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Intensely Radioactive Industrial Smoke Detector from the 1950's
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- Опубликовано: 11 дек 2021
- In this video I look at a Pryotronics F3 Smoke Detector that was bought off of eBay. It uses radium which is a million times more radioactive than uranium.
Visit uraniumstore.com if you are looking for uranium or other radioactive objects from the past.
#radiation #radioactive #radium
Drew: If you are going to do these kinds of things, strongly urge you to get yourself a dosimeter so you can monitor any dose you get yourself. I also would not take anything apart in your house, and when doing so, only on easily cleaned non-porous surfaces. The source you showed today gave you a dose of about 20 mrem an hour at one meter--it goes up exponentially as you get closer.
The way I think of it: your chances of getting cancer are already high, don't push it.
Lmao
If you dont't take proper safety precautions like lead apron etc, there won't be too many more videos on this channel !
Lemme do what he wants 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Agreed, but if he wore a dosimeter we wouldn't get to hear him say "very, very radioactive" a hundred more times, he would actually have to quantify how much he's received. And I thought I was nuts going to the local dental school to be practiced on by aspiring dental xray techs that kept zapping me over and over and over again about two dozen times until they finally satisfied their instructor with the images they had taken.
I read about the US Radium Corp and how some of their employees from the late 20's you can visit their graves with a Geiger and still detect the radiation from their bodies being exposed to the radium based paint.
One of the most famous photos of anyone negatively effected by Radium has to be Eben Byers, a consumer of "Radithor". He was a resident of Pittsburgh PA, and I happen to live about 20 mins from the sarcophagus he was buried in. I've been meaning to go up there with a Geiger counter and see what I can find.
@@seidoukan Can you detect the radiation through the lead coffin lining? I don't know a ton about radiation.
@@stephhhie17 Probably not
@@stephhhie17 Im assuming the answer is going to be no, but since its so close I might as well have look
@@seidoukan Wouldn't hurt! Tell us if it detects anything!
This actually gave me goose-bumps.
I pulled these things out of deconstruction jobs, and we were throwing them around like anything else.
If it makes you feel any better the Ra-226 Pyrotronics detectors are a lot less common than the Am-241 Pyrotronics detectors.
I believe the Am-241 version is much higher activity (60uCi if I remember correctly). They both use the pedestal source. I’d be a lot less concerned about the Am-241 because there’s much less gamma involved. How much gamma for a 60uCi Americium source I don’t know, quantum physics is whack.
Having alpha primary emission makes those Am-241 models a fair bit safer to be around.
Today when a house collapses with radioactive smoke detectors all the scrap will be searched until all detectors are accounted for…
I find this hard to believe.
@@RadioactiveDrew You would think so considering NZ and the AUS are apparently void of anything radioactive. You know apart from those Uranium mines. We came in to pull shit down. Most of the time we find things that we have no idea what they are.
@@RadioactiveDrew In Germany, radioactive materials are of course considered hazardous special waste. If a house burns down and not all smoke detectors can be recovered as per installation plan, the home owner will have to have all their demolition waste treated like hazardous material waste making this much more expensive. That‘s the regulation. What happens in real life is another story.
Good news: It protects you from fire
Bad news: It doesn't protect you from itself
Its been over 40 years, but I'm pretty sure that my elementary school had smoke detectors like the one you showed. It looks very familiar. I've known for a long time that residential smoke detectors used a small radioactive source, but didn't realize they also made "industrial strength" models that were much "hotter".
I would be a little surprised that they would use these in a school. They are very much industrial smoke detectors. The only other place I've ever seen these was when I was making the video of that nuclear power station being decommissioned. They had a bunch of them going down the hallway to the reactor building.
@@RadioactiveDrewAll I can say is that I had an immediate, "Hey! I've seen that before!" reaction. Perhaps other models were sold that had a similar appearance.
@@JohnDoe4321 they could've very well used them in some schools. I was just sharing where I have seen and heard of them being used.
@@RadioactiveDrew I had the same reaction but to an apartment my friend just moved into. I remember thinking it was a very vintage/interesting shape for a detector. We’ll see if it’s a similar model
There are also ones that use Americium 241 instead of Radium 226. They put out a lot less gamma radiation.
I'd recommend getting a surplus glovebox (from say a GSA auction). This would not only reduce your external radiation exposure when handling a device, far more importantly, it would dramatically decrease your risk of inhaling radioactive particulates (from decay daughters or broken-off pieces) and to some extent the radon. You should have been wearing an N100 mask when you did this. One final thing, you need to store something like this outside of a living space (say in a well-ventilated garage) because of the radon issue.
If the foil remains intact then the radium and all its decay products will be encapsulated, including radon.
Apart from the mask, those precautions, whilst “best practice”, are overkill for occasional careful examination of mechanically robust sources.
I doubt the radon stays in the foil. But everything else I agree with.
Nothing is breaking off of that foil at STP. Ppl hear radioactive and lose their minds.
@@anhedonianepiphany5588 Makes ya wonder how guns ever get built if you have to treat them as always loaded...
@@RadioactiveDrew If the radon didnt stay in the foil, it would be leaving a trail. Didnt see any indication of that.
I remember 30yrs ago working at the holiday Inn conference resort in Decatur IL. In the maintenance department and we were told to remove all the old exit signs that had these little glass tubes of radioactive material that glowed constantly and I remember one of the guys breaking the tunes open and smearing that crap onto a sheet of plywood and him thinking it was funny. I removed myself from that area very quickly. He definitely underestimated the dangers.
