FAQ- Radon - Safe Storage - etc.

[Richard Hull]

Radon gas is only given off by uranium ore, radium dials, monazite or thorium bearing rock, thorium metal and thorium chemicals. There is no other source of radon that we might encounter.

No radon comes off any uranium metal or uranic chemicals, Uranium glazes, glasses, etc. No radon or any radioactive gas is emitted by any man made radioisotope that we might encounter or use for calibration.

With regard to both radiation and radon gas, we must deal with personal opinion, education or lack there of and finally, paranoia. Personal opinion is based on a judgement call. This can be based on education or lack of it. Opinion is also often influenced by the thoughts of others who may be more or less informed than ourselves on a subject. (media reports, friends, books, etc.)

In the end, paranoia can trump all education, scientific or medical reports, or other factors. Paranonia is based on a more visceral, internal, often blinding human emotion that serves as a basis for many people's actions and decisions in a more or less "knee-jerk" fashion. Radiation is famous for clicking on the paranoia switch, especially in the un-informed or nervous-nelly masses.

Radiation affects the meat engine our brains are forced to ride around in. The amount of radiation, when extremely far above the natural background level is known to affect us in more or less well studied, deleterious ways.

Lower levels of radiation just above background and their effects are much more questioned and are known to have far less predictable effects that are often considered advantageous to health in some medical opinions and studied reports, (hormesis). In other camps, lower level radiation is shunned as still being bad, (ALARA - As Low As Reasonably Attainable).

While this FAQ can't deal with emotions, it can outline a number of reasons for sealing up radon emitting sources or not sealing them up, based on reasonable scientific observation and good radiological practice.

Question: How much radon emitting stuff do you have?

If you have a lot of radioactive ore as might be found in an avid radioactive mineral collector's home or in a stock of such ore to be sold to collectors, (rock shops - private dealer holdings, etc.), it is wise to store the bulk of such material in sealed containers. This is especially true if you live or work around the material daily or if it is held in a tighly sealed living space.

If you have a lot of radium dialed clocks, meters, instruments or other antique memorabilia, it is especially wise to store most of it in a sealed and contained environment if it must be kept in a well sealed, tight living space. The best solution is to never store such items in the same building where you sleep, live or eat.

It is not necessary to seal up any amount of radioactive ore or radium dialed instruments if they are stored in an infrequently used, closed, out building that is well separated from any living quarters. Open air shelters or other outdoor covered structures are fine as well.

An amusing and practical storage plan for larger amounts of ore is in an outdoor "rock garden" or other decorative free-air setting. Rain won't hurt the ore and when you need a piece for scientific work, examination or show-and-tells, it will be clean and mostly free of surface "daughter products".

How much radon is too much?...............................................

Again, we get into territory that is driven often by fear and litigious concerns. The knee-jerk ALARA types want you to live in 2 pCi/liter or less radon environments. The EPA and U.S. government recommends less than 4 pCi/liter living quarters, while some more liberal radiologists have found no effects present in 10 or even 50 pCi/liter living areas.

All of this is drivien by the term "living space" and more importantly, your time spent in that space. A stay at home mom and kids under 5 will spend a lot more time in such a space than a socially active working man who partys a lot, using his pad just as a place to crash.

You can breathe in some absolutely horrid levels of radon for short periods with no real worry. 1,000pCi/l can be readily handled provided you do not experience this level often or more blessedly, ever again. Smoking more than doubles the risk of lung cancer in any given radon environment.

Example: Many U miners in the early fifties were known to have worked in mines that contained thousands of pCi/liter of radon for 8 to 10 hour shifts day after day for years and they, almost to the man, smoked 2-3 packs (40-60 cigarettes) of unfiltered Lucky Strikes each day! Yes, they had a very high lung cancer rate, but the vast majority of them simply died of old age. This should be a sufficient example of how overblown some radon paranoia can be, especially for non-smokers in even a 50 pCi/liter environment.

I have set a lab limit in my outside lab, where I might spend only 10-15 hours a week at 25pCi/liter, (It rarely exceeds 10pCi/liter.) I do not store any radon emitting material in my lab except what I am or will be using in tests, calibrations, etc. All such items, when not in use, are held in gasket sealed military ammo tins. My actual living space in my home is at about 3pCi/l. ( I test using an electronic Pylon radon monitoring system that is lucas cell based with scintillator detection and counting.)

