Making radioactive uranium glass

this video has been sponsored by bright sometime last year it was the first time i heard about

uranium

glass

and i thought it was some marketing thing or something but actually its real i mean its not

glass

made entirely of

uranium

but it is glass with the uranium in it I was very interested in it and decided to buy some and got this cup from eBay. Pure uranium glass is normally yellow, but this one is green and I think it's because they put some iron in it regardless. although that's not really what makes uranium glass special and it's what it looks like under a black light, the uranium in it fluoresces and makes this really nice green color, although the actual amount of uranium in it is quite small, so the glass itself is only smaller.

Radioactive general glass goblets like this one were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, during World War II, the government began confiscating all uranium and diverting it to nuclear research. This killed the entire uranium glass industry until the late 1950s. When some restrictions on uranium were lifted, some companies started manufacturing it again, but at that time the health effects of radiation were much better known and also after the nukes public perception of uranium wasn't exactly good nowadays apparently there are still a few companies

making

it but i couldn't find anything for sale that i know of if you want to get some uranium glass , you can really only buy the old stuff.

I found this all really interesting and I've wanted to work with uranium for a while so I decided to make some uranium glass. My original plan was to buy some uranium ore and then refine it and use that purified uranium to put it into some glass. However, I learned from Cody in Cody's lab that the government doesn't really like it when you show how to refine uranium on the internet. Instead, I had to start with an already purified source and was able to find some DU. This means that it lacks the isotope to do things like generate nuclear power. power or make nuclear weapons however it is still good for

making

glass nitrate is the salt of uranium nitrate and when pure it can form these nice yellow crystals as well as looking pretty even though it looks relatively mundane and that's something I've always I found it interesting about radiation as this urinary nitrate just sits there it's shooting out thousands of extremely small particles but they're too small to see or feel so there's no way to naturally perceive that it's there and this was a one of the main reasons it took so long to discover radiation to know it's there has to be detected using some sort of instrument or setup and many different methods have been developed over the years today one of the easiest ways it's just using a geiger counter but before starting this project i didn't have one however when working with something

radioactive

like uranium it's an absolute must so i looked online and ended up buying this one on amazon which wasn't very expensive, but supposed to be decent. i turned it on and let it stabilize for a minute and they saw the natural background radiation was about fifteen CPM CPM stands for counts per minute and it is a reading of how many

radioactive

particles it detects in a minute there is radiation everywhere in the environment and always you are being bombarded by it naturally and this reading of 15 CPM is pretty low now it was time to test it with the uranium so i put it next to it clearly there was an effect on this geiger counter that was going to be more than usable for this project but unfortunately it wasn't going to be very accurate this was because most of the radiation uranium emits is in the form of something called alpha particles and this counter can't even detect them it can only pick up magnify rays beta and gamma it's putting out which are significantly less than the Alpha despite this although it will still be very useful because I don't really need a super accurate reading I just need to know if it's there or not now before it started hitting I just wanted try something else: nitrate in the urinal was supposed to fluoresce under ultraviolet light.

I put some on a plate turned off the lights and shot it with my black light and well it was definitely fluorescent this got me thinking maybe to make the uranium glass I could directly throw the nitrate from the urinal into some molten glass However when I looked it up it didn't seem like that was the case, I mean I could barely find anything on how to make uranium glass in general, but out of all the information I found it always mentioned using something called sodium dye Based on this and considering the fact that I had never made uranium glass before, I thought it was probably best for me to use that now as well, although this meant that the project was going to be a bit more fun because I would have to make a little uranium chemistry to convert urinal nitrate to the sodium dye that is innate to start with, i had to add the urinal nitrate to a beaker and normally i would have waited quickly for some paper and then threw it away, however , I was working with a uranium compound this time, so I had to be much more careful because the off dust tag LED is not only radioactive, it is also toxic and can lead to heavy metal poisoning.