Those contain Tritium
@@mirskym yeah in gaseous form to be clear; it excites phosphors on the inside of the tube which is what the guy was smearing around. Interestingly one of the buildings I worked in at a major tech corporation (we moved) used to be a US Superfund site precisely because of their use of Tritium. It was an old Timex building and they were apparently making GTLS (Gaseous Tritium Light Sources). It had been thankfully remediated before the company ever took it over. You can look it up, Valley Green One in Cupertino, Ca.
I hate it when people smear gaseous vapors less dense than air all over my ply wood too. It makes me feel super duper unsafe as well. I always say say 'when I feel in an unsafe state, I must evacuate' You can never be to cautious, anything to feel like your safer right. Feelings matter, the mostest.
One teacher I had, when trying to describe dosage of radiation to middle-schoolers put it in a rough analogy: The intensity is how "bright the sun is, getting stronger as it is closer", the type of radioactivity is the "color of the light, which may go through some things and stop at others, and will give varying degrees of 'heating' the object", and finally likened the effect to "how much sunburn you get and if it will lead to 'skin cancer', depending on these variables". Not bad for the basics. Anything he might have missed?
The light analogy is pretty good but it mainly works for gamma radiation as that is a form of electromagnetic energy just like visible light but at a much higher frequency. Alpha and beta radiation are ejected particles from an unstable atom. So it doesn’t work too much for them but I think good enough for middle schoolers.
Drew: I worked at Crystal River Unit 3 for 25 years. B&W had sample bolts made of steel from other B&W reactors installed in the CR-3 core barrel. One outage I supported the B&W rep taking care of spent fuel transfer equipment. Once reactor operators transferred the fuel to the spent fuel pool and the core barrel was moved to the deep end of the spent fuel pool, I assisted in removing a Davis Bessie reactor sample bolt for shipment to B&W. My job was supporting operation of the underwater video equipment. I was there if we had any problems with the video electronics. We didn't have any problems so I was a standby observer.
Prior to starting work the HP's assigned surveyed the bolt area of core barrel with an underwater detector. As they moved the detector towards the sample we had a reading of 500 MR at 10 inches. The detector went off scale at 2 inches (10,000 R).
The sample was to test for Neutron embrittlement of the Davis Bessie reactor. I learned the most of the B&W reactors had samples from sister plants. This radiation level was after fuel removal.
The area where I was had a dose rate of les than 5 MR/hr.
Also I used to take care of the fire detection system at CR-3. I tested many of those Pyrotronic detectors. They were a high enough source that HP's had to survey the job even when the detectors were not in a radiation controlled area. I retired in 2009. I am a fan of your channel.
That’s a very cool story man. I always like hearing how industry professionals worked in those environments. Super intense radiation is extremely fascinating to me. I saw some Pyrotronics detectors inside the reactor building on my way to the RCA. I’m sure they were just the Am-241 version and not the Ra-226.
I'd be interested in seeing the Pyrotronics Radium source cartridge placed in the midst of some various moss, fungi, and plants and then monitoring the effect on the flora over time. This would show a field of damage of varying levels from the center.
Now that would be cool.
@@RadioactiveDrew @Lu Johnson If you are interested in such an experiment, I highly recommend looking up both the Brookhaven Gamma Forest and the Rhinelander Radioactive Forest. Both were experiments in which IMMENSELY radioactive sources were place in a forest for a period of time to gauge the effects on the surrounding environment. At Brookhaven they used a 9,500 curie source and at Rhineland they used a 10,000 curie source. Apparently they plan if something went terribly wrong with the Brookhaven source was to airlift it by helicopter to drop it into the ocean. I also assume you've heard about the much less terrifying Atomic Gardens used around the world to increase the mutation rates of crop plants and seeds in an effort to discover more beneficial mutations and cultivars. This actually worked with some notable successes.
A great many studies to gauge these effects have already be done, so that’s entirely unnecessary. We know the results of exposing just about every life form to all types of ionising radiation at pretty much every level of energy.
@@RichardSenn98 I'm sure there were myriad experiments like this done throughout our nuclear history.
Those experiments didn't use an F3 radium post tho!
I imagine a large circular terrarium with moss, grass, various small greenhouse flowers, etc. Shot from above, time lapse. At least that's the way I'd envision it.
Really interesting idea. To see videos of it and see the progression over time in a lab or close to lab conditions in 4k.
Props to making this video showing how dangerous the older smoke detectors were. Showing the comparison of the new smoke detector vs the old smoke detector is literally night and day in comparison.
Wow. I didn’t realize they had those type of smoke detectors back then. I guess it had to be such a strong source because the electronics weren’t as sensitive as they are now ?
That's my guess as well.
Electronics used to be more sensitive most of the time. It's just because of lack of technology production wise
The ionisation current in modern smoke detectors is in the picoampere range, as far as i'm aware. In the 50s and 60s, measuring that was only possible in highly sophisticated electronics laboratories.
@@mfbfreak yes back then they needed miniature low noise vacuum tubes to boost a signal to then drive a little mechanical meter indicator. So, it was cheaper just to use copious amounts of radiation.
