Should I be worried about radium?

[AndyHull]

  

25 minutes ago, spectre6000 said:

there was a billboard advertising said nudist resort on my way into Boulder...

I think I've seen that billboard.

Edited January 16, 2022 by AndyHull

[Fuzzy2964]

Hi.  From the little research I have done it appears that Timex watches from the 50s and early 60s "could" have radium in the hands/dials.  I think this is an early 60s watch.  There is no glowing lume now.  I don't see any radium burn on the dial.  Am I OK to start taking the watch apart.  Any help on the year would be great also.  Cheers & Thanks in advance, Fuzzy

[AndyHull]

The practice of UK Time, aka Timex Dundee, luming dials with radium continued on in to the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore the company was not averse to dumping unwanted radioactive dials by the thousand, straight in to the North sea. 

This is from a Sunday Post article on the subject.

Quote

Documents at the National Records of Scotland show how the now-defunct Dundee firm UK Time a forerunner to the well known Timex firm arranged a deal with local fishermen to put 35,000 luminised dials coated with radium into drums and dump them in the Tay Estuary in 1949.

The arrangement, according to Scotland Office papers, continued for a further eight years at an estimated 5,000 dials a year before dumping was then switched to the UK Government’s official site at Beaufort’s Dyke.

So it would appear that radium waste was 'disposed of' both in the North sea and the Atlantic for many years.

As to the danger of an individual dial, I would suggest that this is relatively low. I would however be a lot more concerned if one of those drums were to wash up on the shore.

The only way to know for sure if your dial has radium would be to check it with a geiger counter, since the zinc based material in the lume degrades over time and it looses its luminous properties.

This means that while the lume is still radioactive, (the most stable isotope being radium-226, which has a half-life of 1600 years and decays into radon gas, also radioactive), it is no longer luminous, so you can't simply assume that if it doesn't glow, then it isn't radioactive.

The watch you show above, is probably from the late 1950s, or at least before 1963, because it doesn't have a date code on the dial. The case back style suggests 1950s rather than 1960s. If I were to take a guess I would say 1959.

Some earlier Timexes have an ink-stamped date code on the inside caseback consisting of one letter and one number. The numeral denotes the year of manufacture as follows: 1959-8, 1960-7, 1961-6, 1962-5 1963-4 1964-3 1965-2 1966-1 1967-9.

So if you look inside the case on the case back, there may be an inked stamp mark with some letters on it that gives a more exact date. These however have often been cleaned from or rubbed off the case back.

It may have radium, or it may simply have coloured hands, or it may once have had radium and this has been replaced at some stage in the past.

Whatever the story is, I would have little major concern about the lume, so long as you are careful when servicing the watch. Read through the rest of this thread for more info on this subject. The levels of radiation present are likely to be perhaps a few times background. Don't ingest the lume, don't sniff the dial, wash your hands after handling it and you should be fine.

Edited January 31, 2022 by AndyHull

[EFan]

I recently bought a Seiko 62MAS (1966 or 1967). It’s a lovely watch but I’ve stumbled upon a lot of articles about radium lume and it’s making me a little nervous. Does anyone know of Seiko was still using radium for their dials in the 1960s? 

[Kalanag]

Is the number at the bottom of the dial followed by a „RAD“ or „T“ (=Tritium)? Tritium is o.k.!

Edited May 28, 2022 by Kalanag

[mikepilk]

2 hours ago, EFan said:

I recently bought a Seiko 62MAS (1966 or 1967). It’s a lovely watch but I’ve stumbled upon a lot of articles about radium lume and it’s making me a little nervous. Does anyone know of Seiko was still using radium for their dials in the 1960s? 

Yes, but it Swiss watches it was phased out in 64-65. I haven't found anything about Japanese watches and when it was changed. 

1 hour ago, Kalanag said:

Is the number at the bottom of the dial followed by a „RAD“ or „T“ (=Tritium)? Tritium is o.k.!

I've done a bit of Googling, and the opinion seems to be : 

"Unfortunately, doubts have been cast on the idea that the letters “R”, “T” or “P” printed alongside other numbers at the bottom of the dial on some Seiko watches relate to the lume terms “Radium”, “Tritium”, and “Promethium”, especially for watches made after Seiko had abandoned the use of radium lume".

