(He's also the person who started the Oak Ridge Associated Universities' uranium glass collection in the 1980s.)įor the most part, sci-fi movies have drummed up fear surrounding radioactivity, Frame says. Paul Frame, a senior health physicist who specializes in radiation protection. And it has been used as a coloring agent, starting with the Romans who used it to paint mosaics, says Dr. That being said, while your mind might be quick to jump to nuclear power plant disasters when you hear "uranium," the naturally occurring mineral is in just about everything-soil, rocks, air, water, according to the Centers for Disease Control's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The Environmental Protection Agency notes that some antiques can emit "very low levels of radiation for thousands of years, if not longer." While it's low, the radiation can register on a hand-held Geiger counter, so it is present. When UV light shines on uranium glass it glows like an alien lifeform. Glassmakers can achieve the look of uranium glass using other neon green colorants, but they don't react to black light the way the real thing does. Today, uranium is still used as a colorant in some countries, but glassmakers in the United States stopped using it in the 1970s, when there were more easily accessible materials available. This is when uranium glass reached the height of its popularity in the United States between 19, with more than 4 million pieces of decorative uranium produced, according to Oak Ridge Associated Universities' Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity. According to Michigan State University, the use of uranium was deregulated in 1958, and production of uranium glass picked up again-except this time, only depleted uranium was used. and uranium was widely used to color glassware until 1943, when the government started regulating its use so that they could save uranium to build atom bombs. Whitney Granger’s uranium glass curio cabinet Whitney Granger What Is Uranium Glass?Īccording to The Glass Museum, the glow-in-the dark glassware is believed to have been invented by glassmaker Josef Riedel, who used uranium to color glassware in his factory in Bohemia in the mid 1800s.
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