[ RadSafe ] Article: The quest for radioactive items on eBay.

[John Jacobus]

The following is on the SLATE at
http://www.slate.com/id/2168398/
   
culturebox
Hot Stuff
The quest for radioactive items on eBay.
By Paul Collins
Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007, at 5:32 PM ET

Some hit antique stalls with their CDV-700s cranked,
hoping to spook dealers into a discount. Others
surreptitiously palm an RM-60 while listening on
earphones for telltale clicks from cheap old candy
dishes and sickly pale-green milk pitchers. These
mysterious men are a most obscure group of antique
collectors, and they seek an invisible prize scorned
by all others: radiation.

"[Look] for a particularly interesting item called a
'Radio-Sanitizer,' " advises one poster on CDV 700
Club, a Yahoo group of Geiger-geeks named after a
classic counter. The item's a corrugated-metal water
trough, he says, and, "They'll twist the meter right
out of the instrument." Others talk Geiger models and
swap war stories—literally. "The hottest radium-dialed
object I ever found was a WW2 Japanese aircraft
turn-and-bank indicator," writes a member. "It was
STILL glowing noticeably under bright light. My
Monitor 4 was reading 30mR/hr at the surface of the
glass." 

That's the hourly equivalent of about three chest
X-rays. And thanks to a 19th- and early-20th-century
love affair with radioactive luminescence and
colorants by manufacturers and consumers alike—a
houseware, medical, and technological boom that
produced millions of toasty isotopic items—there's
plenty more radioactive whup-ass where that came from.

"Collecting this is a bad idea," sighs Paul Frame, the
Oak Ridge Associated Universities curator of what may
be the country's definitive online radiation
collection. From his tone, it's pretty clear that he
gets called often by collectors. "It's hard to give
useful advice other than 'Just stay away from it.' " 

But even as we spoke, hundreds of buyers and sellers
haggled over charming antiques that radiate more than
just the glow of ownership. It's all online now, with
no clunky CDV-700 units required. Where? EBay, of
course.

This week was a fairly typical one in radioactive
auctions, in fact, beginning with hundreds of pieces
of spookily green glass, like this uranium absinthe
cup. Produced in huge quantities, glass containing
uranium compounds—now sold as uranium glass, canary
glass, or Vaseline glass—tends to be the most faintly
radioactive of collectibles, albeit with a great party
trick: Canny eBayers reassure buyers of authenticity
by picturing the stuff fluorescing alien-green under
UV light.

Other hotly contested auctions include that much-loved
1950s kiddies' delight, an Atomic Energy lab (no, they
were not falsely advertised); a 2-inch pod of "very
radioactive" cuprosklodowskite that fetched $225 after
12 bids; and two pricey auctions for circa-1920
Revigator radium water coolers. You can find most
isotopes without much effort on eBay. Bidding on old
Coleman camping lamp mantles? Thorium. Vintage Doramad
Radioaktive Zahncreme ("radioactive toothpaste"), used
by Germans to keep teeth gamma-ray bright? Radium,
with even a squished-out tube fetching a high bid of
$122.50. Old spark plugs? Polonium. Still other
auctions are evidence of a jazz-age infatuation with
radium as the byword of the future, like this Lee's
Radium Shaving Razor—a steal, won with a single
99-cent bid.

"Many items simply weren't radioactive," Frame muses.
"Radium was used then the way gold or silver is
today—for instance, a gold card wouldn't have real
gold in it." Even so, you might want to think twice
before bidding on an old tin of Tho-Radia face
powder—because the stuff really did contain both
thorium and radium, an inhalation hazard that your
lungs will not thank you for.

If you look, millions of bona fide radioactive
antiques are out there—Oak Ridge even publishes A
Collector's Guide to Radioactive Dinnerware (pdf
file). The red-orange hue in old plates by Fiesta
Dinnerware and its imitators was achieved with uranium
oxide, though the ore supply was interrupted by the
U.S. government in 1942 for use in, ahem, other
projects. Topping out with a surface reading of about
3 or 4 mR/hr, uranium glazes don't pack a killer
punch. Granted, one 1996 study did produce uranium
leachate by microwaving acidic foods—but al-Qaida
won't be planning its next attack with vintage butter
dishes. "To really do some harm, you'd probably have
to sit on it for a month or two," notes science writer
Theodore Gray in his superb online gallery. The
greater danger is lead: Enough leached in during the
microwave experiment to exceed an adult's weekly
suggested exposure. 

So, how much radiation are you getting from this
stuff? In many cases, maybe not much more than
naturally occurs in your home. The radiation
collector's bible—William Kolb's self-published and
utterly engrossing Living With Radiation—is quick to
point out that lots of common objects are faintly
radioactive. Bananas, brazil nuts, cat litter, granite
countertops, sensitive toothpaste ... even dryer lint
boasts 20 times the background rate of radiation.
(Don't blame your appliance: Naturally occurring
radioactive isotopes adhere to dust.) Exposure also
varies greatly by distance—and there's probably more
danger from a uranium oxide pendant on your skin than
from that plate on your shelf.

Even so, Kolb and Frame both avoid one type of
radioactive antique—and startlingly, it's the one the
rest of us are most likely to own. "I shy away from
anything that contains radium," Kolb tells me. "In
most cases, radium is not fixed in a way that
eliminates the risk of contamination or ingestion."
And where would Joe Public find that radium today?
Simple: in old watches. "There were probably 100
million watches made in the U.S. alone during the era
of radium dials," Oak Ridge's Paul Frame says.
"There's so many of these things." 

Many stopped luminescing years ago, so their
radioactivity is not obvious to the casual observer.
But it's still very much present, and will be for
millennia. The relatively short half-life of the
RA-226 isotope (1,602 years) means that it has lots of
decay going on—radium puts the active in
radioactive—and inhaled or digested radium dust
presents a particular danger because its bodily
absorption mimics calcium. It can go right to your
bone and marrow, as unfortunate dial-factory "Radium
Girls" discovered in the 1920s.

One YouTube clip shows the dramatic squawk an old
Timex watch face can still coax from a Geiger counter.
Take off the glass bezel and you're asking for
trouble—and not just from the radiation. "The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission is about to clamp down," Frame
warns me.

Amazingly, the NRC lacked regulatory control over
consumer radioactives in the past; that was left to
the desultory enforcement of states. But buried in
regulatory language and unnoticed by any news media,
last month the NRC quietly announced a change in
policy: It can now require a general NRC license from
any owner of an object containing more than 37 kBq of
Radium-226. That's about twice the typical content of
an old mantle clock, four times that of a pocket
watch, and about six times that of a typical
wristwatch. Collectors with particularly hot
timepieces—or with many typical old ones—may now fall
under the NRC's regulations, as may eBay auctions of
multiple radium parts like this one. Any CDVer with an
old crate of 100 luminous gauges (or radium chain
pulls, or anything else that glows) will also need a
general license—and so will Revigator owners. That
means you can't export, disassemble, or dispose of the
stuff without NRC approval.

The news has not even reached the happy hunting
grounds of the CDV 700 Club yet. Instead, a recent
post reminisced about how, "The hottest rock that is
not 'ore' that I've Urban Prospected was in an antique
store, appeared to [have] been a green marble smoking
stand. It was hotter than a firecracker compared to
most."

It's an appropriate find for radiation hunters:
Because now, it seems, you'd better smoke 'em if
you've got 'em.

Paul Collins teaches nonfiction at Portland State
University. His latest book is The Trouble With Tom:
The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2168398/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co.
LLC


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“All men dream, but not equally. Some dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds and wake in the day to find it is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.”
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


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