedroom, do you guys think it is very
hazardous to my health and I should NOT do this or do you think it's fine?
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Metacelsus
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It will probably be fine as long as the samples are completely sealed and on the other side of the room from your bed. Most of the radiation
will be alpha particles (except from the tritium). The inverse square law is also on your side. However, I would be more worried about you being
exposed to particles of radioactive materials.
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careysub
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The major hazard here is the emission of radon from radium, natural uranium samples (if any), and samples of thorium that are several years old. You
want to keep the radon bottled up.
The major risk with radon is not really the radon itself, it is the fact that it quickly decays into other radioactive nuclides that stick to dust
particles and get trapped in your lungs.
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elementcollector1
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I remember when I slept next to my chemicals. Those were good times.
Elements Collected:52/87
Latest Acquired: Cl
Next in Line: Nd
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Texium
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I have all of my chemicals in the garage other than my element collection. I don't have anything radioactive though. The most dangerous element that I
have is bromine.
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Metacelsus
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Oh yeah, I forgot about radon. That will be hard to contain; you'd have to seal the samples in ampoules. Tritium would still be fine, though.
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careysub
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A good seal should suffice.
Radon has a half life of a few days (we are talking about more than one isotope, but they are similar) so you get a steady state concentration after a
week or so.
Then the only hazard is how fast this fixed radon concentration can leak past the seal.
There will be some leakage, but it will be orders of magnitude less than the rate of emission from the specimens, and so will effectively eliminate
risk.
BTW - electrostatic precipitators are effective in mitigating radon risk. They are different types with different precipitation geometries. They
really do remove the smoke-sized radioactive particles that are the source of the danger.
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deltawars
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Thanks for the reply guys, I guess it's fine as long as everything is properly sealed, I'm going to practice sealing ampoules.
I never looked at radium's decay chain luckily when I first bought it a few months ago I sealed it with Teflon tape and stuck it in another container.
The fact that you can breath in radon which in a few days will turn into polonium and stay with you the rest of your life freaks me out.
Do you think it will be fine if I seal the radium in a glass ampoule and a chamber made from a acrylic tube and 2 round steel plated on either end, I
can also use multiple glass ampoules lol?
[Edited on 4-11-2014 by deltawars]
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MrHomeScientist
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Surprisingly this sounds a lot like the 'radiophobia' that careysub was trying to put to rest in the Radiochemistry sub-forum. In my opinion, the
items you have are all commercial products that people have been living around and handling for many years with little incident, so I wouldn't worry.
I wouldn't eat off of a uranium-glazed plate, but handling these things is no big deal. Alpha particles are stopped by the glass of the vial your
sample is stored in, betas are stopped by aluminum foil, and gammas need some lead sheeting. If you are measuring some activity on the other side of
your shield, add another layer of lead. Make sure your display is securely positioned on a sturdy table in case it's accidentally bumped. You don't
want mercury or bromine vials toppling off and breaking!
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careysub
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Certainly the hazards of a typical element collection is not large, and it would statistically impossible detect any harm from radiation exposure from
such a collection.
I define "radiophobia" as having an inconsistent (exaggerated) attitude or behavior toward the risks of radiation vs other similar risks. A common
cause of this inconsistency is a misperception of the level of risk. I argue for a consistent evidence-based attitude toward managing the risk of
radiation.
Taking sensible safety precautions to minimize risk is not radiophobia however.
The largest potentially avoidable risk to the U.S. population from radiation is the effects of radon exposure accounting for an estimated 17,000
excess deaths annually, more than double that of all other avoidable radiation sources combined.
It would take a good chunk of natural uranium ore to single-handedly bring a house interior up to the EPA action level of 4 pCi/L, for a modern tight
energy efficient house 100 microCuries of uranium content (300 g) would do it. If it were confined to just one room of the house though (say 125 sq ft
vs 2500) then 5 microcuries (15 g) could do it. A radium clock dial might have a microcurie by itself. (But the EPA action level is rather high, you
would really want it to be substantially lower.)
So you can see that under certain circumstances a significant radon hazard (significant compared to health hazards generally) is possible, mostly if
you have a good chunk of rich ore.
Keeping you samples in a sealed container just makes for sensible practice - by doing so not only are you eliminating any respiratory hazard, but you
are controlling the (relatively unimportant) direct emissions as well (beta goes to zero, gamma is attenuated), and it protects the samples too.
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MrHomeScientist
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Fair enough!
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