yea its used in lots of electrochemistry, i had my hands on about 10 pieces of industrialsized titanium baskets about an arms lenght each, it came from chromeplating factory
THANK YOU for the note on cleanup! Almost no chem videos indicate how to safely dispose of used solutions, side products, etc, some of which are clearly pretty nasty. Chem youtube needs more notes like that!
Corium would also have a mess of different peaks at all sorts of different energy levels due to being a mixture of most radioactive isotopes known to man.
One would think that but most likely you would only see a few lines of the most relevant isotopes (for an example Cs-137). Tschernobyl was almost 40 years ago so the isotopes with a half life of 10-100 would dominate (and I think that are not that many AFAIK). Everything else goes under because your detector is saturated + other effects like compton scattering.
There's another way to get tungsten into solution too. Speaking as both an amateur chemist and as a welder, tungsten reacts vigorously with sodium nitrite. This is exploited in a product called 'Chem-Sharp' for quickly putting a point on the end of welding tungsten without risking making thoriated dust. At a red heat, the tungsten quickly reacts with the nitrite and the reaction is exothermic enough to keep the metal hot. Not sure what the precise mixture of products are, but I bet they're more soluble than the tungsten metal...
You can do the same by dissolving the tungsten in molten potassium nitrate and hydroxide, but that's a very interesting use of the reaction. You dip the rod into the powder and the O2 makes it red hot again, dissolving more metal each time.
Potassium nitrate as well as sodium nitrate works too (no hydroxide needed), I used this method with sodium nitrate for producing sodium tungstate for a density separation experiment, I used non-thoriated rods so didn't have any insoluble thorium dioxide in solution but I suspect this method would work well for extracting it from thoriated rods.
@@oxoniumgirl Very much so, especially if you were to do the reaction in a high pressure+high temp sealed stainless steel vessel that was capable of holding the entire length of the rods and enough molten nitrate to cover them, with a pressure relief valve at the top (set at 800-1000 PSI) it would be possible to dissolve multiple rods in a matter of seconds, the high pressure would reduce boiling and keep the rods in full contact with the molten nitrate. But even if you just did it in a small stainless steel cup in open air it only takes a minute or two to eat an entire rod, even faster if you heat the nitrate red hot before starting. The only thing that slows the reaction is having an excess of tungstate in the molten salt, once you've burned a few rods (per 25-ish grams of nitrate) it really starts to slow down since the tungstate acts as a buffer between the tungsten and fresh nitrate.
No thorium lamp mantles were harmd in the making of this video, to the relief of those of us who like the Aladdin mantle lamps with such mantles fitted... :P
A nerd ridge love you to death watched you for years I just so happen to be a welder I have to point out to you that those are welding tungstens not welding rod welding rod is the actual material that we're using as the filler those we pump a shit ton of electricity through and use them to stabilize and control the electric arc hence the thorium
@@NurdRage At the end of the day it's just semantics, it is a rod that's used in the welding process. I mean you could use welding rod they're are interested to be used as anodes but they mostly consist of cellulose and mild steel
Extraction of radium is quite easy, as long as you don't need it in pure form (which is not really possible with the short lived isotopes of the Th-232 decay chain anyway). I did extract lanthanides from monazite and there were small amounts of thorium in there as well. The radium can be co-precipitated or adsorbed to BaSO4. The most interesting aspect about Ra isolated from the Th is that it contains the isotopes Ra-228 and Ra-224. The latter has a half life of just a few days and so you can see the second half of the decay chain fading away over the course of a few weeks and you end up with a source only giving signals for Ac-228 (the decay product of Ra-228). My product has only about 0.5 CPS due to the small amount of monazite (which had only 4 CPS of all radionuclides before extraction) but it demonstrates proof of concept.
I wonder how the Curies extracted their radium. It must have been frustrating as hell to keep chasing the radioactive ghost in the uranium extraction waste.
I used beach sand from Brazil to calibrate my Gamma Ray Spectrometer. It is easy to use and is plenty active enough for my purposes. The Silicon Dioxide was dead easy to remove. The bonus is that you end up with multiple isotopes.
