Fiestaware (and Trinitite!): Uranium in the Cupboard

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  • Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
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    Fiestware is a line of brightly-coloured dinnerware introduced by the Homer Laughlin China Company of Newell, West Virginia, in 1936. Of the six colours in the original series, the most popular by far was red-orange, whose glaze contained up to 14% Uranium Oxide by weight, making these pieces detectably radioactive to this day. Indeed, the main industrial uses of Uranium prior to the 1940s was as a colouring agent in glass and ceramics.
    Trinitite is desert sand which was melted into glass by the world's first nuclear explosion, the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945 near Alamagordo, New Mexico. Distinctively bottle-green in colour, Trinitite contains a number of radioisotopes including Plutonium from the bomb core, fission products from the chain reaction, and activation products produced by the neutron bombardment of the bomb casing, explosives, and shot tower.

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