@@redneckshaman3099 interesting
What a _beautiful_ find! I also have an F3 Pyrotronics smoke detector! They're very hard to find! Mine is dated 7/16/1959. I also have several of the Pyrotronics F3/5A models and a F5B model too, which each have 80 μCi of americium-241. The Ra-226 and Am-241 sources will also "overflow" (≥ 367,440 CPM) my SEI Inspector USB Geiger-Müller counter too. My EcoTest Terra-P dosimeter read a maximum of 111.7 mSv/h (11.17 R/h) from the Ra-226 "lipstick-type" mast source, however that was with beta _and_ gamma, so it's not _entirely_ accurate. I also have three 5.7 μCi (211 kBq) plutonium-239 sources from РИД-6М (RID-6M) Soviet-era smoke detectors. The Pu-239 sources are the _most_ gentle of these three isotopes, since it emits mostly just alpha particles, and with _extremely_ little gamma ray emissions. I get _about_ 84,770 CPM from each Pu-239 source, but with a sheet of paper absorbing the alpha particles, I only get 302 CPM from the low-energy gamma rays, since the gamma ray branching intensities for Pu-239 are so low. So, the gamma ray exposure is basically null. With the F3 however, the ionizing radiation is coming _mostly_ from the bismuth-214 and lead-214 decay isotopes. The Ra-226 decay isotopes are pretty much in secular equilibrium at this age now, meaning that the Ra-226 decay isotopes now have about the same activity as the Ra-226 parent isotope, meaning that these Ra-226 sources actually became hotter, fairly shortly after they were first fabricated. So, you will get _very_ broad energies and _numerous_ branching intensities for alpha, beta, X-rays, and gamma rays from Ra-226. Anyways, great demonstration! Wonderful quality! Thank you for sharing this! I really like it! 👍
What is your most active source?
11 Roentgens per hour.....holy hell. Isnt 400 R a fatal dose? They had these things around children in schools back in the day. I dont know how many times I walked under one for 6 years.
I worked for a midwestern Pyrotronics distributor 40 years ago. And while by the early 80s these specific type of ionization detector were no longer manufactured, there were still many in use and those were almost exclusively found in large mainframe computer centers and telephone company switching centers. They were also often coupled to Halon or CO2 fire suppression systems, so not an inexpensive investment.
@@donreinke5863 As he said, they had multiple models and most of them used Americium. I highly doubt your school was using these, no matter when it was built.
I had a Ecotest Terra P and I have a Terra Bluetooth. The Terra P specs show it's limited to 999.9 µSv/h or just under 0.1 REM/h. My Terra Bluetooth is limited to 9999 µSv/h or 1 REM/h but I'm not sure if it will saturate before it reaches those numbers.
Good video! The NPP I work at uses these Ceberus detectors. I've seen comments saying that they'll shock you. And that's absolutely true! We do sensitivity testing on the different plant areas throughout the year. The "new" ones we install have to be surveyed by RP before we can install them in the plant.
Oh yeah, they will for sure! They ran off of ~200VDC and had a hot chassis. So that was the "tamper resistant" feature of the day.
I love your content, Drew. This one was especially interesting! Horrific was the right word to use. Holy moly.
Thanks...really glad you enjoy it.
This guy is holding something radioactive and dangerous and talking to us like its just some fun toy.
That 15 inches on the warning label definitely an understatement. That might work for Americium but obviously not Radium. Good education thank you.
No problem.
I've also heard that these weren't electrically insulated, and that you could get a shock if you touched the housings of these while they were powered up. Systems at that time operated on 120 VAC like residential interconnected smokes, not 24 VDC like modern fire alarm systems.
Voltage isn't what should scare you when dealing with electricity. Amperage should. You can deal with an electrical system of a car and the voltages are high so the spark can jump the gap and ignite the fuel in the combustion chamber but you can easily survive a shock like that. Those would be in the 20k-40k volts range. Not much different than a stun gun/taser. Very high voltage and very low amperage.
@@Stubbies2003 Yes, it's true that it's the current that kills you, but a higher voltage is better at driving the same current through you. I am also aware that a normal carpet-to-doorknob static shock is in the thousands of volts range.
@@Stubbies2003 But when the source has the capacity to deliver very high current -- including nearly any standard mains power system in use worldwide -- then you need to respect the fact that voltage and amperage are related by Ohm's Law (V=I*R). Human skin is a relative constant for R (resistance), so any increase in V (voltage) is likely to give a proportionate and predictable increase in I (current). In the old times (pre-1970s), little or no effort was made to protect the user from such things. For major standards bodies such as NFPA and UL, a consensus has been reached that the threshold where V can start imparting unsafe levels of I across the skin barrier and through a human body is about 50V. Less than 50V, a system is considered "low voltage" and subject to lower requirements for cable routing, junction boxes, and guarding. That, and simplified battery backup requirements, are two reasons why many commercial and industrial control systems including fire protection and Power-over-Ethernet run at 48V or less (commonly 48V or 24V).
@@Stubbies2003 The voltage is still necessary to even be able to deliver that current, otherwise touching a 9v battery would be deadly...
I heard of the Ra226 version of this fire alarms but I didnt know they were so radioactive! Great video!
Yeah, I didn't expect it to be so hot.
@@RadioactiveDrew what reading do you get from gamma only?
@@allRadioactive 170 uSv/hr on contact from the top of the wire mesh cap that has the screw in source. That's using a gamma filter on my Radeye B20.
@@RadioactiveDrew that is a lot!
@@allRadioactive yeah, but it might have been picking up some of the betas as well. I need to do some more tests to make sure that number is accurate.
“Careful, this is very radioactive.”
“Oh, thanks. How radioactive is it?”
“Very.”
When I saw that thing I recognized it immediately as hanging on the ceiling in several places in my elementary school back in the 1960s.
I had no idea they were radioactive/dangerous until now.
I thought they were some kind of fire alarm and never gave them any further thought....until today..