Would love a video on both tungstates and radium! I used 35% H2O2 to obtain my sample of thorium from thoriated rods. Wish I'd known about the electrolysis method. Been looking for some experiments with the remaining tungsten compounds. I also have some radium I'd like to work with. I'm thinking of using barium as a carrier, but would love to see how you approach it. Amazing work as always. Thanks for inspiring my love of chemistry.
I was able to extract quite a lot more thorium dioxide from a negative ion pen from China, I would look into it maybe in a RU-vid short since I know a lot of effort goes into making long videos like this, Thanks!
@1:39 - Firstly, "Heavy Metal" was the greatest cartoon movie ever. R.I.P. John Candy. Second, our Tungsten/Carbide wedding rings put a hurting on anything they touch. We love the rings, but the damage can be very noticeable.
Really love the titanium basket! I’ve got some contaminated silver that I’d like to clean up and I think this would be a great basket! Just gotta check the reactivity with silver nitrate and all that (hopefully it passivates on the surface like aluminum?)
Thank you! One remark: It seems that the production of those red tungsten electrodes shown in this clip will be discontinued due to their radioactivity for occupational health reasons. The red eletrodes are going to be replaced by safer electrodes with Lathanium and/or Cerium. Everybody who wants to reproduce this experiment should not hesitate to get some red electrodes if possible yet. The cause for the substitute of Thorium appears fully reasonable to me, because the smoke, generated during the welding process, contains significant amounts of ThO2 (and traces of Ra).
Great video as always :D Reminded me of a nostalgic time years ago when I used hydrogen peroxide to extract thorium dioxide (I even made a youtube video), never though of using electrolysis back then.
This content was fantastic. Not a welder, so I had to look up why Thorium is used in the Tungsten rod. Looks like it reduces the melting temp of the Tungsten when welding. I could guess why, too, the rods are ground to a point before using. I've had more fun with chemistry (organic and inorganic) through the internet, than I did when in high school and college (Photchemistry, in college).
May my wire be clean, my rig be ready, my tungsten be sharp, my hand be steady, make the next weld I make my very best, and Lord please help me pass the welding test.
We used the sodium hydroxide electrochemical etching process to prepare tungsten tips for doing STM. It's really pretty convenient and gives you extremely sharp (like at the atomic level) tips.
I'm glad that you posted this cool extraction video. I don't plan on getting any thorium dioxide but I love knowing I could get it if I wanted to or that it is at least possible. Massive synthesis videos are cool but simple extraction is cooler
Nice extraction, as usual. That tea infuser is very interesting... I'd like you to try to isolate thorium, as well as concentrate radium traces in a tiny spot. Maybe as a carbonate.
yyaaaay! I love to oxidize metals with electricity Copper and alloys to obtain the oxides are the best. in the alloy you don't even need to precipitate the oxides to separate the metals as it's already precipitated. my HCl and NaOH are happy not being used to simply neutralize each other to obtain some cheap metal oxides
Dr. Paul M. Brown showed that a tuned resonant alpha,beta or gamma cell creates way more power than a regular A,B or G cell. It looks like your thorium had a 39 to 40 cps. A more precise way to find the frequency is a spectrum analyzers. I think he used americium since it was easy to obtain through smoke detectors 🎉
hey NurdRage, have you considered isenglass or even gelatin for your flocculating agent? They're both used as fining agents in winemaking, so should satisfy your desire for organic flocculating agents.
Wow, totally cool! This is the second after the platinum bar into the ampules, wicked cool! Have to ask your background if that is not too personal. Chem MSc of PhD? As far as interst? GO FOR IT! I'll give a thumb every time.
@alexdrockhound9497 Thanks a lot for your suggestion. But, the only radioactive items that I have are uranium glass beads and a bunch of thorium mantle. Also, not in every country allows you to access Uranium. Fortunately, most thorium mantle is 99% thorium and ±1% cerium. So, I reckon that using thorium mantle is easier for me. But still, thanks for the information tho... 👍
@@rahmanaridho if you can find an old mine with uranium ore in it thats accessible to collect, it will have much more radium due to being so long since it was deposited. The issue with manmade thorium compounds is that when it was originally processed they removed all the other elements out of it, and thorium decays VERY slowly, so any thorium compound you buy that was made in the last 100 years will have almost zero radium.