I bought a cheap geiger counter so that I can check pre '65 watches. Some really send it spinning !

[Kalanag]

One more interesting find:

https://www.thewatchsite.com/threads/the-seiko-dial-codes-r-s-and-t-pointy-a-and-flat-a.346758/#post-3028534

[Neverenoughwatches]

On 1/29/2022 at 9:42 PM, Fuzzy2964 said:

Hi.  From the little research I have done it appears that Timex watches from the 50s and early 60s "could" have radium in the hands/dials.  I think this is an early 60s watch.  There is no glowing lume now.  I don't see any radium burn on the dial.  Am I OK to start taking the watch apart.  Any help on the year would be great also.  Cheers & Thanks in advance, Fuzzy

Tbh i may be wrong  but the lume on the hands doesnt have that original look.  It seems more like the repair lume colour. Doesnt look much faded or deteriorated.

[Nucejoe]

 As a decaying nucleus fissions it transforms into smaller nuclei so alpha particles among many others  may pop into existance  what actually happens, is that the released  energy may be  enough for making  a new particle and the energy flow tends to stablize at the first possible stable state.

Alpha particle is nucleus of helium, upon forming it quickly absorbs two electrons to stablize as helium, the newly formed helium is still as radio active as its nucleus, so if inhaled or ingested two major route it may go.

1- It may just go through our digestive system and leave our body, though it may get re-absorbed in vegtables or other food we eat ,  It wont disappear it just dispersses in nature. 

2- It may get absorbed in some organ  of our body. It all depends on the chemical composition of what we have ingested/ inhaled.

Let presume its absorbed in our blood, it will stay and circulate throughout our body where ever blood goes. providing sufficient amount of radium in our blood it may cause blood cancer. If however the radio active nuclei ends up in our nail or hair it will depart in a few months, so exposure periods differ. 

Alpha particles do penetrate solid material like our bones or flesh, but only a short distance, it travels only a few centermeter in air.  Its a massive particle so wont travel far. 

Other fission products such as beta or gamma particles are considered massless , they are of elctromagnetic nature  so they frantically travel through the space for they have no mass or mass too small that  we have been unable to discern/detect,   as we speak we are recieving particles released at big bang. 

Consider the vastness of routes fission product may head and you will see we are the ingrediants of a soup material existance is made of, about all we can do is to stay away from strong current of radioactivity and minimize our exposure to it. 

Guys who made and  sell you this toy  "the gieger counter " knew that our brain produces fear when dealing with unknown. 

For all we know you could be living near a strong radioacrive source all your life, did anyone measure the dose in imported sugare or fronts coming you direction form near or far neighbores. 

If you work on watches just don't inhale/ ingest the luminous material and stop worrying about a threat thats no threat to you. 

I spent years experimenting with nuclear reactors and I know for a fact my accumulative  exposure is neglegible. 

STOP WORRY ING.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[arron]

Good morning all,

I  read through this entire thread and other materials online and still have this question: How can I, or how should I, dispose of a small amount of radium from a watch dial?  I've made numerous calls to state agencies and have yet to find a place that accepts radium for disposal.  I live in Oregon.  Thank you.  Arron.  

[mikepilk]

11 minutes ago, arron said:

Good morning all,

I  read through this entire thread and other materials online and still have this question: How can I, or how should I, dispose of a small amount of radium from a watch dial?  I've made numerous calls to state agencies and have yet to find a place that accepts radium for disposal.  I live in Oregon.  Thank you.  Arron.  

Same problem here in the UK - who do you contact?

I don't know about the USA, but in the UK I understand it's OK to dispose of a radium watch in the household waste. But not a whole lot at once. Though I've no idea where you would take them.

When removing the radium, I seal everything in zip lock backs and put in the household rubbish bin. It hasn't set off any alarms yet!

I guess the question is - is it OK to put a radium watch in the trash can. If so, it must be OK to put the radium (in a sealed container/bag) in also?

