lol, I bought a dozen bright tritium vials as gifts for some coworkers, but I was going to deliver them in person a couple of months later, so I held on to them until then. It was hard to let them go!
Glue one to your deadbolt handle, and you can see whether the door is locked at a glance, from across a dark house! Hang them from your ceiling fan pulls, and no more fumbling around for them in the dark! (for complicated reasons, we don't control ours with the switch) Putting one on your keychain is a no-brainer, but still an awesome idea! And so on...
from another supplier about 8 years ago and still haven't managed to use any of it, beyond just being in awe of how well it glows in response to a UV light.
The fibers are not in the note but painted on top of them, neither side of the note is the same fiber wise, also they do get wear with usage.
The fibers on the new notes are different, they are more compact and illuminate.
It's most likely the same chemical formula (so yes, "same stuff"), but phosphors vary quite a bit in their quality based on the synthesis conditions (maybe the "same stuff", or may be better/worse quality than UN's batch).
Given there's less than 20kg/10lb production of tritium per year, and a large amount of it seems to go to fusion experiments, how much tritium is there in that vial?
United Nuclear sells the real stuff like yellowcake for $15/gram [1] so if you've got hydroflouric acid [2], a big gaseous centrifuge, millions of dollars, and a death wish, you can make weapons grade uranium too!
You'd want to ship the yellowcake as HAZMAT Class 7 radioactive and it cannot be shipped outside the United States without an NRC export license (probably continental US only too).
The hydrofluoric acid should be shipped as HAZMAT Class 8 corrosive.
Edit: If you're asking why it's legal to sell this stuff, naturally occurring uranium is over 99% U238 isotopes. Extracting useful U235 from it requires some really nasty chemistry, insane amounts of electricity, and very specialized hardware like gaseous centrifuges powerful enough to separate isotopes. Buying the thousands of kilograms you'd need to build a bomb would set off a ton of alarm bells all up and down every major government but small samples for educational or novelty purposes aren't a concern.
Please don't fool with HF. I don't know you, reader, but I like you anyway.
Bringing uranium into your life almost certainly won't yield the cerebral joy you might imagine. Once you have it, it is a liability and a social responsibility until you can dispose of it safely, probably at substantial cost. If you feel the need to purchase a radioactive source, a sealed source will be much safer and readily transferred/disposed-of.
I've worked with HF and spent about a year coordinating the safe cleanup of someone else's uranium oxide. If offered $19 and the choice to buy a gram of yellowcake or a bottle of wine from the grocery store, I'll choose the bottle of wine every time.
Seriously; neither one is worth fooling with unless absolutely necessary. (A tungsten cube on the other hand....)
Full Quotes for reference " Our Europium UltraGlow® phosphorescent (glow-in-the-dark) powder is the brightest, longest lasting, non-toxic & non-radioactive, glow-in-the-dark material known"
My best is a glow-in-the dark Pacman and ghosts. it's a big black plastic board with shapes cut into it with my CNC. Then I backfilled the shapes with the appropriately tinted epoxy which dried in place. Then I have a UV light pointed at the board. At night, you don't see the board, just some glowing figures suspended. Yellow and green work great, blue/red/purple not so much.
I also embed LEDs into epoxy resin that's tinted, which makes the whole thing glow amazingly for very long periods of time.
Just random stuff, really anything that comes into mind.
Add it to anything you want to make glow-in-the-dark: paints, toys, safety equipment. I know someone who produces small batch silicone adult entertainment devices for sale, and the GITD ones are quite popular.
Doped strontium alluminate is not exactly food grade (though it is considered non-toxic), but that's not the orifice these devices are going in. The silicone matrix retains the vast majority of the pigment, which itself is fairly inert. It has virtually no bioavailability and any of the micrograms of it that might slough off during a session will almost certainly be exuded in short order.
It's used in miniscule quantities in glow powder. It's commercial use as a pigment/phosphor in display, lighting, and safety equipment far outweighs its use by hobbyists.
ah united nuclear, purveyors of high quality reagents for the discerning, jittery, sleepless grad student found in only the most prestigious government watch lists and infuriatingly paywalled technical journals since nineteen sixty-one.
Thats right United Nuclear, a beguiling reminder to mankind that the entire predicate of the Iraq war could just as easily have been a secret santa gift.
it's a slightly poetic and roundabout way of saying "This website will sell you some funny toys and some slightly radioactive stuff [like uranium ore, i guess, from previous comments]. "By the way, remember when the US invaded Iraq because we claimed they had stuff which is [allegedly, maybe, i dunno] remarkably similar to what you can order as a gift from this website?"
