Radioactive Rare Earth Metals

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golddie

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 3, 2009
Messages
515
In yesterdays newspaper they said Malaysia is going into the production of these metals and talked about radioactivity of the metals.
In the same paper there was another article that wrote about a women who was working in a factory with rare earth metals and had a son that was born handicapped.
Which rear earth metal is radiactive
 
The Gebeng plant was thrust into the limelight after a New York Times report said the “long term storage of thorium waste was still unresolved. The ore to be imported for processing in Malaysia will have 3% to 5% of the thorium per tonne found in the tin mine tailings that Mitsubishi had processed.''

This raised alarm bells and the critics are unconvinced - to them, the risks of radioactive pollution is very real because refining rare earth minerals usually leaves thousands of tonnes of low level radioactive waste behind.

Thorium is low level radioactive.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/thorium.html
 
I guess we don't have to worry about the metals in computers being radioactive.
I see the radioactive sign in my fire alarm at home so when there is radioactivity they probably have to put a label on it
 
I think I can clear up the confusion somewhat here about this radioactivity question about the rare earths. As I remember they are mined from a material (ore) known as Monazite Sand which contains all the rare earths and also thorium. It is the thorium which is radioactive, a beta emitter. That's where the radioactivity comes from. When the rare earths are first extracted to concentrate them the first step is to separate the thorium from them. By the way, your smoke detector in your home uses the radioactive element Americum which is quite toxic and poisonous so don't swallow any parts of your smoke detector. Regards, Chris.
 
I am looking for a analytical method for testing soil samples for rare earth metals.
Any advice?
 
hyderconsulting said:
By the way, your smoke detector in your home uses the radioactive element Americum which is quite toxic and poisonous so don't swallow any parts of your smoke detector. Regards, Chris.
Damn! There goes dinner for tonight. :lol:

Harold
 
hyderconsulting said:
I think I can clear up the confusion somewhat here about this radioactivity question about the rare earths. As I remember they are mined from a material (ore) known as Monazite Sand which contains all the rare earths and also thorium. It is the thorium which is radioactive, a beta emitter. That's where the radioactivity comes from. When the rare earths are first extracted to concentrate them the first step is to separate the thorium from them. By the way, your smoke detector in your home uses the radioactive element Americum which is quite toxic and poisonous so don't swallow any parts of your smoke detector. Regards, Chris.


A man in America was actually going through the phases of building a nuclear reactor successfully in his shed using lots of parts from smoke detectors under the guidance of old dictionaries and science mags from the 50's, his experiment went wrong and that street is gonna have unacceptable levels of radiation for thousands of years now.

heres a link. http://www.wesjones.com/silverstein1.htm

and for those that cant be bothered to read it take a look at this paragraph.

''To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to "collect" detectors while at scout camp.) David wasn't sure where the americium-241 was located, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she'd be happy to help out with "your report." She explained that each detector contains only a tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix "to make sure that corrosion does not break it down and release it." Thanks to Weber's tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded them together with a blowtorch.''
 
It is the thorium which is radioactive, a beta emitter.

No, thorium is an alpha emitter, except for 2 very rare and transitory forms typically not found in nature.
thorium.jpg


Of the rare earth isotopes that are radioactive, the great majority are beta emitters.
 
Uraninite is a radioactive, uranium-rich mineral and ore with a chemical composition that is largely UO2, but also contains UO3 and oxides of lead, thorium, and rare earth elements. It is most commonly known as pitchblende (from pitch, because of its black color, and blende, a term used by German miners to denote minerals whose density suggested metal content, but whose exploitation was, at the time they were named, either impossible or not economically feasible). The mineral has been known at least since the 15th century from silver mines in the Erzgebirge Mountains, Germany. However, the type locality is Jáchymov in the Czech Republic, from where F.E.Brückmann described the mineral in 1727.[1] Pitchblende from the Johanngeorgenstadt deposit in Germany was used by M. Klaproth in 1789 to discover the element uranium.[2]
All uraninite minerals contain a small amount of radium as a radioactive decay product of uranium. Uraninite also always contains small amounts of the lead isotopes Pb-206 and Pb-207, the end products of the decay series of the uranium isotopes U-238 and U-235 respectively. Small amounts of helium are also present in uraninite as a result of alpha decay. Helium was first found on Earth in uraninite after having been discovered spectroscopically in the Sun's atmosphere. The extremely rare element technetium can be found in uraninite in very small quantities (about 0.2 ng/kg), produced by the spontaneous fission of uranium-238.
Uraninite is a major ore of uranium. Some of the highest grade uranium ores in the world were found in the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the initial source for the Manhattan Project) and in the Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Another important source of pitchblende is at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada, where it is found in large quantities associated with silver. It also occurs in Australia, Germany, England, and South Africa. In the United States it can be found in the states of New Hampshire, Connecticut, North Carolina, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
Uranium ore is generally processed close to the mine into yellowcake, which is an intermediate step in the processing of uranium.
 
