Bradley said:

Are those radioactive rocks dangerous? I held onto one for several minutes. I know it is radioactive because it registers on a radiation monitor — high up close but not at all about two to three feet away. It didn’t crumble at all or flake. Are those mineral deposits okay then?

Yes they’re fine. I’d recommend not eating them. I mean, not just the uranium, but you’ll likely crack your teeth and they won’t be much good coming out the other end either. If you don’t have hemeriods, I’d expect you could get them that way. So yeah, don’t eat them and you’ll be fine.

        Ed Bassett said:

I would like to place a seamless text link of a couple of words within an existing sentence on a sub-page of your website?

Pretty disgusting form of advertising.

Thanks I look Forward to Hearing From You-

Ed Bassett

It took a good ten years before we looked back and realized that there was no evidence of anything and that at the same time that the medical conditions allegedly associated with it were all unrelated and not even consistent.

Tell that to Dow and the massive loss. CEO’s lost a lot of money, and that’s what made people feel like they had gotten the big bad guy. Thousands of low level workers lost their jobs and retirement savings too. A lot of lawyers made off good. Surely they won’t pay that back.

The moral of the story should be to let the safety experts and the experienced people deal with these issues and keep them out of the hands of the politicians and the panic-inducing media

        Burya Rubenstein said:

Would a uranium foil hat work better than tinfoil (or aluminum foil) at blocking the Evil Mind Control Rays?

Er… well it might also strain your neck pretty badly unless the foil was extremely thin.

        drbuzz0 said:

Yeah, there is, but it’s a bit desceptive because it never becomes all that radioactive and never more than it started out as before it was processed.

In uranium ore, the majority of the radioacivity comes not from the uranium itself but from the daughter products of the decay of uranium.

Depleted uranium would not contain these because it has been refined and the daughter products like radium-226, lead-210, bismuth-214, polonium-210 etc have been seperated out leaving the uranium much less radioactive than the ore it came from.

It will take some time for the depleted uranium to decay enough to produce signifficant amounts of these daughter products. I’m not sure how long and it’s complicated by the fact that radon is one of the daughters and radon is a gas, so the physical form of the depleted uranium comes into play because that can affect whether the radon outgasses or not.

The term is fractional equilibrium – the point at which the daughters and the original material reach equilibrium so that it is no longer creating a net increase in daughter products.

In uranium, it decays so slowly it would be at least hundreds if not thousands of years.

This is pretty deceptive though, because it never actually gets all that radioactive. Eventually it basically reverts back to the amount of radioactivity that high grade ore has – minus the U-235 and daughter products that is.

Try this link:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/rup.html#UF6DEP

There are a number of diagrams with fairly good explanations that show how the radioactivity increase as the daughter products build up. There is also a lot of other good info about uranium. I use the site when training new employees and explain why the “evil” DU we work with is probably less likely to hurt you than the Big Mac you had for lunch. Not that I have any problems with Big Macs, although I prefer Wendy’s.