To be as safe as possible I carefully weighed everything directly into the beaker and in total used about 15 grams, then dropped in a magnetic stir bar and poured in a little water which should have been enough to dissolve all the urinary nitrate. the shaker and waited for it all to go away but unfortunately it ended up being a bit cloudy I tried adding a bit more water just in case there wasn't enough but it didn't seem to do much this was unfortunate because now it meant I had to clean things up a bit and really didn't wanted to have to work with a uranium solution luckily however cleaning it up wasn't exactly going to be very difficult and just had to do a quick filtration I did this by running it through some cotton balls and some sea light which is like sand superfine the stuff that goes through initially tends to be a little cloudy so i let it run for a bit and then swapped it out for a new beaker i put the other stuff back in after this it was perfectly nice and clear but still there was a lot of uranium solution all over the funnel and on the cotton and sea light so i washed it with a little water when all the water had finally gone through.

I removed the funnel and the solution was good enough to use now to turn this into the sodium dice that is innate. I had to react with something called sodium hydroxide this is also known as lye and is often sold as a drain cleaner and that's where I get all of mine for this reaction it also had to dissolve all of it in water but the exact concentration it didn't really matter. I figured something around 30 percent by weight would probably be good, so it measured about 70 mils of water and dumped in about 30 grams, all dissolves relatively easily in water, but also generates a lot of heat, so that by the end the solution is usually pretty hot however I wanted it to be closer to room temperature or maybe just a little warm so I put it in the fridge to chill when I felt it was good I took it out of the fridge and i started slowly adding it to the urinary nitrate almost immediately it started forming this weird solid donut type of thing and this was all terrible sodium and the reason this happened was because unlike urinary nitrate and sodium hydroxide sodium durin 8 is pretty much insoluble in water so by the time it was formed it separated what you had to do now is basically keep adding the sodium hydroxide until it stopped making the DNA at this point it was still pretty simple because the solution was nice and clear and very obvious to see, however I finally started to stir it up and it all got a little cloudy so I couldn't.

I only rely on looking at it to know when it was done. I had to keep testing the pH. i did this just with some cheap ph papers and kept it in the hydroxide until it turned blue which told me the ph was about 10. after this i let it sit there for a while to make sure everything reacted completely and then filtered it. I just did it by pouring it through a plain coffee filter and when most of the water had gone through, washed it out a bit. A few times with distilled water I let it sit there until all the water was gone too and now I had some relatively clean Innate Sodium Dyer although it was still wet and sticky and I would have to dry it but it was going to take forever just sitting here on the strainer with other chemicals.

I usually just set up a fan on the side to help speed things up, but that would probably end up blowing a small amount of dust into the air and I really wasn't comfortable doing that. than with uranium, so I carefully took out the coffee filter, put it in a container and sucked it under a vacuum, the water vaporizes much more and this makes it dry much faster in an enclosed space, although as in In this vacuum chamber there is nowhere for the water vapor to go, so to fix this I included a bunch of dry salt at the bottom that would constantly collect the water vapor.

I took it out about five hours later and it was almost dry. I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't let it dry completely because I wanted to avoid as much dust as possible by keeping it slightly damp and a bit doughy. I was able to scrape it all off pretty safely without making dead clouds. In addition to the safety issue, I was concerned that if I let it dry completely for it to stick to the paper it would become impossible to separate. I was able to get most of it out and put it in a small bottle, but there was still some stuck to the paper.

This last part was a lot. more sloppy than I wanted it to be but I really had no choice I just did my best to scrape it all up and then everything that even remotely came in contact with the uranium was put in a special dump bin everything I took off was transferred to the same little bottle and I did that as carefully as possible but it was still a bit of a mess there was a bit of uranium that managed to get out to the outside of the bottle and of course I had to clean it off and I did this by just wiping it off a few times with a damp paper towel now with all the uranium safely in the bottle and nothing on the outside to poison me when I touched it.

I was ready to finish drying it to do this. i put it in the same vacuum chamber i used before and ran a very strong vacuum on it. I wanted it to be as absolutely dry as possible, so I left it there for three or four days, so I went back to it for a few days. then we pressurized the chamber and took it out and it worked fine it was very dry when dry like that although it does tend to give off dust which is obviously really horrible waste so that's why I just dried it completely in the final container I was storing it in so as not to having to move or manipulate it.