Wow that’s scary
Maybe one should point out that not all smoke detectors contain radioactive material. I am not sure what is available in the US, but here in Germany (and likely most of the EU), you don't find radioactive smoke detectors for home use. Maybe for places that have a full-fledged fire alarm installation, not sure about this.
The ones for home use over here are optical detectors. Basically an infrared LED flashing into a dark chamber with a detector monitoring the same chamber. They are arranged so that normally the detector can't see the LED - but if smoke enters the device, the light is diffused and the detector can pick up the LED's flashes, triggering the alarm.
They do exist in many countries but are only rarely used in some countries
Yeah I can walk into a home repair place anywhere in America and buy as many of the smaller Americium smoke detectors as I want.
Great, great video ! the maximum count I got at home was 9700 cpm from radioactive minerals bought in internet. Greetings from Mallorca, Spain !
I actually bought one of these few years ago on ebay and tried to have it shipped to Croatia/Europe for my random number generator project. US authorities blocked the shipment even though the seller said it can ship worldwide, I just got refunded and it said it was restricted. Guy probably shipped it in regular cardboard box and it sounded the radiation alarms at the postal center :D
I used to service the Cerberus pyrotronics units) Radium sulfate in gold foil. Different aged units had different levels of different radioactive materials. I have found units where the foil had degraded.(lickily th eunits were in the center of Lawrence Berkeley labe Bevatron igloo (well shielded)
I'd like to get ahold of one of those. I'd put it in a lead shielded container and use it for a check source. Half life of radium = 1600 years. What would be interesting would have been if you calculated your exposure while playing with that detector.
You got balls dude thanks for the info so I know how to dispose of smoke detectors
My wife was about to kill me if she heard that Geiger counter one more time while she was sleeping lol
Are there now radioactive crumbs/particles around your home. I'd never do this, but consider doing this outside on a tarp or something 😨
After watching Chernobyl I have to admit stuff like this gives me the heebee jeebees. I'd guess that prolonged exposure to these things is "not great, not terrible."
I think these were the first smoke detectors ever made (since the late 40s). This thing should be in a fire museum!
My uncle loved to buy all sorts of junk and was very into alternative medicine, one day he died of stomach cancer, happened rapidly like 3 months from the day he was diagnosed.
So my cousins joked about there being something fishy about some alternative medicine amulets he had, so for curiosity I went in with a reader, mine from cold war but still very accurate, and when the reader started to hit 200 to 300, it was at that point all of us in that house turned cold, never f*ck around with radiation, he wore those amulets for God know how long.
And the fact the cops said they did not care about it, or what we did with the amulets says everything about this country.
It's terrible that those amulets are still allowed to be sold when it has been proven so many times how dangerous long-term exposure to them is. So sorry to hear that your uncle was taken advantage of by the awful people that sell these things with no regard for public safety.
@@jamescollins6085
Its kind of annoying that these scam artists manage to sell these extremely dangerous amulets and "healing cards" on places like Amazon and no one bats an eye, there a video on RUclips of a guy buying these and testing them, absolutely horrid the amount of radiation and other toxic heavy metals in them disturbs me.
@@SMGJohn I might have seen the video you are talking about, was it from Big Clive?
@@jamescollins6085
There appear to be multiple ones, The Thought Emporium also has a few videos on this on various "alternative medicine" products which seems to cover the topic a lot better than most.
Kind of disturbing you can buy thorium powder in such large quantities, anyone with knowledge of bomb making will have a field day if they want to maximise damage.
@@SMGJohn I imagine quite a few of these products exist primarily as a way to dispose of nuclear waste material, which is someting that would normally be very expensive to dispose of, but they can sell for a profit to people online using false claims of healing powers. Thanks for the video suggestions, it's an interesting subject.
Just discovered your channel. What GREAT and well presented content! It will be exciting to watch your channel grow. You earned a new subscriber here!
Thanks for the sub. Glad you’re enjoying the content.
Anyone who would want to own that is far braver than me! I'm amazed how comfortable some people are around chemicals and radiation (He seems to have a respect for it but I'd be running!)
"This radium post is incredibly radioactive with gamma rays"
Mate, luckily, you have rubber gloves
Drew, you're the coolest nut using hot rocks on RUclips. :) Please stay extra careful and safe!
I try to stay as safe as I can. I'm more concerned about something happening in a mine than from any of my radiation exposure.
@@RadioactiveDrew Yeah, I guess that makes sense. At least here you're in control of what's happening.
I want to know how these were produced. Its hard to imagine it didn’t involve some manual assembly and exposure to the workers making the parts and assembling it. And all the places these have been stored or used probably include some people being nearby for longer time. And how about a burned down building or these ending up in landfills or metal scrap being reused…
Probably somewhere in Asia
@@Kaiyats You just have to change your workers every year when they start losing their hair and get constant nose bleeds. The cancers will come years later. Sadly, it’s probably how it was done.
@@ThinkingBetter These were manufactured in the 1950s, long before manufacturing moved to Asia. If you saw the tags, I believe parts were made in New Jersey and Switzerland.
@@Barabel22 Yes I agree but my point is that the manufacturing was likely not with high standards of radiation protection. A lot of workers in mining, material processing and manufacturing involving radioactive isotopes decades ago got a lot more exposure than what is healthy but when a cancer developed years later, it rarely got any attention. Only extreme cases like “the radium girls” have made history.
