The Atomic Energy Lab Kit for Kids That Came with Actual Radioactive Materials

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/gilbert-u-238-atomic-energy-lab-kit-for-kids/

by jnord • 3 years ago

34 15 3 years ago

tombert2• 3 years ago

I am a complete ignoramus in regards anything involving radioactivity, so forgive a bit of a silly question: how dangerous was this kit for kids realistically? If they never broke any of the seals, would this have been relatively safe?

dorwi• 3 years ago

"It described the likely radiation exposure as “minimal, about the equivalent to a day’s UV exposure from the sun”, provided that the radioactive samples were not removed from their containers, in compliance with the warnings in the kit instructions."

Someone• 3 years ago

“about the equivalent to a day’s UV exposure from the sun” doesn’t say anything.

If it’s that every day, it’s not _that_ safe.

If, on top of that, it’s what you receive from the sun in a day, every day, and concentrated on a few cm² of skin area, it’s downright dangerous.

I would guess they mean the same amount of radiation per second and per cm² as that of the sun on a sunny day, while you’re playing with it. I guess that’s fine, as long as you don’t play with it for hours every day (even more so if you do the playing inside a house, as that cuts out the sun’s UV quite a bit)

yreg• 3 years ago

The professional journal IEEE Spectrum published a more-detailed review in 2020, discussing the kit in the context of the history of science education kits and safety concerns.
It described the likely radiation exposure as “minimal, about the equivalent to a day’s UV exposure from the sun”, provided that the radioactive samples were not removed from their containers, in compliance with the warnings in the kit instructions.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fun-and-uranium-for-the-whole-fami...

ClassyJacket• 3 years ago

As an Australian, a day's UV exposure from the sun sounds terrifying

gymbeaux2• 3 years ago

The article mentions a 2020 paper from IEEE that suggests the radiation exposure from playing with the kit would amount to around 1 day’s worth of UV exposure, so it appears the kit was pretty safe. Of course if a child were to break open a container and say eat the radioactive material, or inhale any dust from it, the radiation exposure would be far greater. Enough to cause cancer in older age? I’m not sure.

tombert2• 3 years ago

Ah, you're right. I must have missed that when I was skimming the article...thanks!

eternityforest• 3 years ago

Kids break things a lot. And don't wash their hands as much as they maybe should. I'm glad this is banned.

TomMasz• 3 years ago

You truly know you've become an adult when at least one of the things you played with as a kid are now banned from sale. This is a perfect example.

perihelions• 3 years ago

Large parts of this SEO spam (?) are straight plagiarized from Wikipedia. E.g., they pasted the entire ~450 word #Description section verbatim (apparently by hand – judging from the paragraph-break errors introduced at several points).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_La...

More HN comments are here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769031 ("Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory (wikipedia.org)", 32 comments)

Also, here's a bit of discussion about the spam domain, from 7 months ago:

- "I work in advertising. What’s going on with this website? This appears to be a very standard ad arbitrage website, as you often see promoted via Native ads. The newsletter has only 5k subs, but it’s possible this is sufficient to farm out —- in effect —- genuine HN submissions via various real users. But you don’t normally see websites like this making the front page of HN regularly, and this website has been on the front page a dozen+ times. It’s probably genuine, but it’s worth looking into whether or not there’s upvote bots involved… just a note for Dang. I love the content too so perhaps real. But I suspect someone is running this site and promoting it here as a business (people seem to like it though, and the ads are bearable)."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33148498

Kon-Peki• 3 years ago

This all seems so silly and quaint, but this past weekend the family and I went to the open house at Argonne National Laboratory. They had big signs saying that bringing sources of radiation onto the grounds was prohibited, and they were checking every single car - the line to get in was probably half a mile long by the time we left!

retrac• 3 years ago

Well, radiation sources are a little more common than one might think, even today. I have half a dozen in my home -- smoke detectors, tritium lights.

That may be in things people don't even expect. Objects made out of uranium glass may set off a Geiger counter. A lot of watches have tritium dials, and older ones have radium dials (a serious risk, unlike tritium). Quite a few people have something radioactive in their jewellery or keepsake box somewhere.

A relative gave me his old US Army compass, and one day while re-examining it I noticed the marking on the back: https://i.imgur.com/CLT98kI.jpg 130 millicuries of tritium at manufacture. And sure enough, the dial is still very faintly lit some decades later (tritium half-life is about 12 years), though it takes total darkness to see it at this point.

Of course any ionizing radiation outside of the tritium-containing glass means something has gone terribly wrong. But when your experiments, and security precautions, are all sensitive to any sort of radiation, I can imagine wanting to keep it off-site.

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

My grocery bag contains 'radioactive materials' in the form of that bunch of bananas. Does this clickbait have any merit?

The Atomic Energy Lab Kit for Kids That Came with Actual Radioactive Materials

Related Stories