And we wonder why its getting harder to buy chemicals and other scientific type devices. Very interesting story though. That kid should have gone on to study chemistry or physics.

sebastionay said:
hyderconsulting said:
I think I can clear up the confusion somewhat here about this radioactivity question about the rare earths. As I remember they are mined from a material (ore) known as Monazite Sand which contains all the rare earths and also thorium. It is the thorium which is radioactive, a beta emitter. That's where the radioactivity comes from. When the rare earths are first extracted to concentrate them the first step is to separate the thorium from them. By the way, your smoke detector in your home uses the radioactive element Americum which is quite toxic and poisonous so don't swallow any parts of your smoke detector. Regards, Chris.


A man in America was actually going through the phases of building a nuclear reactor successfully in his shed using lots of parts from smoke detectors under the guidance of old dictionaries and science mags from the 50's, his experiment went wrong and that street is gonna have unacceptable levels of radiation for thousands of years now.

heres a link. http://www.wesjones.com/silverstein1.htm

and for those that cant be bothered to read it take a look at this paragraph.

''To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to "collect" detectors while at scout camp.) David wasn't sure where the americium-241 was located, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she'd be happy to help out with "your report." She explained that each detector contains only a tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix "to make sure that corrosion does not break it down and release it." Thanks to Weber's tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded them together with a blowtorch.''
 
"These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision," says Minnaar. "It's simply presumed that the average person wouldn't have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas."

Famous last words..? :oops:

Where there's a will there's way...
 
Pick up a copy of "The Radioactive Boy Scout" for the whole sad but entertaining story. The poor guy had an awful series of his neglectful mother's boyfriends that drove him to turn to science as a refuge.
The really sad part is that after he was caught by several three letter federal agencies and his garden shed turned into a mini superfund site, he was again tangled up with Johnny Law for the same transgressions...
 
element47 said:
It is the thorium which is radioactive, a beta emitter.

No, thorium is an alpha emitter, except for 2 very rare and transitory forms typically not found in nature.
thorium.jpg


Of the rare earth isotopes that are radioactive, the great majority are beta emitters.
Pure thorium is an alpha emitter, but in nature the thorium in the minerals have had time to decay enough so the whole series of daughter isotopes is present. When the decay chain has reached the steady state then for each thorium atom that decays every step in the chain have a decay and we got 6 alpha and 4 beta decays to reach stable led.

Even in pure thorium it wouldn't take too long (~50 years or so) to fill up the decay chain to reach a steady state.

Göran
 
goran is right, thorium is an alpha emitter, its one of the few natural radioisotopes with huge half time of decay . theres also a large research about thorium usage as nuclear fuel except of uranium.

in our lab, we have some thorium nitrate and uranyl nitrate as a salts for common in hundred gram lots.other radioisotopes we store as a solutions with very low concentration due to their activity
 
guys!

i made a photo of thorium nitrate for you :lol:
i also measured the activity of whole flask by simple putting it on a NaI/Tl scintilation detector. after that, activity was 300 times higher than background ( for whole flask, no alpha or beta particles were measured, only x-rays and gamma from thorium and daughter radionucides.corpuscular radiation was absorbed in matter - salt itself or glass )
for comparison, same activity as flask with 50 g of thorium nitrate has 10 microliters of sodium pertechnetate solution i work with each day.

problems may occur when you ingest or inhale that salt
 

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As was noted earlier in this thread, the radioactivity in rare earth refinement comes from thorium, which is not itself a rare earth (it's an actinide). Thorium oxide is found in monazite along with rare earth oxides. Promethium is the only radioactive rare earth, but it is found only in minute, trace amounts. To be explicit, the rare earths consist of the elements Sc, Y, and the lanthanides (La-Lu).
 
hyderconsulting said:
By the way, your smoke detector in your home uses the radioactive element Americum which is quite toxic and poisonous so don't swallow any parts of your smoke detector. Regards, Chris.


Sorry for reviving this thread, but I was thinking about this a while back.

A couple years ago when I was still new at refining, I took apart a couple fire alarms that I was going to throw out. I did what I normally do, pick off certain things, then use a hammer/chisel and scrape everything else off the boards to process later. They were all from the mid/late 90s and they were pretty wore out. I don't remember seeing any stickers or radioactivity symbols on them.

Talking about refining gold, later in this thread, it says that the Americum is contained in a gold matrix. If there was any in these particular ones, should I be worried about any radioactivity from this? How harmful would 2 or 3 fire alarms be?

I may have already processed the components from the boards since then, or pieces of it could still be mixed in with my buckets of other components.

Edit - added
 
Here is a good video on the topic of rare earth metal, thorium and uranium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZhvO0FoopQ
 
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