Nuclear Physicist Debunks - The Green Radioactive Glow Myth

Nuclear Physicist Debunks - The Green Radioactive Glow Myth

There are many Green Radioactive Glow Myths out there that have been misleading the general public about nuclear energy and radioactivity for decades.
In this video, I debunk the Green Radioactive Glow Myth that has stigmatised the nuclear industry. I go step by step explaining and debunking the Green Radioactive Glow Myth.

Hope you find the video about Nuclear Physicist Debunks - The Green Radioactive Glow Myth helpful Don't forget to like and subscribe and share with friends and family members.

[YourFriendlyNuclearPhysicist]

Do you like these debunks episodes? Let me know what myth you’d want me to debunk next! Thanks for watching!☢️👩🏽‍🔬🧪🥼

[jeremiahshoemaker]

A bit of a different theory here:
As an NDT student, my instructor told me a very detailed account of where he thinks the "green glowing liquid" stereotype came from. As the story goes:
He was a liquid penetrant inspection technician working for a nuclear power plant manufacturer in the 1970s.
Part of the inspection process during a plant shutdown was to inspect the turbine. To do this, site carpenters construct a large tank to "dunk" the turbine fan in liquid penetrant. For optimum detection, the penetrant is designed to fluoresce crack indications when exposed to UV black light...

The penetrant is made on-site with water and the chemical compound and is mixed together. The part to be inspected is covered in the penetrant, allowed to dry, and developer is sprayed to bring out surface-open indications through capillary action. Finally, any indications are evaluated.
This was the (early) 1970s and plant regulations stated that used water-soluble penetrant could be drained and flushed out with the plant's cooling water.
Well, this power station flushed directly into the Pacific Ocean near a major interstate...
He suspects many witnesses saw the intentional discharge of the liquid penetrant: a GREEN (by design), GLOWING (under UV, including sunlight), LIQUID (very low viscosity and floats on water), and assumed it to be a plant leak. The Three Mile Island incident a few years later would recall any such memories from witnesses and cement the stereotype in the public consciousness as part of the anti-nuclear movement.
I would love to hear your thoughts!

[asterix]

You can still find Uranium glass in thrift stores. People collect them and they do sell on ebay. If you’re not sure if it’s Uranium glass, shine a black light on it and you’ll see the glow.

[johnbenson]

When I was volunteering at a local aviation museum, we received guidelines to no longer accept donations of old aircraft instruments that were luminous due to the radium used in them.
I don't know if this was UK wide or not.

[skodovkar]

Radioactive material is actually still sometimes used in watches. Phosphorus glows only when charged with light. Tritium is used in tiny little tubes to produce light independently of previous illumination. Tubes have some coating reacting to radioactivity that results in glow. It glows continually. It lasts around 12 years and gets weaker over the time due to half life of tritium.

[cdh]

my dad (retired nuclear physicist) had quite a uranium glass collection.. I also grew up with uranium ore (that we found ourselves in the Austrian mountains when I was a kid) at home. I remember running around in my pre-teens with a Geiger-counter and watching it go off drastically whenever we found some. When talking about this topic with friends, I jokingly say that's most likely the reason I'm bald (and after a short pause add "...and glow in the dark" ;))
Also after the Chernobyl incident (I was 7 and still remember his pager going off that evening very vividly, as my dad was working for the governments early radiation protection system back then), we usually measured the levels of Cs-137 in mushrooms and so on.. still for many years later, half of the mushrooms would be eaten, the other half would be dried and measured, obviously with way too high levels of what would be considered "normal". If it was good enough for him to eat, then so it was for us, I guess..
While nuclear physics was a quite interesting topic to me, I personally was always drawn more towards astronomy and astrophysics instead though..

[ChipNRat]

Only "glow" I've learned to be afraid of is the blue glow, but only when it's outside of water. Inside of water it's just cool.

Love these videos, not nearly enough nuclear physicists or people in the nuclear space giving out good information!

[Twenty_Six_Hundred]

As a kid my great grandfather gave me his old watch. Was probably from around the 50s era. It glowed in the dark on the tips of the hand and hour markings. I used to think it was amazing but obviously had no idea how it did this.

[peters.]

Great Channel, thanks for your work. I'm working in environmental physics where a lot of radionuclides (natural ones or products of atomic bomb tests) are used for dating. I think a video about natural radioactivity would be really interesting for viewers.