A "secret santa" is a gift giving tradition where you pool a group of people together and each person gets the name of someone and buys them a Christmas gift (generally within some price range) but they don't know who bought them the gift. So it's an opportunity to buy joke-gifts for someone you aren't particularly close to, if you happen to draw their name.
Strontium aluminate doped with europium has been the standard in persistent phosphorescence for a while. A large part of the reason I got into epoxy resin craft was to incorporate it in glowing elements, so I have a lot of such items. Some last all night. Some - especially reds and purples - are faint and barely last an hour. More recently, I've noticed dysprosium being added to the mix as well, though TBH I've never noticed any difference in brightness or duration compared to stuff I could get ten years ago.
The one thing I'd highlight (heh) for anyone trying to use this stuff themselves is: be aware of its density. I have yet to find a version that disperses evenly in resin; it tends to sink instead. Might disperse better in glass, but I know little about that craft so maybe it would be unusable for other (thermal?) reasons. If it tends to sink or float in any medium, such as paint, color/glow will be uneven. There are ways to deal with this issue, but they tend to involve extra steps. For example, with resin you can pour many thin layers, but if you want to avoid visible strata you have to go even further with non-planar surfaces and thickeners and such. It's ton of fun, but also a bit of work sometimes.
In my direct experience, grain size hasn't made much difference. Also, I use several kinds of very fine dusts/powders in my resin work and I've come to loathe the whole category. They go everywhere at the slightest puff of air, stick to equipment and tools, etc. I already wear a mask, but with chemical (NIOSH magenta or olive) rather than particulate cartridges, so there's that too. Of course YMMV. Perhaps also relevant is that I tend to work mostly with low-viscosity resins because it's easier wrt bubbles and edge creep, but I've had the settling problem even with higher-viscosity formulations. Maybe some day I'll hit on a combination of materials and techniques that solves the problem. Just hasn't happened yet. Good luck!
"Do no not grind the glow powder or try and dissolve it. On a microscopic level, the glow powder works by an energy exchange in its crystalline structure. These crystals are very small and just appear like a fine powder. When they are mixed with a clear medium as we do with our glow paint, the glow powder does not dissolve, it is just suspended in the medium. If you mix the powder with a medium that causes it to break down and dissolve (like water), the glow will be ruined. The same thing will happen if you grind the glow powder. You crush and destroy the crystal matrix and the energy will not be able to transfer between the glow material molecules causing a dramatic drop in glow brightness."
I _LOVE_ United Nuclear. They have made many chemistry and physics classes so much fun.
Here’s a bit of free advice though: Do not tell a police officer that you have thermite on you. Furthermore, do not explain what thermite is if they don’t know what it is. It is a recipe for a really long day.
What does it mean to place a company on probation? I tried looking it up, but can't get away from results about employee probation...ddg and Google both are ignoring my -employee and various other negations to filter the results...
Back in the early 2000s me and a few friends were playing with thermite in a parking lot, igniting tiny piles of it and watching it burn into the asphalt.
Somebody across the street called the police and all of a sudden two cop cars and a fire truck showed up. They saw we were just kids and pretty much just told us to fuck off, which I would have, except I had just put down a sizable pile of thermite on the ground.
Being both a genius(moron) and civic-minded, I asked if I could clean up my pile of thermite first so as to avoid any danger to others.
Then I was asked what that is, so I happily told them about how it creates extremely hot iron slag that can melt through lots of things.
And then me and my friends were interrogated about being bomb-makers, terrorists, or if we were planning on doing another Columbine. They called in the local FBI (who thankfully knew what we were talking about and didn’t really give a shit), we got a long speech about the PATRIOT act, and at the end they said we’re all going on “a list”
Ruined my entire evening and I never got to ignite the big pile :(
Why's that not convenient. I usually turn the water off while I apply soap and then turn it back on when I've finished to conserve water. That wait time is around a minute anyways. From talking to international friends this seems to be the norm around the world though I wouldn't be surprised if the average American doesn't practice this.
Not me. Water is on the whole time. I will move the body part I'm washing out if the stream long enough to apply lather, then immediately rinse it and then repeat. I would be surprised if there aren't at least a large minority that are at the two extremes here.