I went ahead and weighed what I had here and it turned out to be 9 grams, which was pretty much what I was expecting. Just for fun, I decided to try it with the Geiger counter and you can see that the glass was able to block most of the radiation. The reading I had was just slightly above the normal background level, but that completely changed when I moved it above. The reason this happened was that most of the radiation that was being emitted here was in the form of alpha and beta particles and they just couldn't go through glass as I mentioned before, although this counter can't pick up alpha particles in general, so what i was seeing here was probably mostly beta particles now another thing i wanted to try was shoot uv at it and i was surprised it didn't floor ass i mean maybe it was fluorescent and it was super faint but from what i could see , it was pretty dead I thought this was really interesting because logically you would assume that if you wanted to make glass fluoresce you would put something fluorescent on it, however I guess that's not the case and glass chemistry is a bit more complicated than he thought, but anyway, now that he had the innate sodium dye, he could start trying to make the glass; however, I had never made glass before so I had no idea how to do it.

I looked around me. online and one of the best things i found was a video of ben who runs the applied science channel he gave a lot of good details and advice and pretty much everything i will do here is based on things i learned from him. i also got some tips from Andy who runs the channel called how to do everything when it comes to glass making its not very straight forward and there are many different ingredients that can be used for beginners although bettan only recommends using a mixture of three different things silica , soda ash and boric acid so that's what I chose and all of these ingredients were reallyeasy to get and I ordered them all from Amazon.

I then bought a jar and made 60 grams of each and shook it to mix it up a bit like this, it would probably work for making glass, but the powder was still too coarse in my opinion, so to fix this, I put it all in one blender and ran it for a few minutes apparently it worked pretty well and after this it was a super fine powder and looked like flour it was definitely much better than before and I was hoping it would give me a better quality glass before I added uranium to it though it was a good idea to test it to make sure it worked.

I had never made glass before and it was probably a good idea to get at least some experience doing it before trying it with uranium. The general idea behind making glass was very simple and all I had to do was melt this powder, so I added a bunch to this dish that I had that was normally used to melt things like gold and put it in a little oven due to the fact that it was bright orange, it was obviously quite hot and I set it to around 1100 C. I wasn't entirely sure it would be hot enough to melt but when I checked a few minutes later, It seemed like it was working and now that there was more room on the plate I decided to add a little more glass at this high temperature the sodium carbonate was mostly melting but the boric acid was breaking down to boron trioxide and water vapor, which caused it to bubble up a bit and you can see this if you look very closely at the main purpose of However, these chemicals have much lower melting points than silica and help lower the overall melting point of mix. well mm getting the temperature that high is very difficult in general and because of this additives are almost always included to lower the melting point in my case because I used boron trioxide the end result would be a kind of borosilicate glass in general borosilicate glass it's much less sensitive to big changes in temperature and I was hoping this would help prevent the glass from breaking when it cooled, but I let it sit like that for about 30 minutes anyway and waited for it to fully liquefy when it finally looked as if almost done, i used to use a torch to preheat a square of graphite, then carefully take the dish out of the oven and emptied all the glass.

I let it cool down for the next 15-20 minutes and it looked pretty decent. a normal piece of glass and he was actually quite proud of it. I really thought it would break but apparently it didn't and I was still a bit skeptical so I left it overnight to see if anything would change and the next. day was still totally fine as far as i could tell this glass mix worked pretty well and the process seemed to be relatively simple after doing it just once i was definitely not a glass making pro but i felt i was ready to i involved the uranium to make this i just had to add a bit of uranium to the glass mix but it was still a bit thick if you added it like that it wouldn't mix properly and make a really uneven glass so far.