As you are into superlatives, Am-241 is 10 million times more radioactive than U-238, H-3 (tritium) is 370 million times more radioactive than U-238 and Rn-222 (radon) is a whopping 2.4 trillion times more radioactive than uranium 238. The reason is that uranium 238 is weakly radioactive with a long half-life of 4.5 billion years. Uranium ore is about 7 times more radioactive than uranium metal, due to the progeny in equilibrium, but even so, these comparative values of radioactivity would still be large numbers.
“Should be treated with the upmost respect”
Says the guy with his head out in the open, and probably 0 lead around his fingers
Meh won’t do anything as long as he’s not spending days next to it
I bet every time one of these ships, some postal inspector has a stroke as it sets off alarms all over the place lmao
The manufacturer probably intended it to be used in factories and thought that there would be no danger in a high hall. The device was then dangerous for the maintenance staff. And in the event of a fire, for the craftsmen who were then ignorantly exposed to high levels of radiation during renovation work.
I could see the potential for contamination after a building fire. Seems like the radium is pretty well sealed in that foil but who knows what would happen in those extreme temps.
I bet it still works too.
Looks like something that slots into a DeLorean.
Subscribed.
I'm going to bet a lot of construction workers throughout the years have unknowingly screwed themselves over by being unaware of dangerous materials like these detectors. The average construction worker where I am treats everything as "trash" when ripping stuff out and tosses everything into the same dumpster and rarely wears anything to protect themselves. I bet landfills are loaded with all sorts of toxic and dangerous things that ended up there because of people just treating everything as generic trash.
I would be much more concerned about chemical exposure than radiation exposure in an environment like the one construction workers find themselves in.
I remember taking apart an old smoke detector as a kid. Thankfully I don't think I ever broke into the ion chamber. Was only Americium and no where near as spicy as that bad boy! :O
I got a box of detectors in my office right now waiting to pull apart.
I'd be terrified of the radon gas generation that a hot radium source creates. Definitely don't keep it in your home (I read one of your comments that you keep it in a safe in an uninhabited place - smart thinking). I think that the radon gas generation is the biggest risk of what you have there.
Whenever you go into where you keep the source, I'd well aerate the place that you have the safe before going in, and well aerate the safe once you open it. Lots of big fans should be used.
Meanwhile there are P=8 Orion and E=6B's doing laps over his region trying to find the loose bucket of sunshine.
I think I recieved a DOSE over the old "Interwebs" while watching this....Need to go drink that Iodine Milkshake now🤣....Great Stuff👍
I am a bored Health physicist who has been doing this kind of work for 33 years. I noticed your comments and thought I would chime in. I did some calculations along the decay chain and determined that You will get some gamma's (not x-rays) from the reactions, but they will be light and low energy. you will get B- particles but those will be shielded ( good heavens don't wear a lead apron or you will turn B- to bremstrahlung), but primarily you will get Alpha particles which the can will shield mostly. This is a sealed source so unless you broke the seal you would receive far far less than 1 mR/hr to the skin much less the whole body. P.S. I stopped reading part way through and when I stopped laughing I did my calculations. forgive spelling errors.
Really fascinating video, makes me wonder how many things in my house might be way more radioactive than i considered checking for. As you consciously expose yourself to more radiation than most people, i'd love to know what you do to mitigate the damage, decontaminate yourself and how you store the items you collect. Do you know roughly how much radiation more than the average person you've experienced?
Geiger counter goes: KRSHHH-BEEEEEEEEEEP
You: *chuckle* I'm in danger
I'm going down the rabbit hole on some of your videos but hot dang this is crazy! Thanks for educating us and putting yourself at risk to do so. Very interesting stuff! I worry that 20-30 years from now, a LOT of tech from the 20s-50s will be misunderstood or lost.
Super cool and intriguing but terrifying at the same time. You earned yourself a new sub, and I've already binged out on a bunch of your videos. Really appreciate you sharing this man!👍👍✌️
Glad you are enjoining the video. Also thanks for the sub.
Bro ur so underrated, i love your video's!
Thanks. Glad you are still enjoying them.
Jesus way to make my palms sweat man, yeesh. Spicy meatball.
Very knowledgeable video and I salute you
Thanks.
I appreciate your bringing us the very cool videos. I have to say I wouldn't do it myself not because it's simply radioactive more so because I have terrible luck. I would probably drop the can on the table causing the foil to become dislodged shooting directly into my eyeball and embedding itself under my eyelid. When I arrive at the hospital to have the foil removed they would lock me up for suspicion of terrorism that's just my luck. On a serious note thanks for the great content.
I've always wanted a radiation detector like the one he's using but I'd rather not end up on a watch list... god knows I'd be the guy that gets raided for no reason.
My Luck As Well Ha :)
Another great video! But be careful please. Do you have any cloud chamber? Do you think that it is also possible to measure the radioactivity of polonium and thorium in tobacco cigarette and in pesticides with your instrument? Thanks
Thanks for the concern. I try to be as safe as I can be and still make the videos. I don't have a cloud chamber but I've been wanting to build one for a while. Would be interesting to try and measure those isotopes in tobacco. Maybe those will be in a future video.
I highly doubt that you could detect them in a cigarette or any tobacco products using conventional means. You'd Definitely need a cloud chamber and even then it'd be hard to distinguish it's particles trails from natural background. It builds up inside the body and concentrates in the lungs. I'd be much more interested in seeing a smokers lungs in a cloud chamber.
So at the distance where it detects 500K cpm, it gives at least 66 mSievert/h if im correct? Thats damn hot
keep up the good work and stay safe.
Can't wait to watch this!
Damn ima need to get my hands on one of those
Well I have two I'm going to sell on uraniumstore.com . I'll try and have the listing up sometime today.