And caffeinated soap has been around a while, and I've been using it off and on. Some are good, some are not.
Tell them that you're a rail enthusiast, and start going on (and on) about how they use it to weld together train tracks. The more detail you go into about the trains, the more likely they are to want to get away from you.
Thermite is basically a quick, low-tech welding compound.
Unless you actually work for the railroad, talking about welding railroad tracks may trigger "he's a terrorist planning to cause a train derailment" thoughts in the law officer.
Heatgen is a new company that is selling self-heating aluminum cans. As I understand it, it uses a thermite reaction as its heat source. So who knows, maybe having a thermite charge in your pocket might become more common!
That is an objectively terrible design. The video through the first link demonstrates that, if you remove the liquid before activating the charge, it gets so hot it melts the aluminum jacket for the charge. Seems then trivial to cause an insane amount of destruction, even accidentally. Definitely one of the more surefire ways to commit arson, especially in wildland settings.
I've designed a lot of dumb things in my life, but that beats me, hands freaking down. Can you imagine the complete clusterfuck a crashed semi trailer full of these things would cause?
Yeah. Given the propensity for people to be as shitty as possible (Kids, teenagers and adults all apply here) I always try to design with regard for a high base level "people being malicious and / or stupid." It's accidents that always keep me up at night asking "What happens to bystanders caught up in this mess?"
It's funny that all their sales material is very very careful to avoid talking about the reaction and then you read the patent and it's "iron oxide, an oxidiser, and an aluminium can" and I guess if you need to melt tank tracks or have a warm coffee you're set either way.
I believe this is the same stuff that makes up Stuart Semple's Lit glow powder and other such glow-in-the-dark pigments. It's a mix of europium and dysprosium. IIRC what makes it last so long is the addition of trap states for the electrons, where instead of quickly re-emitting absorbed photons they can give up a little bit of energy to remain in the trap state, and are later bumped back out of that state by random thermal fluctuations.
I tried it out on some cardboard and it's almost as impressive as the marketing makes it sounds. I can hold a cheap LED headlamp next to it and wave it over the surface, and it leaves a bright green streak behind that glows visibly for many hours afterward. It doesn't stay bright for very long (I suspect it's an exponential decay), but for such a short exposure I wouldn't expect it to.
The blue version is less impressive because you need sunlight or a proper UV light source to charge it up, but it does work.
By trap states do you mean "forbidden transitions" (phosphorescence lasts longer than fluorescence because the electrons have to go through a very low probability mechanism).
United Nuclear is quite the nostalgia bomb. My first experience with them was in 2008, buying a chunk of uranium ore to trigger a geiger counter to use as a true random number generator. I'd say "where else can you just buy a chunk of uranium ore" but... [1]. Of course at the time it wasn't something you could buy on amazon.
When you have a bottle full of this stuff, is the interior powder getting charged by photons as well via propagation? Or is it only the directly light-visible surface that gets charged and is glowing?
If the former, does having a larger interior volume of powder increase the glow duration, behaving as a sort of rechargeable glow battery? Or does it just generate heat or more brightness while lasting the same duration?
only the surface of a bottle of this kind will emit photons. The emission frequency and intensity is not enough to really make this propagate light significantly. Instead, you would suspend a tiny amount of this in a volume of transparent resin.
Being kind of a maniac for glow in the dark stuff, this isn't quite true. I've filled up flask bottles with glow gravel of this variety and, after a "charge," poured it out -- the interior gravel did indeed get charged. I think you would need much more thickness than a centimeter or two for the interiors not to get charged up.
(Yes, I had a bunch of bottles filled up and arranged on a rope so they would glow softly during the night because I'm weird like that)
Since you seem to have done some experiments, what effect does increasing the bottle size have on the glow? Duration or brightness changed? No visible effect?
You max out pretty fast. Most people don't understand the incredibly wide (over so many orders of magnitude) ranges our eyes (and ears) function over. Once you're in the dark, the glow is quite visible but it wouldn't have been very notable before. And so the absorb-release cycle can penetrate rather rapidly. If I had to guess, with the gravel, that would die off at maybe a few centimeters of depth.
Essentially, you're getting just surface area at a given brightness, despite the interior gravel getting charged.
With the zinc sulfides, they really did take much longer to hit their max charge, although I never measured it.
> Most people don't understand the incredibly wide (over so many orders of magnitude) ranges our eyes (and ears) function over.