I had really done my best to avoid working with powdered uranium but unfortunately I had no choice here I just did my best to grind it very carefully and try to make as little powder as possible when I was done I put it all back together. in the bottle and anything that came in contact with the uranium was put in my waste container now to be added to the glass mix. The amount of uranium he needed was very small, however he did not know exactly how much he had. To add because from what I found online some recipes use as little as 0.1 percent uranium and some as high as 3%, this concentration was done by weight and I decided to go with a moderate 0.25 percent.

I figured this way if the final glass didn't shine well I could just add a little more 0.25 percent, although it was hardly needed and for what I had here I only had to add 4 grams to mix it up. I stirred it for several minutes and when I was done. it looked the same as it did before the uranium, as far as I could tell it was still very white and I guess there wasn't enough of it to noticeably change the color. The dish from before was already in the oven and I started to load it. with a few tablespoons i waited for all of this to melt and then added some more and left it there for about half an hour also as a safety point this was all being done in my range hood in case it released some uranium vapors actually probably there wasn't much or any of it, but it was obviously something I had to be very careful about when I checked it out and it seemed ready.

I preheated that block of graphite again then took the plate out and poured in what was hopefully uranium glass while it was still red hot hard to tell but as it cooled it was definitely colored this time it also shrank a bit and when i felt it was solid enough to move, i picked it up and put it on some glass insulation with a white background the color was much easier to see and it was a really nice bright yellow it was exactly what i expected it to look like and ,so far things seem to be going pretty good in the next one what i had to do was test and see if it was fluorescent so i picked up my uv lamp and turned it on and i mean it was working the glass was definitely a little bit green , but it wasn't very impressive to say the least, my first assumption that this was at 0.25% just wasn't enough uranium, though I thought maybe it was still too hot and needed to wait for it to cool down, so I decided to be a little patient and try it again a few minutes later. this time it still wasn't amazing but it sure was better than before.

I then let it cool completely to room temperature before retesting and this time it worked great. The 0.25% uranium I used was apparently more than enough and I guess I wasn't going to have to add more, there was still a bit of glass left in the dish so I poured that in as well and made another little flat glass thing, this it also worked great once it got to room temperature and it glowed really nice under the uv after doing this it was getting late so i had to drop everything and come back in the morning sadly though when i checked the glass one of them had broken spontaneously, these pieces were much larger than the first test and was looking like this though could cause some problems, one of them was still fine and I thought maybe just one of them braking was just bad luck, then almost like the forest somehow knew what i was thinking it responded by splitting in half just as i was sitting across from me this was completely random so unfortunately i didn't get it on camera but this made it clear to me that there was a problem because this was happening because it had cooled the glass quickly and unevenly and caused a lot of internal stress what i thought might work to fix this was to just insulate the glass and let it cool very slowly the end result still it would be under a lot of stress but i was hoping i would get it down enough that it would stop spontaneously falling apart for this one i also decided to try and make it a lot bigger and loaded up a lot more glass then i spilled it all and by the time it looks nice enough solid, i put it between some insulation then moved it to one of my benches cooled down and initially it seemed to be working fine, however a few hours later i heard the sound of glass breaking and this is what i came back to.

A lot of stress had clearly built up and it was apparently enough to trigger a bit. a couple of inches, the surviving pieces didn't seem to be too brittle, at least when I was pounding them, however, pounding them with heat would probably have caused them to explode. I decided to try breaking off a piece with pliers and it was surprisingly difficult. The moment it broke it just blew up from all that internal stress, I thought this was really cool but what I wasn't a fan of was all the powdered uranium glass dust flying everywhere. After doing this, I realized my only real option. was to anneal it to do this you would have to hold the glass at around 450 C for several hours at this temperature glass is solid but still liquid enough that its atoms can move around this happens very slowly that's why it takes several hours, but allows them to move to new positions and reduce overall internal stress.