Any recommendations on personal Geiger counters or dosimeters under the $300 range? That Radeye looks really nice, but not sure I can drop $2000 on one!
Bro. You forgot tom cruise. That was INTENSE AF. Love your channel
Being old, I remember so many crazy items that were 100% legal that today are so illegal you can't have it, regardless of how long you have owned it
These are legal to own…fyi.
@@RadioactiveDrew Depends on where you live.
Hi! I'm a new sub. In the military we were taught that no amount of radiation is safe and to always use the ALARA procedures. You know far more than I do about radiation. If I dealt with the things you do on occasion, I would wear a radio-logic vest (lead) and lead lined gloves with respirator and plenty of lead shielding vessels for the items. I'm sure you have all that but I want you around for a very long time so keep safe like I know you do and please never become complacent. Remember the demon core? They saw it so often they lost sight of how bad it could be. Love your content, would love to run into you someday at an event. I could learn so much. Thank you for all you do.
Thanks for the sub. I don’t agree with “there’s no safe dose of radiation” because we are all exposed to way more radiation than any of us realize. Our bodies have also evolved to repair itself from ionizing radiation. The problem comes from when the damage overwhelms the repair system. I hope I can show this better in future videos as my journey to where I am now took finding so many sources out in the open and no one getting cancer or dying from them.
@@RadioactiveDrew the no amount of radiation idea is a a teaching tool not a realistic warning, However ALARA is a real thing and there is a reason it is a practice in the rad industry.
@@jbond119 Agreed but I personally hate gross oversimplifications like that. Sure it can help laymen understand difficult topics but it can also lead to dangerous misconceptions in others. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an anti-smoke detector crowd out there that thinks they are deadly.
I'm a bit concerned about the bones in your hand and arms and gamma exposure -- leukemia is not your friend. An N95 might also be a good idea as grains of radioactive dust in your lungs are bad news.
The half lives are 3.5 days for Ra-224, 1,600 years for Ra-226, and 6.7 years for Ra-228 -- I wonder why they chose Ra-226 instead of Ra-228 so that these units don't contaminate the waste stream for millennia.
I wonder what it would do in the vicinity to a fluorescent screen/paint.
I would imagine they chose Ra-226 because of its long half-life. You want something to keep working for as long as possible. When this was first manufactured there was probably a mix of different isotopes of radium that have since decayed away.
My exposure from this wasn't that great since my time handling it wasn't that long. So I'm not concerned with any health effects from it. Also an N95 mask wouldn't stop the radon coming off of this or the daughter products of radon. More importantly its not that high of a level to be concerned about.
I bet you could move the needle on a CDV-715 ionization chamber meter with that source.
We'll see...I bought a CDV-777 kit that has a 715 in it. The CDV-700 didn't work in the kit and the 715 and 720 turn on. But they are very hard to see any activity unless you have something very spicy...I would imagine. So far my experience with Civilian Defense detectors hasn't been great.
0 min 54 s Actually, most smoke detectors have 0.9 uCi, not 0.3 uCi of Am241.
Also, if you calculate it comes out to 0.3 ug of Am241.
It's probably not good to handle it like this with little protection, but entertaining nonetheless.
The most radioactive thing I own (actually the only radioactive thing I own) is a radioactive Fiestaware plate from the 1930's. I got it to test my geiger counter. Even though it doesn't put out nearly enough radiation to be dangerous (the highest reading I've gotten from it, really close up, is around 60 microsieverts/hr), I still keep it in a shielded box just to be safe. I have a geiger counter that can detect the full spectrum (alpha, beta, gamma, x-rays). Interestingly enough, although my plate is supposed to be U-238 which is an alpha emitter, most of the radiation from the plate is actually beta. I suspect this is due to being a 1930's model rather than a newer one, which used more natural uranium...so most of the radiation is probably coming from decay products rather than the uranium itslef. Geiger counters are pretty easy to overload, they are not designed or equipped to measure high level sources (it's a consequence of how the G-M tube works, it's impossible to make a geiger counter that can measure high level sources like this). If you want to measure high level sources, you'd need a scintillation counter.
Oh hey, I have the exact same story, I noticed that it was emitting beta and almost no gamma at all, thanks for explaining that for me!
Both the old and new fiestaware produce mostly beta, since the second decay product of U-238 is Pa-234m (a potent beta emitter). Just because natural uranium was used in the old fiesta, it doesn't mean it contained all the long-lived daughter nuclides (such as Ra-226), as processing the ore removes them. U-235 has a much less exciting decay chain compared to U-238, hence the depleted U plates are just as hot as the older ones. If you want to use a GM counter for high dose rates, you just use a smaller tube! Energy compensated GM counters are the industry standard for personal dosimetry (although other technologies are also used for cumulative dose monitoring), and small tubes capable of measuring up to 1000R/h are commonplace. Scintillators are more sensitive, and in fact far worse with intense fields than GM tubes. I think you might have meant ion chamber, and not scintillator, as these are commonly used for providing exposure rate readings in intense fields.
Should have put a cloud chamber on the desk, that would have been so cool.
The lower end counters have an integer rollover error above 65534 which is a 2 byte max value for a positive integer.
I saw this in some of the testing I did.
@@RadioactiveDrew I noticed it too in your Geiger counter faceoff video. It was very interesting.
Hi Drew, cool channel I've enjoyed watching them. I live in Darby Montana and do plenty of prospecting including looking for
radioactive minerals. I've collected at several sites in the area and need to check out a few others this summer.
