Dishes Radioactive Enough to Take an X-ray!

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]When grandma takes out the antique orange plates, I take out my geer counter. And that's because these plates get their amazing orange color from a mixture of lead and uranium. Turns out the secret to grandma's apple pie was heavy metal poisoning. But did you know that these crazy things are radioactive enough to take an X-ray? We've shown the radiation that comes off of these plates before using a device called a cloud chamber. And as you can see, the plate throws off tons of particles. But one of the things we can't see with this are the X-rays that the plate puts out. For that, we picked up some old school X-ray film. We fashioned a dark room bag out of a black plastic trash bag so we can get the film as close to the radiation source as possible. And then between the film and the plate, we put various objects, some metal, some not. The idea is that these will stop the radiation from reaching the film and leave a shadow when we develop it. While these plates are radioactive, it's a pretty low level. So, we had to leave this alone for more than a week without disturbing it to take our X-ray. So, not exactly practical for medical imaging.

[00:01:06]Sorry to bust any ideas of this method saving you on insurance costs. But after a week, we could develop the film. And sure enough, we see the distinct shapes of many of the objects that we put on the plate. If you want to see us fire up a proper X-ray tube and see all the things we can do with it, check out the full video on our