Best Tools I Ever Bought
- Thread starter Canuk
- Start date
Wingsonmyheels
Dirt Disciple
I sincerely hope you haven’t put your balls on it either.I picked up a protective box 6mil thick ally, lead lined from the US air force. It was clearly marked on the outside 'Caution, Radioactive Material Inside'. I've not yet had the balls to put a Geiger counter on it
I did let nextdoors cat sit on it. But it does piss on my herb garden, so fair play
bikeworkshop
Old School Grand Master
A cautionary tale of stolen radioactive material:I picked up a protective box 6mil thick ally, lead lined from the US air force. It was clearly marked on the outside 'Caution, Radioactive Material Inside'. I've not yet had the balls to put a Geiger counter on it
I've still got it, kinda hope it previously contained bomb parts!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident
I've had the box about 30 years, man and boy? But I did recently hear an awful story of an American couple who bought a 'fixer upper' in Carcassonne, South of France. Unbeknownst to them, during the war the house was used by a watchmaker to produce luminous dials for clocks, instrumentation for tanks and planes and field watches.
Of course to do this they used fairly radioactive isotopes in paint form, with no real inkling of the danger. All of the wartime family succumbed, no one really none the wiser, the jars of paint stored in a gloomy hard to get to cupboard, and sixty years later the Americans were soon diagnosed with pretty rare cancers. And of course died. Radioactivity is not good!
And now Rolls Royce wants to build 200 mini nuclear reactors in the UK in the cheap....
bikeworkshop
Old School Grand Master
jim haseltine
Senior Retro Guru
There was a nursery (plants, not the kindergarten sort) in the village where I used to live that branched out into selling military surplus tools in a tunnel greenhouse. Picked up some tools there which I still use some 50 years later.
Haha! Nah it's just a curio! I eat me carrots, I'll be fine! I can't imagine it would have housed any Gamma emitters (the most dangerous kind) probably alpha or beta emitters, with short half lives. You've got me paranoid now!Does it glow in the dark?
Do you glow in the dark?
Radium (Ra-226) or Promethium (Pm-147),n was used until the middle of the 90ties fur watch dials and avionics displays. Radium was (and still is) quite a fierce beta emitter with a half life of 12.3 years. But even full force on your wrist, you still only being irradiated with 1/100th of your yearly safe dose per year.
Although I'm always a bit suspicious of 'safe dose' when government officials say it.
Apparently those most at risk are people living in old stone built houses on top of inactive coal fields. Radioactive Radon gas is pretty awful stuff.
The instability of 222Rn, its most stable isotope, makes radon one of the rarest elements. Radon will be present on Earth for several billion more years despite its short half-life, because it is constantly being produced as a step in the decay chains of 238U and 232Th, both of which are abundant radioactive nuclides with half-lives of at least several billion years.
Radon gas is thought to be the #1 cause of lung cancer in the UK, owing to its abundance and prominence in previous coal mining areas, where it has been 'liberated' from safe rocks.
Still, not to worry. We'll all be burnt to a cinder in ten years time on account of El Trump and Musk's climate denial. Both of whom will likely be on a moon of Saturn by then, living it up in an inflatable megastructure till the last hurrah. B#stards every one.
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