If your very in Darby area let me know, I can point out a few sites.
Ken
Glad you are enjoying the videos. I live near Bozeman and have done some exploring at some old uranium claims in the area. Haven't found anything very good. I usually go down to Utah looking for uranium ore and have some pretty cool spots I hit. Thanks for the offer, might take you up on it over the summer.
nice little device you found there ! I am sure you already know about the older Russian smoke detectors and the "spice" they (sometimes) hold ...
One of those Russian smoke detectors is on my list of things to get.
@@RadioactiveDrew The Russian KI-1 contains Plutonium but they are as rare as rocking horse doo doo.
@@gb5uq the RID-6M's have plutonium in them as well, just not as much as the KI-1's or RID-1's. I have a few of the RID-6M's if anyone needs one. They cost an arm and a leg to get though, which sucks.
I wonder how many folks handled that exact same detector with no protection, and was contaminated with radium directly. Also, i wonder just how many people were adversely affected by just that detector being installed in various buildings.
It seems like the installation process would be fairly quick cutting down on people’s exposure.
@@RadioactiveDrew Yeah. Most of the time it would be, when troubleshooting is necessary, someone may have handled it longer. Im just thinking, how radioactive it is, wow.
@KickOutTheJhm I don’t think anyone would have been holding it for that long. Plus it has stickers on it saying it’s radioactive. I would imagine the techs for the company had some training on do’s and don’t’s.
Some of the long range bomber pilots in WW2 suffered “sunburn” from the Radium contained in the instrument dials. Just how much radiation were these instrument dials emitting to produce physical effects with perhaps a dozen hours of exposure? Since many crews didn’t survive to complete a full mission tour, limiting radiation exposure probably didn’t come high on the list of priorities at the time. I imagine each individual instrument dial was emitting similar amounts of radiation to your single smoke detector, so the cumulative dosage would have horrific.
Always visible though! lol
Radium dials like those were "hot' but not as hot as the smoke detector he took apart here. "Horrific" is too extreme, but it was significant. It would be interesting to learn more about this "sunburn" - it was probably from flying multi-hour missions several days in a row, if there is truth to it at all. UV is also more penetrating in the thinner sky, leading me to wonder about the validity of the story further. I do agree though that if you were surrounded by a cluster of units like Drew took apart here, that would be a pretty "horrific" dose. One side note - more altitude equals more radiation dose, just due to the cosmic rays getting through due to having less atmosphere to shield you. This is true even on modern flights. That wouldn't cause a sunburn though (or people would be tanned getting off the plane, lol!)
I was once asked to measure the exposure at the yolk of a B-29 using my RO-2 ion chamber. About 20 mR/hr. Of no concern and certainly not horrific. BTW, "sunburn", more correctly referred to as "beta burn" is produced by beta particles absorbed by the first few layers of skin. Betas can't escape the glass faces so no beta burns occurred. Gross over-exposure to gamma radiation, such as in cancer therapy, causes erythema, a general reddening of the skin. This takes many hundreds of R, not the small fraction of an R that I measured.
@@LFTRnow Radiation exposure causes burns and reddening of the skin that looks like sunburn
Also the women who painted the instrument dials with radium paint often became very sick, lost their jaws and passed away
Holy hell! One of the few radioactive items that I’d actually be afraid of.
You should see if it glows in the dark, and point it at something fluorescent
Even the americium buttons can produce a detectable glow when pointed at strontium aluminate
Why ? It wont kill you if you handle the detector for awhile. Lol
-This is very radioactive
*holds the most radioactive part in his hand
There aren't many sounds that make me shit my pants but a geiger counter going *bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep* is definitely one of them.
Love the channel, Drew! I knew some of those older bigger smoke detectors used radium, but didn’t know they were that hot! Wonder if they emit enough energy to make phosphorus glow?
Me and my son have been using a app for iPhone called “Radioactivity counter” that uses the phones selfie camera as a primitive gamma ray detector (and maybe beta? 🤷♂️), but the camera must have ALL light blocked out…. We tired to find radioactive rocks in a old quarry used for a source of roofing shingle rocks, as about ~5 miles north there used to be a Thorium mine, and we live on what’s basically a massive granite deposit…. And radon gas can be a big issue in the area.
The alpha radiation from that smoke detector might be enough to make a zinc sulfide mixture glow...maybe. Would be interesting to test it out and see. If anything could do it that radium source should be able to. If you want to get into looking for radioactive rocks or items I would suggest getting a Geiger counter of some kind. I'm working on a Geiger counter review video right now. It will show some of what's out there and price point. Hopefully it will inspire some to get the right tool for the job.
@@RadioactiveDrew Oh I definitely plan on getting one eventually….my phone (camera) would only detect gamma radiation, as the glass lenses would attenuate alpha and beta radiation…. The app does have a neat cloud chamber function so you can visually “see” the traces. At the wastewater treatment plant I used to work at we had tritium lit exit lights(for the explosive gas areas of the plant… cheaper and safer than any explosion rated 120v fixture!)… the original ones were installed in 1989 and still had a decent amount of green glow to them shockingly…. I was 8 years old when those were made. We got new ones… wish I had a counter capable of reading its alpha radiation! That is if it would make it out of the plastic enclosure…. Perhaps by that b. Radiation (not going to try and spell that! Lol) would generate some gamma rays if tritium has enough power to do so?
Tritium is a beta emitter, it glows because of a phosphor coating on the inside of the glass tubes it’s in. Radiation does get through the glass but it’s in the form of low energy X-rays (Bremsstrahlung) from the beta particles hitting the glass wall of the tritium container.