[LittleWatchShop]

21 minutes ago, arron said:

I live in Oregon.

Probably depends on "where" in Oregon.  Ziplock and the trash, or dig a hole in the back yard.

[mikepilk]

7 minutes ago, LittleWatchShop said:

Probably depends on "where" in Oregon.  Ziplock and the trash, or dig a hole in the back yard.

As Oregon has uranium mines, no one will notice if you dig a hole in the back yard 

https://www.oregon.gov/energy/safety-resiliency/Pages/Uranium.aspx

For those in the UK, I just found this on Gov.uk  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fdca79bd3bf7f3a364b5c31/JSP_392_Chapter_22_-_LUMINISED_EQUIPMENT__Alt_Text_.pdf

 

By "normal refuse route", I assume that's household waste. 

Edited October 12, 2023 by mikepilk

[arron]

Boy that's interesting that they don't want you to label it; do you suppose because they don't want to alarm people that might come across the bag at the landfill and get flooded with inquiries?    The uranium article (linked above) mentions Hanford; that's the site that was involved with making plutonium during the war.  Hanford is within about an hour of my house.  If all else fails, I might contact them.  I guess I worry about some unsuspecting person opening the bag down the road and getting contaminated.  

[AndyHull]

On 10/12/2023 at 7:42 PM, arron said:

Boy that's interesting that they don't want you to label it; do you suppose because they don't want to alarm people that might come across the bag at the landfill and get flooded with inquiries? 

Absolutely. What I will say is that while technically the amounts involved are very small, and the risks are low, if everyone follows this advice, then there will be elevated levels of radium at every landfill and incineration site, since any "securely sealed" container will stay "securely sealed" for about 5 seconds once it enters the back of a trash compactor (aka bin lorry).

Having said that, this is small beer compared with for example the beaches on the Fife coast near a former WWII era scrap merchant which disposed of large amounts of luminous instrument dials by burning in barrels and discharging the resultant mildly radioactive slurry down the Fife coast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-63515856

Not to mention the disposal by Timex Dundee of barrels of lumed dials from fishing trawlers into the North sea.

Out of site and out of mind seems to be the British disposal policy. That didn't end well at Dounray.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-54085592

Low risk, throw it in the trash, don't tell anyone,  and let the council burn it.
What could possibly go wrong that is worse than what has already gone wrong?

Edited October 14, 2023 by AndyHull

[mikepilk]

13 minutes ago, AndyHull said:

Low risk, throw it in the trash, don't tell anyone

I don't see any problem with small amounts going in to ground fill in the UK. There are parts of the UK with significantly higher background radiation (3x) than the average e.g. Cornwall, Scotland. Even  granite buildings have increased background.

We are just making it more even by spreading it around 

[LittleWatchShop]

11 minutes ago, mikepilk said:

We are just making it more even by spreading it around 

 

 

"...and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our's down."

[AndyHull]

23 hours ago, mikepilk said:

I don't see any problem with small amounts going in to ground fill in the UK.

Quote

"So far 3,200 particles have been retrieved from the beach." - BBC

The problem will only become apparent when around 3,200 people in your local council have availed themselves of the "Disposal of Luminised Article" law, and someone starts finding small pieces of rusty 1950s radium alarm clock dials and sundry other mildly radioactive crap in the local landfill or raised levels of "interesting isotopes" in the ground water during routine monitoring and hits the panic button.  Either way, I suspect it might be simpler to say. Send your mildly radioactive crap to a registered disposal site and save us all the trouble of having to clean up the local river, might be a slightly less risky law than the "a big boy did it and ran away" approach we currently have. After all, what exactly qualifies as a luminised article? A watch hand? A time expired 2 gallon drum of radium lume found in grandad's shed?  3,200 Timex radium watch hands that turn up on ebay? The law as it stands does seem a little wish washy.