For sure. Last year while walking through the woods on a cloudy, new moon, 3am morning I saw a green light piercing through the trees. It was difficult to find because it was over a hundred feet away. Once I reached it, I found a single green LED. It wasn't an ultra-bright variant or anything-- just a normal LED attached to a camera.
I wonder, if one were to specifically design some kind of lamp based on this, what would be the ideal shape to maximize the emitted useful light for a given volume.
Anyone knows how this relates to SuperLuminova used in watches? There is always much discussion in watch forums regarding how good the lume is in different watches, and this looks like a nice contender.
Depending on the answer given to the quiz on the bottom of the Chemistry Experiments page, visitors are directed to one of Thomas The Tank Engine, Disney, or the actual safety page.
I wonder if the radium dial paint in my Baby Ben clock would emit enough energy to activate the Europium? The original phosphor has degraded to the point where it doesn't glow but it certainly sets off my Geiger counter.
152 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadGlue one to your deadbolt handle, and you can see whether the door is locked at a glance, from across a dark house! Hang them from your ceiling fan pulls, and no more fumbling around for them in the dark! (for complicated reasons, we don't control ours with the switch) Putting one on your keychain is a no-brainer, but still an awesome idea! And so on...
from another supplier about 8 years ago and still haven't managed to use any of it, beyond just being in awe of how well it glows in response to a UV light.
https://www.scoopwhoop.com/world/do-you-know-why-euro-bank-n...
The fibers are not in the note but painted on top of them, neither side of the note is the same fiber wise, also they do get wear with usage. The fibers on the new notes are different, they are more compact and illuminate.
``` Access denied Error code 1020 You do not have access to unitednuclear.com.
The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. ```
Connecting from work and mobile
so more than 30 hours after being charge for 5 minutes in the sun.
Well that's a disappointment if, misled by the name "United Nuclear", you were hoping for the real stuff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_dial)
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&p...
https://www.energyencyclopedia.com/en/thermonuclear-fusion/i...
PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME
[1] https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
[2] https://www.laballey.com/products/hydrofluoric-acid-electron...
The hydrofluoric acid should be shipped as HAZMAT Class 8 corrosive.
Edit: If you're asking why it's legal to sell this stuff, naturally occurring uranium is over 99% U238 isotopes. Extracting useful U235 from it requires some really nasty chemistry, insane amounts of electricity, and very specialized hardware like gaseous centrifuges powerful enough to separate isotopes. Buying the thousands of kilograms you'd need to build a bomb would set off a ton of alarm bells all up and down every major government but small samples for educational or novelty purposes aren't a concern.
Bringing uranium into your life almost certainly won't yield the cerebral joy you might imagine. Once you have it, it is a liability and a social responsibility until you can dispose of it safely, probably at substantial cost. If you feel the need to purchase a radioactive source, a sealed source will be much safer and readily transferred/disposed-of.
I've worked with HF and spent about a year coordinating the safe cleanup of someone else's uranium oxide. If offered $19 and the choice to buy a gram of yellowcake or a bottle of wine from the grocery store, I'll choose the bottle of wine every time.
Seriously; neither one is worth fooling with unless absolutely necessary. (A tungsten cube on the other hand....)
https://luminlay.com
I also embed LEDs into epoxy resin that's tinted, which makes the whole thing glow amazingly for very long periods of time.
Just random stuff, really anything that comes into mind.
Joke aside, wikipedia says:
> Europium is one of the rarest of the rare-earth elements on Earth
Maybe we should regulate its use ?
Thats right United Nuclear, a beguiling reminder to mankind that the entire predicate of the Iraq war could just as easily have been a secret santa gift.
A "secret santa" is a gift giving tradition where you pool a group of people together and each person gets the name of someone and buys them a Christmas gift (generally within some price range) but they don't know who bought them the gift. So it's an opportunity to buy joke-gifts for someone you aren't particularly close to, if you happen to draw their name.
Not just a dessert (topping), but also a floor wax (well, not really, but pretense for Iraq War) (https://spyscape.com/article/saddam-husseins-fake-uranium)
https://search.brave.com/search?q=bob+lazar+united+nuclear
The one thing I'd highlight (heh) for anyone trying to use this stuff themselves is: be aware of its density. I have yet to find a version that disperses evenly in resin; it tends to sink instead. Might disperse better in glass, but I know little about that craft so maybe it would be unusable for other (thermal?) reasons. If it tends to sink or float in any medium, such as paint, color/glow will be uneven. There are ways to deal with this issue, but they tend to involve extra steps. For example, with resin you can pour many thin layers, but if you want to avoid visible strata you have to go even further with non-planar surfaces and thickeners and such. It's ton of fun, but also a bit of work sometimes.
