Intensely Radioactive Industrial Smoke Detector from the 1950's 

Drew: If you are going to do these kinds of things, strongly urge you to get yourself a dosimeter so you can monitor any dose you get yourself. I also would not take anything apart in your house, and when doing so, only on easily cleaned non-porous surfaces. The source you showed today gave you a dose of about 20 mrem an hour at one meter--it goes up exponentially as you get closer.

Just discovered your channel. What GREAT and well presented content! It will be exciting to watch your channel grow. You earned a new subscriber here!

As you are into superlatives, Am-241 is 10 million times more radioactive than U-238, H-3 (tritium) is 370 million times more radioactive than U-238 and Rn-222 (radon) is a whopping 2.4 trillion times more radioactive than uranium 238. The reason is that uranium 238 is weakly radioactive with a long half-life of 4.5 billion years. Uranium ore is about 7 times more radioactive than uranium metal, due to the progeny in equilibrium, but even so, these comparative values of radioactivity would still be large numbers.

Drew, what kind of detector would best to detect NORM? Sometimes I buy used oilfield equipment and have had some test hot AFTER I purchased it. I'd like to know before I spend my cash😂

Dang! Gonna get fingertip cancer from that thing.

Rocky Flatts?

In Soviet Russia (insert Yakov Smirnov joke here) they just straight up used plutonium238. I don't understand how it's actually even working, like why are there TWO separate sources of radiation and how is the smoke even getting inside that inner can at all?

I read about the US Radium Corp and how some of their employees from the late 20's you can visit their graves with a Geiger and still detect the radiation from their bodies being exposed to the radium based paint.

I'd recommend getting a surplus glovebox (from say a GSA auction). This would not only reduce your external radiation exposure when handling a device, far more importantly, it would dramatically decrease your risk of inhaling radioactive particulates (from decay daughters or broken-off pieces) and to some extent the radon. You should have been wearing an N100 mask when you did this. One final thing, you need to store something like this outside of a living space (say in a well-ventilated garage) because of the radon issue.

Good news: It protects you from fire Bad news: It doesn't protect you from itself

Wow. I didn’t realize they had those type of smoke detectors back then. I guess it had to be such a strong source because the electronics weren’t as sensitive as they are now ?

Its been over 40 years, but I'm pretty sure that my elementary school had smoke detectors like the one you showed. It looks very familiar. I've known for a long time that residential smoke detectors used a small radioactive source, but didn't realize they also made "industrial strength" models that were much "hotter".

One teacher I had, when trying to describe dosage of radiation to middle-schoolers put it in a rough analogy: The intensity is how "bright the sun is, getting stronger as it is closer", the type of radioactivity is the "color of the light, which may go through some things and stop at others, and will give varying degrees of 'heating' the object", and finally likened the effect to "how much sunburn you get and if it will lead to 'skin cancer', depending on these variables". Not bad for the basics. Anything he might have missed?

This actually gave me goose-bumps. I pulled these things out of deconstruction jobs, and we were throwing them around like anything else.

I remember 30yrs ago working at the holiday Inn conference resort in Decatur IL. In the maintenance department and we were told to remove all the old exit signs that had these little glass tubes of radioactive material that glowed constantly and I remember one of the guys breaking the tunes open and smearing that crap onto a sheet of plywood and him thinking it was funny. I removed myself from that area very quickly. He definitely underestimated the dangers.

I'd be interested in seeing the Pyrotronics Radium source cartridge placed in the midst of some various moss, fungi, and plants and then monitoring the effect on the flora over time. This would show a field of damage of varying levels from the center.

I've also heard that these weren't electrically insulated, and that you could get a shock if you touched the housings of these while they were powered up. Systems at that time operated on 120 VAC like residential interconnected smokes, not 24 VDC like modern fire alarm systems.

Are there now radioactive crumbs/particles around your home. I'd never do this, but consider doing this outside on a tarp or something 😨