@alexdrockhound9497 Thank you so much for your further information, that's make a lot of sense why my thorium has weak radiation output. I also keep it in an airtight bag and barely produce any radon gas. I know that uranium and thorium are available across the globe on earth crust, but the problem about uranium mine is sensitive information, and there is no information about uranium mine in my country mining maps whatsoever. However, the daughter isotopes from the Uranium decay chain, such as lead and bismuth mines, are available here. So.... can I go to those mine to get uranium? Or is the number of uranium there is neglectable? Thanks.
@@rahmanaridhothe mines you mention wont have what you are looking for most likely. They probably have nothing to do with the uranium decay chain, they probably formed by fusion when a star went supernova before our solar system formed, and are not the product of a radionuclide decay chain, so their concentration in those ore deposits is probably unassociated with uranium at all. Im not sure how strict your country is on naturally occurring radioactive substances, but if you can find some pitchblende ore for sale or some autunite, those would probably be a good source for radium. There may be minerals like that available at local flea markets or traveling rock and mineral shows. Your other option i suppose is going to places that sell antiques and trying to find old things with radium paint. You could potentially reprocess the old paint to concentrate the radium thats left in them, and even take out the fluorescent compound that turns the radium’s radiation into light and reuse it. Though i expect this could get expensive. Possibly an alternate to radium paint all together is tritium fluorescent vials that you could glue onto things. They only last for about 10-15 years, and they need to be glued on instead of painted, but it might be able to replace radium paint if the application allows it.
FWIW, "healing wands" found on eBay, elsewhere give a Thorium signature. They're either ore or thorium oxide. I've not opened mine and won't, but others' pictures look similar to your results.
Gas lantern mantles are coated with thorium oxide. I would think it would be eaxier to strip it from the linen or cotton threads that the mantles are made from, but never considered this until seeing your video.
Not all are but some are. I have a bunch of mantles and something like 5 or 10 of them in stack gives pretty high count rate on my Radiacode. You can always fold them or even make a wrap from them to put radiacode inside a cylinder wrap. I'm not exactly sure but I thought mantles are made with thorium nitrate (that turns into oxide when heated) but I've never tried if it really is soluble or not. That would also not be legal in my country even though I can have mantles as long as I cause no danger with them.
Well that is a small spectrometer. I had one with huge crystal in it - I could barely lift it up alone, it even broke my car window one day when i was transporting it. It was veeery sensitive, but resolution was crap. I threw it away after window accident.
I'm sure we'd all like to see a re-creation of the Radioactive Eagle Scout experiment! Perhaps not you though... but you do have some thorium now. Smoke detectors, anyone?
Depending on where you live, you could just collect a naturally radioactive mineral species. For example, I have collected autunite, torbernite, meta-autunite, meta-torbernite (all of these are various hydrated copper uranyl phosphates), uranophane (calcium uranium silicate, talk about something "stronger" lol! This guy SIZZLES on the geiger) and even some rare Thorium containing Zircon crystals in the western Carolinas region. I have a box of "hot rocks" out in my shed because I dont like the idea of storing them inside with my prettier "showcase" mineral collection. But yeah, The Carolinas, California, Nevada, Colorado, Maine, and parts of Georgia have well-known localities where "hot" rocks can be collected (if you know which pegmatites to visit). Hell, if you want to share your email with me, depending on how far away you live, perhaps we could arrange a specimen to be sent to you! Or at least I could suggest some collecting sites near you.
There's a barium-based shave alternative, though I've no idea how concentrated it is. It can't be that strong if it's meant to be applied to the face, but the material's there.
a good source of radium would probably be from uranium or thorium ore, as a large ore sample would contain quite a large amount of daughter products. i remember Cody from codyslab doing a uranium ore refinement years ago and i really wanted to see him refine the radium concentrates, but i don't think he ever got around to that.
I noticed that some of your tungsten's appear to have some purple on the end. Those are known as a trimix rare earth tungsten and contain no thorium at all. Only the ones with the red end on them contain 2% thorium. The thorium is mixed into these tungsten welding electrodes in order to increase electron emission capability
I'm curious if you could have used Thoriated gas mantels as your source instead of extracting, or it it would have been easier to extract from mantel ash. Technology Connections had no problem picking up the radioactivity from his.
