Denis,
Being from a place that has a special interest and expertise in
radioactive materials, I can offer some information, but perhaps not
all of what you may be looking for. I'm no glass guru.
Uranium comes in the form of several hundred types of
uranium-containing minerals, but it appears most widely in minerals
like metatorbernite, autunite, carnotite, and uraninite
(pitchblende). The first principal uses of uranium oxides in industry
were as pigments for ceramic glazes and the yellow-green fluorescent
glass like Miodownik found. The correlation he makes is strong, but
since not all uranium minerals fluoresce and a number of other
non-radioactive minerals do (such as lead), to some degree one could
argue that Miodownik's quest was perhaps futile if he truly tied
fluorescence to radioactivity.
If he was looking for uranium glass, I think he might just as well
have been looking for yellow-colored glass.
Todd
>Hi all
>
>A bit of a trivia question.
>
>Attached is a link to Nature News, the chatty gee-whizz stories from
>the august journal Nature. This one is about a materials scientist
>who is creating a reference collection of unusual materials [many
>weird synthetics]. It contains the following paragraphs:
>
>'Miodownik trawls the globe in search of additions to his
>collection. On a recent trip to Australia, he found himself in the
>remote uranium-mining town of Broken Hill in New South Wales. He
>started hunting through antique shops there to find a special type
>of glass.
>
>'Miodownik explains that in the early twentieth century people
>thought that radioactive materials had beneficial health properties.
>For this reason, they manufactured glassware containing uranium,
>especially in places such as Broken Hill that had an abundance of
>the element.
>
>'In the Australian antique shops, Miodownik flashed an ultraviolet
>light on various glass pieces to find one that glowed, a sign that
>it contained uranium. When he found a bowl that did just that, he
>brought it back to London and added it to the library.
>
>[full link - http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050328/full/050328-5.html]
>
>Apart from the small matter of Broken Hill mining silver, lead and
>zinc and no appreciable uranium, nor being a notable decorative
>glass manufacturing centre, I was wondering from some of the many
>glass gurus on the list what added elements cause flourescence such
>as described. Was Dr Miodownik's bargain hunting futile?
>
>cheers
>
>Denis
--
Todd A. Hanson
Curator
Bradbury Science Museum
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
(505) 665-2085
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