What a _beautiful_ find! I also have an F3 Pyrotronics smoke detector! They're very hard to find! Mine is dated 7/16/1959. I also have several of the Pyrotronics F3/5A models and a F5B model too, which each have 80 μCi of americium-241. The Ra-226 and Am-241 sources will also "overflow" (≥ 367,440 CPM) my SEI Inspector USB Geiger-Müller counter too. My EcoTest Terra-P dosimeter read a maximum of 111.7 mSv/h (11.17 R/h) from the Ra-226 "lipstick-type" mast source, however that was with beta _and_ gamma, so it's not _entirely_ accurate. I also have three 5.7 μCi (211 kBq) plutonium-239 sources from РИД-6М (RID-6M) Soviet-era smoke detectors. The Pu-239 sources are the _most_ gentle of these three isotopes, since it emits mostly just alpha particles, and with _extremely_ little gamma ray emissions. I get _about_ 84,770 CPM from each Pu-239 source, but with a sheet of paper absorbing the alpha particles, I only get 302 CPM from the low-energy gamma rays, since the gamma ray branching intensities for Pu-239 are so low. So, the gamma ray exposure is basically null. With the F3 however, the ionizing radiation is coming _mostly_ from the bismuth-214 and lead-214 decay isotopes. The Ra-226 decay isotopes are pretty much in secular equilibrium at this age now, meaning that the Ra-226 decay isotopes now have about the same activity as the Ra-226 parent isotope, meaning that these Ra-226 sources actually became hotter, fairly shortly after they were first fabricated. So, you will get _very_ broad energies and _numerous_ branching intensities for alpha, beta, X-rays, and gamma rays from Ra-226. Anyways, great demonstration! Wonderful quality! Thank you for sharing this! I really like it! 👍

Props to making this video showing how dangerous the older smoke detectors were. Showing the comparison of the new smoke detector vs the old smoke detector is literally night and day in comparison.

I heard of the Ra226 version of this fire alarms but I didnt know they were so radioactive! Great video!

That 15 inches on the warning label definitely an understatement. That might work for Americium but obviously not Radium. Good education thank you.

Drew: I worked at Crystal River Unit 3 for 25 years. B&W had sample bolts made of steel from other B&W reactors installed in the CR-3 core barrel. One outage I supported the B&W rep taking care of spent fuel transfer equipment. Once reactor operators transferred the fuel to the spent fuel pool and the core barrel was moved to the deep end of the spent fuel pool, I assisted in removing a Davis Bessie reactor sample bolt for shipment to B&W. My job was supporting operation of the underwater video equipment. I was there if we had any problems with the video electronics. We didn't have any problems so I was a standby observer. Prior to starting work the HP's assigned surveyed the bolt area of core barrel with an underwater detector. As they moved the detector towards the sample we had a reading of 500 MR at 10 inches. The detector went off scale at 2 inches (10,000 R). The sample was to test for Neutron embrittlement of the Davis Bessie reactor. I learned the most of the B&W reactors had samples from sister plants. This radiation level was after fuel removal. The area where I was had a dose rate of les than 5 MR/hr. Also I used to take care of the fire detection system at CR-3. I tested many of those Pyrotronic detectors. They were a high enough source that HP's had to survey the job even when the detectors were not in a radiation controlled area. I retired in 2009. I am a fan of your channel.

So, it clearly warns not to hold it close for a certain period of time. I'm a bit concerned how close you're holding it to us, the viewers... Better not put the video on pause on such a moment 😬

“Careful, this is very radioactive.” “Oh, thanks. How radioactive is it?” “Very.”

Drew, you're the coolest nut using hot rocks on RU-vid. :) Please stay extra careful and safe!

I want to know how these were produced. Its hard to imagine it didn’t involve some manual assembly and exposure to the workers making the parts and assembling it. And all the places these have been stored or used probably include some people being nearby for longer time. And how about a burned down building or these ending up in landfills or metal scrap being reused…

You're sitting here, waving around radioactive knick knacks and for some reason you're talking like you're in school trying to fill the minimum word count in an essay 😐

Bruh don't do this in your fucking house with kids and neighbors.

Good video! The NPP I work at uses these Ceberus detectors. I've seen comments saying that they'll shock you. And that's absolutely true! We do sensitivity testing on the different plant areas throughout the year. The "new" ones we install have to be surveyed by RP before we can install them in the plant.

After watching Chernobyl I have to admit stuff like this gives me the heebee jeebees. I'd guess that prolonged exposure to these things is "not great, not terrible."

This guy is holding something radioactive and dangerous and talking to us like its just some fun toy.

I'm a bit concerned about the bones in your hand and arms and gamma exposure -- leukemia is not your friend. An N95 might also be a good idea as grains of radioactive dust in your lungs are bad news. The half lives are 3.5 days for Ra-224, 1,600 years for Ra-226, and 6.7 years for Ra-228 -- I wonder why they chose Ra-226 instead of Ra-228 so that these units don't contaminate the waste stream for millennia. I wonder what it would do in the vicinity to a fluorescent screen/paint.