How do I contain radon?............................................

Simple....Place any source that you fear might emit too much radon to your liking in a gasket-sealed container. The gasket seal is important.....It must be there. You are now fully protected against long term inhalation of radon from this source.

If the gasketed container is large, several pieces of uranium or thorium ore or radium dialed items might be placed inside.

I prefer, and highly recommend, any one of three different standard sizes of U.S. military ammo boxes or "tins". These are all made of steel and have a heavy gasket to seal out moisture and air and a firm clamping system for constant pressure closure. The smallest is a 30 caliber sealed container about 3"X12"X10" the next is a 50 caliber ammo container that is about 6"X12"X10" and the final is a large 20mm cannon round container that is about 9"X15"X24". These "empties" are most often encountered in quantity at gun shows and range from $5.00 each for the smallest to $20.00 each for the largest.

Warning*** do not use old, hardened gaskets in older containers. The gasket needs to be highly compliant and easily deformed to affect the proper seal.

Fly in the Ointment ! .........................................

There is always a fly in the ointment, a down side to any fix or work-around. Storage of radon emitters in sealed containers is no exception to this rule. The interior of such a gasket sealed storage container will collect and harbor 100% of the 5 highly radioactive daughter products. This is far worse and more intense than the radiation emitted from the sealed source, itself !!!!!!!!!

After you have opened the container at some future date to use, view or show off your emitter, your hands will be loaded with radioactive daughter products and you will not be able to casually wash off the contamination as the contamination is at the single atom level and is lodged deep within your skin's pores. I have run the tests, personally, and found that just removing a large group of five really hot ore rocks contained in a 50 caliber ammuniation tin, left my hands with a count of ~8,000 cpm on them immediately after removal. Washing my hands, casually, still showed a 5,000 cpm level. A good scrubing with a nylon brush and plenty of soap dropped my hands to about 600 cpm.
A second scrubbing with the brush and soap left my hands stinging and a bit raw but took me down to about 350 cpm. The material remaining on my hands naturally decayed to near background in about 4 hours.

This is a terrible situation and quite startling as you can't eat without surgical gloves on your hands for about 5 hours.

Solution to the flies in the ointment.....................

1. When you need to use the sealed material, put on disposable surgical gloves

2. Open the container out of doors on a table and walk away for 3 minutes. This will release most of the trapped radon gas.

3. Next, dump the contents on the table out of doors and leave it for 3-5 hours. This will allow the bulk of the daughters to decay.

4. The items are now relatively safe to handle with the bare hands, but caution might still demand gloves or a large tweezer manipulator. The individual items may now be brought indoors to the lab or experimental area.

During all this time, the interior of the container will have its daughter product contamination decay away as well. There is little need to clean or scrub out the container prior to placing the material back in it for resealing. The gloves may be disposed of in the normal manner as the daughters will decay over a few hours.

Beyond the above caveats and precautions, you should develop your own procedures that are sensible and servicable to your own needs.

Regardless, If you choose to exercise your right to the general license granted all American citizens, you are obligated as a good citizen to protect yourself and others; to learn and practice good health physics and radiological handling and laboratory procedures. These procedures can be found in any number of good older books reported on in our books and references section.

As an amateur scientist you are just an unpaid scientist. Act like a scientist, always.

Richard Hull

[JohnCuthbert]

Does scrubbing your hands raw not convert a relatively harmless external radiation hazard into an internal one (albeit only for a while)?

[Richard Hull]

There is no harm done here for the periods mentioned and the hands were light rosey red and not bleeding, (no wounds). I have learned that just a single scrubbing is fine and that 1000 cpm on the hands is a sleeping dog that goes away without need a second painful pass at the sink where daughter products are concerned.

Trust me, you could wash all the daughter radionuclides from a storage box into a pepsi and drink it with no ill effects whatsoever. I would never do it, but it is of no real concern. If your day job involved this kind of thing for years and years, you might have concerns, but knee jerk fear and paranoia seem to creep into such discussions here regularly. We have the ALARA people who are the most voiciferous. It is their self appointed duty to see bogey men and herald same.

Radiation from publicly acquired sources, ores, etc., is not the bug-a-boo that it is often hyped to be, provided just a tiny amount of caution based on common wisdom is observed.

Richard Hull