Cancer from radium dial watch11/24/2023 Only one of those short-lived isotopes, radon-222, is a volatile. The first six disintegrations after Ra-226 have a combined half life of about 22 years, dominated by the polonium-210 half-life. The decay chain continues on from there, but it hardly matters. But I have always shied away from uranium and thorium minerals, because I just don't want any more alpha emitters around me than the americium-241 in my smoke detectors.īy the way, Ra-226 undergoes a sequence of seven consecutive disintegrations with short half-lives before reaching Bismuth-210 with a half-life of 3 million years. I'm a physicist, I occasionally teach the Applied Nuclear Physics course to the Navy engineers who come to my lab for training, and I also collect minerals. (The gamma's put out by the radium dials are not worth worrying about.) ![]() And that tends to be much more carcinogenic than the same whole body dose of gamma radiation. (Your outermost layer of dead skin will stop nearly all of them!) However, for similar reasons, if you inhale or ingest a tiny, dust mote sized piece of alpha emitter, and it gets lodged in the lining of your lung or your intestine, it will deliver a large local dose of radiation to a very small volume of tissue. ![]() Alpha particles are completely harmless when their source is outside the body, because they are heavy, slow charged particles (i.e., they have a small charge-to-mass ratio) that give up their kinetic energy and stop in a very short distance when traveling through matter. If you're going to collect radium watch dials, I would wash my hands after handling them, just out of an abundance of caution.
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