Maybe one should point out that not all smoke detectors contain radioactive material. I am not sure what is available in the US, but here in Germany (and likely most of the EU), you don't find radioactive smoke detectors for home use. Maybe for places that have a full-fledged fire alarm installation, not sure about this. The ones for home use over here are optical detectors. Basically an infrared LED flashing into a dark chamber with a detector monitoring the same chamber. They are arranged so that normally the detector can't see the LED - but if smoke enters the device, the light is diffused and the detector can pick up the LED's flashes, triggering the alarm.

I'd like to get ahold of one of those. I'd put it in a lead shielded container and use it for a check source. Half life of radium = 1600 years. What would be interesting would have been if you calculated your exposure while playing with that detector.

When I saw that thing I recognized it immediately as hanging on the ceiling in several places in my elementary school back in the 1960s. I had no idea they were radioactive/dangerous until now. I thought they were some kind of fire alarm and never gave them any further thought....until today..

Another great video! But be careful please. Do you have any cloud chamber? Do you think that it is also possible to measure the radioactivity of polonium and thorium in tobacco cigarette and in pesticides with your instrument? Thanks

My uncle loved to buy all sorts of junk and was very into alternative medicine, one day he died of stomach cancer, happened rapidly like 3 months from the day he was diagnosed. So my cousins joked about there being something fishy about some alternative medicine amulets he had, so for curiosity I went in with a reader, mine from cold war but still very accurate, and when the reader started to hit 200 to 300, it was at that point all of us in that house turned cold, never f*ck around with radiation, he wore those amulets for God know how long. And the fact the cops said they did not care about it, or what we did with the amulets says everything about this country.

Really fascinating video, makes me wonder how many things in my house might be way more radioactive than i considered checking for. As you consciously expose yourself to more radiation than most people, i'd love to know what you do to mitigate the damage, decontaminate yourself and how you store the items you collect. Do you know roughly how much radiation more than the average person you've experienced?

So at the distance where it detects 500K cpm, it gives at least 66 mSievert/h if im correct? Thats damn hot

Watching this video, the whole time, i am like: 'Dont Do it! Dont Do It!'. My head hurts from whatever tumors he develops.

I actually bought one of these few years ago on ebay and tried to have it shipped to Croatia/Europe for my random number generator project. US authorities blocked the shipment even though the seller said it can ship worldwide, I just got refunded and it said it was restricted. Guy probably shipped it in regular cardboard box and it sounded the radiation alarms at the postal center :D

man lost 10 from his life for this video, Nice sacrifice man 👍👍😅

I used to service the Cerberus pyrotronics units) Radium sulfate in gold foil. Different aged units had different levels of different radioactive materials. I have found units where the foil had degraded.(lickily th eunits were in the center of Lawrence Berkeley labe Bevatron igloo (well shielded)

Brah have a radiation fetish 😅

Your actual body exposure from making his video was probably not more then one or two microsievert. No need to exaggerate the danger of handling this.

0 min 54 s Actually, most smoke detectors have 0.9 uCi, not 0.3 uCi of Am241. Also, if you calculate it comes out to 0.3 ug of Am241.

I'd be terrified of the radon gas generation that a hot radium source creates. Definitely don't keep it in your home (I read one of your comments that you keep it in a safe in an uninhabited place - smart thinking). I think that the radon gas generation is the biggest risk of what you have there. Whenever you go into where you keep the source, I'd well aerate the place that you have the safe before going in, and well aerate the safe once you open it. Lots of big fans should be used.

Make your own battery with a pervoskite, or maybe cigs or gan solar panel, with gamma and other types of radiation, you coupld probably get some minor useful result. How many watts of energy is this radioactive thing throwing out? It does not get hot in watts, but its probably very energetic in a non heat manner. ? Gammavoltaic conversion Gammavoltaic devices use a semiconductor junction to produce electrical energy from energetic gamma particles (high-energy photons). They have only been considered in the 2010s[13][14][15][16] but were proposed as early as 1981.[17] A gammavoltaic effect has been reported in perovskite solar cells.[13] Another patented design involves scattering of the gamma particle until its energy has decreased enough to be absorbed in a conventional photovoltaic cell.[14] Gammavoltaic designs using diamond and Schottky diodes are also being investigated.[15][16]

It's probably not good to handle it like this with little protection, but entertaining nonetheless.