You need to get a higher range detector!
I know. In the future I'm going to pick up the Radeye B20ER version. It has a much higher range than my B20.
@@RadioactiveDrew Nice, I got a high range m87 something thay goes to 10sv/h
@@LubckeEnjoyer I do have a Gamma Guard CT007-F that uses a solid state detector. Pretty sure that goes up to 1,500,000 CPM. I didn't use it for this video since the detector surface area is smaller than on the Radeye B20. But I might be doing a follow up video on this item using that detector and some alpha detecting screens that show a blue light when exposed to high alpha radiation.
@@RadioactiveDrew see if its gamma has any effect on camera
@@LubckeEnjoyer I tried to capture the gamma radiation effecting the camera sensor. But the Sony A7S3 has very aggressive noise reduction. So I can see some noise when I'm seeing it live in the LCD. But when I try to record it the noise goes away. Might have to capture it with a different camera.
5:38 , he's thinking, "yup I've got cancer now"
Can help flashing back to “Silkwood,” the movie that gave me nightmares for months.
Nice movie, congratulations on your picks in the form of smoke detectors. If I can advise you, avoid touching potentially radioactively contaminated objects with the dosimeter. You can take off the gloves, but with radium flecks on the mica window it will be hard :D
I've had to clean the mica window a couple times after being in a uranium mine that had a very high level of radon and radon daughters in it. So its not that big of a deal but I do try to keep it from getting any contamination.
AWESOME video!
Thanks.
Watching this video, the whole time, i am like: 'Dont Do it! Dont Do It!'.
My head hurts from whatever tumors he develops.
If anyone’s curious shielding time and distance reduces exposure
Your actual body exposure from making his video was probably not more then one or two microsievert. No need to exaggerate the danger of handling this.
Well to shoot this video it took a couple days and I had close or direct contact with the smoke detector for an hour total. I calculated 170 uSv/hr at surface using a gamma filter on my Radeye B20. So I'm not sure what my dose was but I think it would be more than 1 or 2 uSv.
@@RadioactiveDrew what she is talking is most likely "whole body dose" there is a difference between absorbed dose, equivalent dose (which is probably what your counter equipped with the gamma filter aims to report) and effective dose where you factor the tissue weight factor. What you measure on the surface of the source is what your fingertips will experience, not to say that it is a good idea to hold it in your hand for a long time but when it comes to effective dose and "whole body dose" for sure you didn't get anywhere near 170uSv still it was probably over the 1-2 uSv. (for a reference, a flight from New York to LA is around 40uSv)
@@RadioactiveDrew That fits well with my assumption actually. Im aware that filming took longer then the final playtime is. With 170 at contact, dose rate at 30 cm which is approximately the distance of you body stem is less then 2 uSv/h. With your hands closer to it, but other body parts significantly further away.
I handled 100 uCi Radium sources before wearing a calibrated dosimeter. Dose was always neglectable. I didnt include any Radon exposure from keepin this in your apartment however. thats probably the greatest concern with this item.
I still think that it shouldn't be downplayed. You have to respect ionizing radiation and you can't be too careful.
Your new video with Measurements, partially, proofs my assumption. I assumed filming took only about an hour. With 4 hours the absorption is obviously higher.
My estimated dose rate at body stem distance was correct though.
Bruh don't do this in your fucking house with kids and neighbors.
u clearly dont know anything abt the amount of radiation its giving off its not a safety concern when handled carfully and especially not to his neighbors he knows what hes doing
Just like the crocodile hunter. "this is a very dangerous radioactive source, I'm going to go play with it" LOL!
Don't forget about the offgassing of radon when storing those!
You just make your life short😬😬😬
Yeah, I don't think so.
@@RadioactiveDrewdont get that thing to close and dont hold it for long
@@catthecommentbothunter6890 when dealing with sources like this I try and limit my exposure.
@@RadioactiveDrew yeah thats good for safety
You're sitting here, waving around radioactive knick knacks and for some reason you're talking like you're in school trying to fill the minimum word count in an essay 😐
I don't even want to touch my phone after watching you play with that thing on it.
Yeah it’s a spicy source.
I wonder if an older digital camera or genuine film would get messed up trying to take an image that close to those industrial sources.
As far as I know the gamma radiation hitting the sensor doesn’t leave a permanent effect on it.
A dosimeter is a good point Sara. Drew, you are messing with fate. Stay Safe.
You should put the smoke detector source in a cloud chamber
I'm gonna have to look into this an old smoke detector is one of the only sources I don't have
There are a couple of the Am-241 versions out there right now. But these Ra-226 ones seem to be much harder to find.
yes, playing with highly radio active materials that can flake of at your house sound like a great idea ;)
Keep safe bro, and thanks for the vid !
The teenager who built a Thorium atomic pile in his back yard, got most of his 'starter' radioactive material from old smoke detectors.
Yeah, not from these smoke detectors. He was using ones that have Am-241 (Americium) not Ra-226 (Radium).
500k counts per minute... It's Radium thus, it's dosage equivalent is 22*10^-8 Bequerel per Sievert, giving you a whopping 6.6 Sieverts per hour at the distance of your measuring device. That is either a huge miscalculation on my side, or that thing is absolutely deadly if you keep it close to your body for just a few hours.
Yeah...your math is a bit off there. If I was exposed to 6 Sieverts in an hour I would be dead. Usually around the 2-4 Sieverts range in an hour starts to be fatal. Sources like that aren't easy to come by and something that dangerous wouldn't be used in a smoke detector.