Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/24/hazmat-team-responds-to-uraniu.html
“It’s not clear why the resident ordered the uranium.”
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TIL you actually could hold U-238 in your hand and nothing particularly bad would happen to you, but you don’t wanna inhale it.
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This is the stuff with a half-life of 4.468 billion years, the radioactivity is quite low.
It is poisonous though, so you don’t want to eat it.
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Yeah, there’s nothing particularly wrong with uranium-238. Assuming we’re talking about depleted uranium (what’s left over after you extract the trace of more exciting uranium-235), it’s even less radioactive than natural uranium from the Earth’s bosom.
IDK why this former meth head wanted it, unless he somehow has interests and personality facets beyond being a former meth head.
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Elements aren’t capitalized.
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But they can be written down. And accrued.
(Sorry - very bad accountancy jokes)
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Yeah, toxicity is annoying. Someone was just telling me that their lab ordered 0.25L of ultra-high purity sulphuric acid, and received 25L instead… because who needs decimals? They got their money back and were told it’s a one-way supply chain, so keep the goods. I assume their grad students are now in the body disposal business.
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resident ordered two grams of powdered uranium for $12 from a Michigan company. It was in powder form and sealed inside a glass vial
What does the (no good very bad) photo have to do with the story?
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He may be a former tweaker, but given this incident it seems like he’s living in a quarter-way house at best.
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Twelve bucks seems like a reasonable price for desk display uranium. Even tweakers want conversation pieces.
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And? Because the guy did drugs this is news? Sounds like a lot of fear mongering hype, if you ask me.
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Two grams for $12? I’d wager he smelled an opportunity for profit.
“This shit is radioactive, bruh!”
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It’s the photo you see when on the wikipedia page for Uranium 238, and every post needs a pic.
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From halfway house to half life house.
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As far as I know, and the Wikipedia page doesn’t cite anything to the contrary, the link between Gulf War syndrome (etc) and depleted uranium is somewhere on the spectrum between “highly speculative” and “false”, and it seems like a fishy conclusion to leap to, given all the less attention-grabbing substances soldiers are exposed to on the reg.
But even if it is all down to uranium, that’d still make uranium less dangerous to breathe in / have embedded in your body than many of the “safe” materials we encounter every day.
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Just a simple mistake, Officer. I thought I was ordering a trophy piece from the wreck of German submarine U-238.
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