What confuses me, if I have a unit (GMC-500+) that doesn't measure alpha, yet reads 10k+ CPM when reading a house hold smoke detector button of americium 241. Am I not reading the alpha? Am I reading beta/gamma? The other part is why does the card that came with it saying over 100 CPM is high. Isn't that ridiculously small compared to other samples that are 10k, 20k, etc

I remember taking apart an old smoke detector as a kid. Thankfully I don't think I ever broke into the ion chamber. Was only Americium and no where near as spicy as that bad boy! :O

Some Russian smoke detectors contained plutonium-238.

I bet every time one of these ships, some postal inspector has a stroke as it sets off alarms all over the place lmao

I'm going to bet a lot of construction workers throughout the years have unknowingly screwed themselves over by being unaware of dangerous materials like these detectors. The average construction worker where I am treats everything as "trash" when ripping stuff out and tosses everything into the same dumpster and rarely wears anything to protect themselves. I bet landfills are loaded with all sorts of toxic and dangerous things that ended up there because of people just treating everything as generic trash.

I appreciate your bringing us the very cool videos. I have to say I wouldn't do it myself not because it's simply radioactive more so because I have terrible luck. I would probably drop the can on the table causing the foil to become dislodged shooting directly into my eyeball and embedding itself under my eyelid. When I arrive at the hospital to have the foil removed they would lock me up for suspicion of terrorism that's just my luck. On a serious note thanks for the great content.

I love your content, Drew. This one was especially interesting! Horrific was the right word to use. Holy moly.

nice little device you found there ! I am sure you already know about the older Russian smoke detectors and the "spice" they (sometimes) hold ...

Ist the radioactive Post from the mesh Thing strong enough to make the needle from my cdv-715 move?

You need to get a higher range detector!

I bet you could move the needle on a CDV-715 ionization chamber meter with that source.

The manufacturer probably intended it to be used in factories and thought that there would be no danger in a high hall. The device was then dangerous for the maintenance staff. And in the event of a fire, for the craftsmen who were then ignorantly exposed to high levels of radiation during renovation work.

wow! so what's the lethal amount of exposure? have you done a video on that guy from Japan that died from radiation exposure? same with the demon core videos. again, why are we not developing a use for that kind of radiation? we have just a gigantic amount of all this radioactive waste constantly emitting energy. why aren't we using it? say like a nuclear photo voltaic even if you could get 1 watt from a 100-watt solar panel with a phosphor ( for instance) how many could you sandwich with in ten feet? 100k plus. well that's 100killo watts. how thick dose the phosphor have to be? lol would a ten-kilo watt nuclear decay photo voltaic fit in a shed? lol so long electric bill. a little weird but there is a material that becomes magnetic when blue light shines on it. hum? thru it? so a blue phosphor I have to look it up again. hum? light induction. I have no idea why people stopped inventing things in this country. we have all this radioactive waste just lying around doing nothing. maybe that's what the fed meant by lack of productivity? lol

Hi Drew, cool channel I've enjoyed watching them. I live in Darby Montana and do plenty of prospecting including looking for radioactive minerals. I've collected at several sites in the area and need to check out a few others this summer. If your very in Darby area let me know, I can point out a few sites. Ken

I think I recieved a DOSE over the old "Interwebs" while watching this....Need to go drink that Iodine Milkshake now🤣....Great Stuff👍

Bro ur so underrated, i love your video's!

Jesus way to make my palms sweat man, yeesh. Spicy meatball.

Can't wait to watch this!

My wife was about to kill me if she heard that Geiger counter one more time while she was sleeping lol

Super cool and intriguing but terrifying at the same time. You earned yourself a new sub, and I've already binged out on a bunch of your videos. Really appreciate you sharing this man!👍👍✌️

Some of the long range bomber pilots in WW2 suffered “sunburn” from the Radium contained in the instrument dials. Just how much radiation were these instrument dials emitting to produce physical effects with perhaps a dozen hours of exposure? Since many crews didn’t survive to complete a full mission tour, limiting radiation exposure probably didn’t come high on the list of priorities at the time. I imagine each individual instrument dial was emitting similar amounts of radiation to your single smoke detector, so the cumulative dosage would have horrific.

You should put the smoke detector source in a cloud chamber

The most radioactive thing I own (actually the only radioactive thing I own) is a radioactive Fiestaware plate from the 1930's. I got it to test my geiger counter. Even though it doesn't put out nearly enough radiation to be dangerous (the highest reading I've gotten from it, really close up, is around 60 microsieverts/hr), I still keep it in a shielded box just to be safe. I have a geiger counter that can detect the full spectrum (alpha, beta, gamma, x-rays). Interestingly enough, although my plate is supposed to be U-238 which is an alpha emitter, most of the radiation from the plate is actually beta. I suspect this is due to being a 1930's model rather than a newer one, which used more natural uranium...so most of the radiation is probably coming from decay products rather than the uranium itslef. Geiger counters are pretty easy to overload, they are not designed or equipped to measure high level sources (it's a consequence of how the G-M tube works, it's impossible to make a geiger counter that can measure high level sources like this). If you want to measure high level sources, you'd need a scintillation counter.

