The item shown bellow is a tritium-containing radiolumonescent key chain. It’s basically a small glass vial containing radioactive tritium gas and coated with a phosphorescent compound and placed in a clear plastic case. Tritium is a weak beta emitter with a half life of 12.3 years. Because the beta particles are very low in energy, they are entirely blocked by the glass and are not detectable on the surface of the key chain. The beta particles ionize the phosphorescent compound and produce a steady glow, most often in green (the brightest and most visible color) but also available in other colors. Because of the 12.3 year half life of tritium, these key chains can be used for several years before there’s any noticeable reduction in brightness.

They’re really great little items and the perfect gift for just about any occasion. For one thing, they’re an interesting conversation piece and a very good example of a practical application of radioactivity. They demonstrate that you can indeed keep something radioactive in our pocket and be quite safe and they’re very eye-catching.
They also have quite a bit of practical value. Finding your keys in the dark is very easy with one of these key chains. In fact, it’s so easy that if you happen to misplace your keys, the easiest way to find them is to turn off the lights. When entering your home or starting your car in complete darkness, the glowing key chain provides just enough light to easily select the correct key and use it without fumbling. If you happen to drop the keys on the dark floor of your car, you can find them very quickly and without effort. You can even see the glow of the keys if they are under a seat or somehow otherwise obscured from direct view. You can get different colors and use them to mark different key chains, making it very easy to grab the correct one, even in complete darkness.
I’ve had these key chains before (and broken a couple by mistake). I can attest to just how useful they are. There’s also no other way of getting this same value without using radioactive material. An electrically illuminated key chain could not provide such continuous periods of glow without the batteries quickly running out. Standard phosphorescent glowing items are limited to a few hours of illumination and must be exposed to light first in order to glow, making them useless for something like a key chain, which is often kept in one’s pocket.
There’s only one problem with these amazing little glowing key chains: nobody in the US sells them, at least not directly. Technically, these are not approved for sale or ownership in the United States, although I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for owning one. Many people do own them and talk about them openly online and elsewhere. It might just be one of those things that hasn’t shown up on the radar of a bureaucrat who was asinine enough to bother to do something about it.
Still, there are stories about their thugs stopping sales of these key chains on sites like eBay. It seems that these days most of those sold on eBay are coming from sellers who are not located within the United States. Exactly how much trouble you could potentially get in for these remains unclear, but it appears to be a case of selective enforcement. (So if you have one, don’t ever leave the federal government looking for an excuse to call you a terrorist.)
Yet while the government may tolerate people owning them, you can’t buy them from any major retailer. They can be purchased on the “grey market,” imported in relatively small batches or sold over the internet. They can be bought from foreign retailers, like those in the UK, who will generally ship to the US without problem. The best place to buy them, however, tends to be eBay, where numerous sellers will sell to US customers.
That, however, was not good enough for me. I know a great product when I see one and these things are inexpensive, extremely useful and very easy to sell. I had bought one and people were constantly asking me about it and where to get one. I wanted to sell these, and not just by keeping it on the down-low, selling them on auction websites or to friends. I wanted to really sell them, importing them wholesale and selling them openly and in quantity.
I also didn’t want even the slight potential to have the NRC knocking at my door, which does occasionally happen when someone tries to sell them in the US. One would think that the government has better things to do, but of course, they don’t.
I thought it would be easy to do. After all, these things are very readily available in other countries, and by “other countries,” I don’t mean just Russia, Zimbabwe and Cuba. They can be bought in the UK. They are brought into the US all the time. They’re also perfectly safe. Of course, I assumed wrong, but this was a few years ago, long before I had gained a full understanding of the bureaucracy that is the NRC.
I e-mailed, called and faxed the NRC several times about this matter. I cannot even begin to explain how difficult they were. First, nobody at the agency seemed to understand what I wanted to do or what the devices were for. They told me that if I wanted to start the process of getting a consumer product containing radioactive material approved, I could get some paperwork to start the ball rolling, but it would be several thousand dollars just to begin and would take more than a year. I told them I believed the items qualified as being license-exempt, since other items of comparable function and contents, such as illuminated watches are. They didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.
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