[therandomloller]

I love your videos, I only discovered your channel today but subscribed after watching the first one I saw where you reacted to the Simpsons. My dad was an engineer in a nuclear power plant but in the civil sector not nuclear and he left because while there weren't actually problems in the power plant, there were a lot of problems that were due to paperwork and administration and politics so with all the misinformation and exaggerating of nuclear for political reasons, it's nice to actually have educational videos that don't try to tell you how to think and push you into an anti or pro nuclear stance. It just is. I like that. Education for the win! 🙌

[pmh]

I grew up in the antique industry and I'm a jeweler and gem wholesaler now. when I was little I used to see and work with uranium glassware and now as a gem wholesaler I've learned there is a somewhat natural form in a gemstone Hyalite Opal which glows and is pretty rare I've only ever seen one Hyalite Opal faceted of gem quality in person because it's so rare and it will contaminate the entire work space with fine radioactive particles. but a lot of gemstones are actually radioactive and have been irradiated by man or in nature maybe that can be a topic for one of your future videos

[techbio]

Great debunk. I realise it might be a bit depressing but a mention of the harm to women who painted the dials of the watches would have been insightful, and to honour their memory. The use of radium in the early days before it's true danger was discovered reminds of me of the use of xray machines in Pharmacies in the 50's. I'm NOT that old haha, but I do remember being told about it. Some bright spark came up with the idea of using an xray machine to measure the fitment of shoes (which Pharmacies used to sell) - put your feet in the machine and see if the shoe fits. No film plate, just a straight live display. No lead shielding so the shop keepers and pharmacist would be exposed day in day out every time the machine was used. As a lark, people would put their hands and any body part they could squeeze into the machine to see their bones. However while the radium dial painter's cancer was definitively linked to the radium (in particular the habit of licking the brush (that had radium paint on it) to form the hairs into a point and probably the main reason it was so harmful, cancer related to the use of shoe fitting xray machines was never proven.

[JustwatchingYouTube]

I once worked on a large nuclear site. One spring a local village was covered in mysterious green dust. This caused a bit of panic because it must have come from the nuclear site, it being green and all. A small sample was taken and I tested it. Turned out it could have come from the site, the site's flora, it was pollen.

[kenibnanak]

In the US many low paid laborers died of radiation sickness as a result of licking the little brushes used to apply drops of Radium to watch and clock dials. They used a little brush to apply a sticky mix of Radium to precise places on the dials and timepiece hands. When the brush spread under use a common practice was to wet it with their lips so the hairs would stick together. When a laborer got too sick to work they were replaced and the cycle began again with a new worker. No one realized and no one cared for tens of decades. This continued until sometime in the 1950s. At the World's Fair in 1964 at the Ford exhibit school children were given little plastic green FORD logo pins that glowed in the dark to wear upon exiting. I used to have 2 or 3 of them as I had been through the exhibit several times. Parents and teachers were assured the label devices were safe. Some kids wore theirs for days. Decades later it was revealed no, actually each one emitted about 0.1 roentgen per hour and anyone having one should dispose of it. I sometimes wonder what happened to those pretty ladies that had big cardboard boxes of those lapel pins they handed out to to the crowds of children. Did any of them ever get sick and if so, did anyone ever recognize what was causing their hair loss or gastrointestinal disorders?

[trevorsheldon-gaylor]

A friend of mine had a really, really red bowl from the 1930's; passed down from a family member. He bought a Geiger counter and started tested random things. He tested the bowl; blew up the counter.

[JetDom]

I think I still have a radium watch somewhere, another great video. By the way I read your thesis on machine learning for fuel fabrication, very interesting I am not a nuclear physicist just have an interest especially when it comes to nuclear physics when applied to power and the operations around this. I agree with all your conclusions I could see a reduction in costs of manufacture if you apply machine learning which in the long run could reduce nuclear power production costs although the reactor itself may still be expensive.

[alexandrutzz]

Do you plan on making a video about radioactive contamination? For example, the Chernobyl graphite blocks.

[John-ciyk]

The women who would paint the dials for the watches of US servicemen in World War II were known as the radium girls. Before putting on fresh paint for each number they would put the brush on their tongues to make it thinner. Didn't end well for them. Thanks for video and thumbs up.

[rickperez]

Just found this channel. Watched them all back to back. Can't wait for more content, as the presenter makes a potentially (usually) dense topic easily understandable.

[petersouthernboy]

Cherenkov Radiation is the BLUE glow seen around spent fuel assemblies stored and remotely handled underwater in nuclear power plants.