Hacker News Reader

Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

Silly question, but is radium paint that bad? Like you wouldn't want to eat it obviously, or wear it on your arm your whole life, but would occasional exposure be an issue compared to other sources?

I could only find this [0], but I'm not sure how to find information about radium paint.

[0] https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/around-us/doses-dail...

View on HN

Amateur watchmaker here. Its half life is ~1600 years, so it's still plenty hot. Hot enough, in fact, to burn out the phosphor in the radium paint, so it stops glowing, but flakes off as radium dust as the binders in the paint break down. Radium produces mostly alpha radiation, which is blocked by glass or your skin, but if you inhale or ingest the particles, it's not good for you, as the alpha particles will go directly into the surrounding tissue. The people exposed to the worst of it would be the ones stripping the radium paint off the dials and refinishing them, as that generates a lot of dust that you might inhale.

A real life horologist! Ok so primarily ingestion is the concern, but if it's sealed in epoxy or something it's not immediately dangerous.

While I have you here - what do you think of Clickspring? Do you have any cool escapement pictures?

You may be interested in this story https://www.wabe.org/radium-girls-the-true-story-of-poisoned... which does involve people literally eating radium.

> The factory manufactured glow-in-the-dark watch dials that used radium to make them luminous.

> The women would dip their brushes into radium, lick the tip of the brushes to give them a precise point, and paint the numbers onto the dial. That direct contact and exposure led to many women dying from radium poisoning.

Thanks for that I remember reading that story and seeing the pictures, so I might leave that link unclicked for today

I don't think sealed radium dials would be a big deal as long as they remained intact, but I can see how you wouldn't necessarily want to have them in a publicly accessible place where the glass might accidentally be broken etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com