this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Naturally occuring Uranium is, really, not very radioactive. You can even eat it and have it pass through your digestive system without any significant negative impact - there was a scientist who (slightly facetiously) used to do this in lectures to prove the safety of nuclear power and lived to a ripe old age.
We use it in power plants because it's fissile, not because it's radioactive, it's easier to sustain chain reactions with constant output.
Spent nuclear fuel, however, is extremely radioactive because when we fission Uranium it splits into very radioactive isotopes of Caesium, Iodine, Xenon etc. plus a ton of minor actinides.
Well it was from an old chemistry set, I would be impressed if it had 95% purity and god knows what the other 5% are.
Also it depends a little bit on how big the vial was, a small HPLC vial may only have contained 100mg, the buttplug style vial they often use to showcase ores/salts may contain like 1kg of it. And also if it was properly sealed or just plugged.
Last factor would be time, a Prof swallowing 10mg once a year has contact with this stuff for 60 days, but lets say she got it from her brother when he was age 15 that would mean semi-close contact 8 hours a day for 80 years. Also the Prof hopefully didnt swallow more of it as uranium apart from being radioactive is also toxix although it takes like 8g to kill one, given the density thats not a too big pill to swallow.
Finally its still only a chance, every bit of radioactivity that hits you could be the one causing cancer.
Yup - most likely a small chunk of ore. The glass vial itself would block the vast majority of alpha emission so it's very unlikely in this case that it had anything to do with the cancer I'd say