Why do i taste metal ? Also, today i found that the 15 floor building i live in have about 28 such detectors, awesome

Holy hell! One of the few radioactive items that I’d actually be afraid of. You should see if it glows in the dark, and point it at something fluorescent Even the americium buttons can produce a detectable glow when pointed at strontium aluminate

Noting like a life dose of x-rays in one video make....

I am a bored Health physicist who has been doing this kind of work for 33 years. I noticed your comments and thought I would chime in. I did some calculations along the decay chain and determined that You will get some gamma's (not x-rays) from the reactions, but they will be light and low energy. you will get B- particles but those will be shielded ( good heavens don't wear a lead apron or you will turn B- to bremstrahlung), but primarily you will get Alpha particles which the can will shield mostly. This is a sealed source so unless you broke the seal you would receive far far less than 1 mR/hr to the skin much less the whole body. P.S. I stopped reading part way through and when I stopped laughing I did my calculations. forgive spelling errors.

RIp pyrotrinics 1949-2001

Love the channel, Drew! I knew some of those older bigger smoke detectors used radium, but didn’t know they were that hot! Wonder if they emit enough energy to make phosphorus glow? Me and my son have been using a app for iPhone called “Radioactivity counter” that uses the phones selfie camera as a primitive gamma ray detector (and maybe beta? 🤷‍♂️), but the camera must have ALL light blocked out…. We tired to find radioactive rocks in a old quarry used for a source of roofing shingle rocks, as about ~5 miles north there used to be a Thorium mine, and we live on what’s basically a massive granite deposit…. And radon gas can be a big issue in the area.

Is this guy still alive? If it’s so radioactive why don’t you take it more seriously? Get rid of that thing appropriately.

Nice movie, congratulations on your picks in the form of smoke detectors. If I can advise you, avoid touching potentially radioactively contaminated objects with the dosimeter. You can take off the gloves, but with radium flecks on the mica window it will be hard :D

While doing this video you had billions of tiny tiny tiny particles flying through your body and hands. Thanks 👍👍

Hi! I'm a new sub. In the military we were taught that no amount of radiation is safe and to always use the ALARA procedures. You know far more than I do about radiation. If I dealt with the things you do on occasion, I would wear a radio-logic vest (lead) and lead lined gloves with respirator and plenty of lead shielding vessels for the items. I'm sure you have all that but I want you around for a very long time so keep safe like I know you do and please never become complacent. Remember the demon core? They saw it so often they lost sight of how bad it could be. Love your content, would love to run into you someday at an event. I could learn so much. Thank you for all you do.

AWESOME video!

Dude, I love your videos, but get a quieter Geiger counter for the love of god lmao. Trying to watch these in bed but need to volume up to hear you speak then have to jump out of bed to turn it down every time you turn that dang thing on lmao. Love the vids! Interesting for sure. Get some PPE though.

You just make your life short😬😬😬

I wonder if an older digital camera or genuine film would get messed up trying to take an image that close to those industrial sources.

You notice he has a tan @ the end of the video…

Meanwhile there are P=8 Orion and E=6B's doing laps over his region trying to find the loose bucket of sunshine.

I looking to buy the RAYSID Spectroscopic Radiation Detector

Cloud Chambers Are Pretty Good,

Instantly subbed at under 1 min 😂

“Should be treated with the upmost respect” Says the guy with his head out in the open, and probably 0 lead around his fingers

Do a video on the radioactive boyscout since your on the subject of smoke detectors.

Drew, where in your home do you store a device such as this? As you mentioned, the gamma rays can penetrate concrete. I would think you'd place it somewhere that is farthest from where you spend the most time each day (your bed), but after months/years of exposure, are you not somewhat worried of accumulated exposure? OOPS...forget I asked. I just read your comment in another video that you keep your hotter sources in a concrete lined safe in the garage. So, at least we now know that your lawnmower will likely die from some horrible cancer.

it messes with you microphone and camera

"This radium post is incredibly radioactive with gamma rays" Mate, luckily, you have rubber gloves

man i want to try some radium cigarettes

How many Rads do you think he got

I'm gonna have to look into this an old smoke detector is one of the only sources I don't have