I've ordered some, will try a little comminution to get fine dust. At some point, viscosity should predominate over settling.
"Do no not grind the glow powder or try and dissolve it. On a microscopic level, the glow powder works by an energy exchange in its crystalline structure. These crystals are very small and just appear like a fine powder. When they are mixed with a clear medium as we do with our glow paint, the glow powder does not dissolve, it is just suspended in the medium. If you mix the powder with a medium that causes it to break down and dissolve (like water), the glow will be ruined. The same thing will happen if you grind the glow powder. You crush and destroy the crystal matrix and the energy will not be able to transfer between the glow material molecules causing a dramatic drop in glow brightness."
Here’s a bit of free advice though: Do not tell a police officer that you have thermite on you. Furthermore, do not explain what thermite is if they don’t know what it is. It is a recipe for a really long day.
edit: yep https://www.justice.gov/civil/cpb/case/us-v-united-nuclear-s...
Somebody across the street called the police and all of a sudden two cop cars and a fire truck showed up. They saw we were just kids and pretty much just told us to fuck off, which I would have, except I had just put down a sizable pile of thermite on the ground.
Being both a genius(moron) and civic-minded, I asked if I could clean up my pile of thermite first so as to avoid any danger to others.
Then I was asked what that is, so I happily told them about how it creates extremely hot iron slag that can melt through lots of things.
And then me and my friends were interrogated about being bomb-makers, terrorists, or if we were planning on doing another Columbine. They called in the local FBI (who thankfully knew what we were talking about and didn’t really give a shit), we got a long speech about the PATRIOT act, and at the end they said we’re all going on “a list”
Ruined my entire evening and I never got to ignite the big pile :(
https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
> leave on for at least 1 minute before rinsing.
And caffeinated soap has been around a while, and I've been using it off and on. Some are good, some are not.
Seriously, at the time, I was drinking gallons of coffee per day, and I appreciated the smell of the caffeinated soap. So, I actually did both.
These days, I'm decaffeinated on the coffee I drink, and I'm trying a variety of soaps, some of which are still caffeinated, and some are not.
Unless you actually work for the railroad, talking about welding railroad tracks may trigger "he's a terrorist planning to cause a train derailment" thoughts in the law officer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSpuTwEOpOg
https://www.poweredbyheatgen.com/
https://www.highbrewcoffee.com/products/self-heating
Edit* - https://www.engadget.com/2006-05-05-self-heating-wolfgang-pu...
Edit: Come to think of it, it might just absorb the heat and do nothing.
1. Empty can.
2. Twist heating element.
3. Toss at target to burn.
Makes me think of the weird looks you would get if you tried to pay with your phone a decade ago.
I tried it out on some cardboard and it's almost as impressive as the marketing makes it sounds. I can hold a cheap LED headlamp next to it and wave it over the surface, and it leaves a bright green streak behind that glows visibly for many hours afterward. It doesn't stay bright for very long (I suspect it's an exponential decay), but for such a short exposure I wouldn't expect it to.
The blue version is less impressive because you need sunlight or a proper UV light source to charge it up, but it does work.
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM
If the former, does having a larger interior volume of powder increase the glow duration, behaving as a sort of rechargeable glow battery? Or does it just generate heat or more brightness while lasting the same duration?
(Yes, I had a bunch of bottles filled up and arranged on a rope so they would glow softly during the night because I'm weird like that)
Essentially, you're getting just surface area at a given brightness, despite the interior gravel getting charged.
With the zinc sulfides, they really did take much longer to hit their max charge, although I never measured it.
For sure. Last year while walking through the woods on a cloudy, new moon, 3am morning I saw a green light piercing through the trees. It was difficult to find because it was over a hundred feet away. Once I reached it, I found a single green LED. It wasn't an ultra-bright variant or anything-- just a normal LED attached to a camera.
Depending on the answer given to the quiz on the bottom of the Chemistry Experiments page, visitors are directed to one of Thomas The Tank Engine, Disney, or the actual safety page.
https://unitednuclear.com/chem_exper.htm
8 ounces ( $70.00 ) (1lbs) 16 ounce ( $130.00 ) (1.5lbs)