This is the correct way to do things and is what I ideally would have done before, but was trying to avoid it because I only had one oven. much harder and slower to get things done, but thought I'd give it a try. I still really wanted to make a big puck so I melted down the rest of the powder I had and poured in another one and then while it cooled. I quickly changed the oven temperature to 450C and put it to anneal this would take at least several hours and I was planning on leaving it overnight in the meantime I picked up all the broken glass I had and because I don't have an oven now I melted it down with a torch now I What I wanted to try here was to blow some glass with it but I had no idea what I was doing and it was a total failure instead I just made several beads that I thought were small enough that I could get by without annealing them, however, at the last minute I had the great idea to anneal them in case I knew it was a bad idea to open the oven, but I did it anyway and it was a bad idea.

I tried to put it on quickly, but where the glass touched the record, a crack began to form. I then tried to move it to get a better look at it and it breaks for him in all the places I touched. I actually thought this was cool, but now I was worried it would end up blowing up again, so I took it out and blowtorched it to heat it up again and melt the surface like this. I was hoping even if there were cracks if I sealed the top I could keep it from falling apart after this I put it back in the oven and let it all anneal overnight the next day I was worried I had opened it up and seen a mess, but it turned out to be ok, at first i was a little disappointed that the big piece cracked a lot, but i actually ended up liking it.

I think having her like that made her a little more interesting. What I had now was how radioactive these pieces of glass were, considering the amount of uranium I put in them, it was definitely pretty low, but I still wanted to try it. The Geiger counter I had though not the best for this and I decided to invest in a better one this one is much more sensitive and has a larger detection area and can also detect alpha particles to test it. I did it with the largest piece and with a uranium concentration of only 0.25 percent.

I guess the reading would be really low, however it was more than what I got with the pure urinary nitrate because now I was seeing the alpha particles. The detector also had a totally different shape and a much larger surface area that allowed it to collect many more particles. As a unit, CPM only shows the strict number of particles it detects and doesn't differentiate between things like alpha, beta, or gamma, although this is important when trying to judge how dangerous radioactive sources are because not all are created equal for this reason. sometimes it's better to go with a different unit like sieverts which will account for this in microsieverts per hour this gave a reading of about 5.5 and according to this I got from the Canadian Nuclear Association it means if you put your cheek against it now it would be like getting a dental X-ray every two hours for one of the pearls I got which was only about 1.3 microsieverts per hour and this was only because it was so much smaller in any case although at this radiation level this glass is usually safe to have around and handle occasionally, however it would be a really bad idea to stuff your pockets with them or something and carry it around all the time, it might be fine to wear occasionally as a necklace or something for a short amount of time but I don't think may it be the best idea in a fairly recent video, I said I wasn't actually going to do endorsements anymore and it was mainly because I didn't feel comfortable doing them, one of my biggest problems. it was that I didn't like being told what to say or covering specific marketing topics or buzzwords even though I would never promote anything I really didn't like.

I just didn't like this part. However I decided that I would start making them again if I could have almost free reign over them and when this idea came to me I honestly didn't think anyone would actually do this but to my surprise brilliant approached me and they did exactly that. before. In fact, I have never heard of this brilliant, but I have been using it for about a week now and I really like it. I mostly use it on my phone, but it's also available on computer just by going to their website. lots of mini courses and things like math and physics and chemistry and computer science and they do it in a way that I think is really funbecause they take a different, more active approach to learning that makes it feel a lot more like a game. cover a lot of the fundamentals and i have mainly focused on the physics ones because physics has always been a big gap in my knowledge what i also like is that it is very easy to start and stop because it is divided into many small sections usually , I don't have a lot of time to do things, but I keep making progress, I even do it randomly for several minutes at a time, but with all that being said, if you're interested in learning something. new you should definitely check it out great they offer a free version you can try first and then if you like it you can subscribe to the premium version which has a lot more stuff and a lot more features also if you decide to go for the premium version . you should sign up using my link which is brilliant dot org slash nile red because they are giving a 20% discount to the first 200 people to use it but anyways i hope you enjoyed the video and see you in the next one as usual there is great things to all my followers on patreon, everyone who supports me can watch my videos at least 24 hours before i post on youtube, also everyone on patreon can message me directly and if you support me with $5 or more. you will get your name at the end as seen here