Edited October 15, 2023 by AndyHull

[mikepilk]

1 minute ago, AndyHull said:

The problem will only become apparent when around 3,200 people in your local council have availed themselves of the "Disposal of Luminised Article" law, and someone starts finding small pieces of rusty 1950s radium alarm clock dials and sundry other mildly radioactive crap in the local landfill or raised levels of "interesting isotopes" in the ground water during routine monitoring and hits the panic button.  Either way, I suspect it might be simpler to say. Send your mildly radioactive crap to a registered disposal sight and save is all the trouble of having to clean up the local river, might be a slightly less risky law than the "a big did it and ran away" approach we currently have. After all, what exactly qualifies as a luminised article? A watch hand? A time expired 2 gallon drum of radium lume found in grandad's shed?  3,200 Timex radium watch hands that turn up on ebay? The law as it stands does seem a little wish washy.

When I wrote, I did mean to add - "I don't see any problem..."  : as long as it doesn't get disturbed by someone building a housing estate in a few years time.

[AndyHull]

I'm over in India at the moment, and this chat brings to mind the "Delhi Alps" also known as the "Great Delhi Garbage pile", a 65m - 220ft high garbage dump which is actually quite impressive in its sheer scale when you see it in person.

It is obviously a hazard, and it obviously pollutes the water table, and the air, due to the regular uncontrolled spontaneous fires it suffers from.

Uncontrolled dumping has resulted in some alarming levels of all sorts of interesting toxins, including, according to various reports,  radioactive medical waste, heavy metals (lead acid batteries I would imagine accounting for a fair amount of that), chromates, mercury, dioxins (caused by partial incineration in various fires over the years) and all the usual toxic suspects.

I suspect that a lot of the waste disposal sites in the UK from the 1950s through to the 1990s would have similar levels of these toxins per ton. All told, I think a few watch and clock hand are not gong to make a huge difference to the amount of crap we are pumping into the environment, but none the less, we should be trying to make some effort to dispose of them carefully.

Edited October 14, 2023 by AndyHull

[AndyHull]

You might all enjoy this channel.
 

 

[mikepilk]

1 hour ago, AndyHull said:

You might all enjoy this channel.
 

I've watched quite a few of his videos. In my eyes he's being a bit blasé about the doses he's getting.  I remember he's handling industrial smoke detectors, and aircraft instruments in the 10s or 100s of thousands cpm. 

Have you seen them @Nucejoe 

(  It's not you is it ! )

Edited October 17, 2023 by mikepilk

[Darthkram]

A bit of an anecdote but might be helpful for some real life dealings with radium.

A few months ago I acquired a moderate stash of mixed parts off Facebook Marketplace. Some of what was in the stash was around 50 small tins of old watch hands with each tin containing maybe 20-30 hands. All of which were rusty and absolutely coated in flaking radium!

Needless to say I wanted rid of them, I double bagged everything and stored it in the garage and managed to find a relevant government email address and fired off an email. I got a response from someone who turned out to be the IAEA representative for our country and lived in my city so he offered to come around to check them out.

He ended up taking them away and disposing of them for me but while he was visiting he also offered to scan my work desk and any other areas I used which I gladly accepted. He found no trace of radium on my desk where I do all my assembly. The only suggestion he had was to move the radioactive watches I own out to the garage and open them out there as my workbench is near the kitchen and he had concerns with potentially getting radium on food.

The takeaway I had from his visit was that the precautions I take when working on radium watches must be at least semi-acceptable.

I put down paper towels before opening any radium coated watch and put on a mask. Once I've opened and removed the dial and hands and placed them in a zip lock bag I carefully fold the paper and throw it away. I then wipe down my desk with more damp towels and wipe down any screwdrivers/tweezers I use and also wash my hands well before starting on the actual movement.

 

[LittleWatchShop]

1 hour ago, Darthkram said:

A bit of an anecdote but might be helpful for some real life dealings with radium.

A few months ago I acquired a moderate stash of mixed parts off Facebook Marketplace. Some of what was in the stash was around 50 small tins of old watch hands with each tin containing maybe 20-30 hands. All of which were rusty and absolutely coated in flaking radium!

Needless to say I wanted rid of them, I double bagged everything and stored it in the garage and managed to find a relevant government email address and fired off an email. I got a response from someone who turned out to be the IAEA representative for our country and lived in my city so he offered to come around to check them out.

He ended up taking them away and disposing of them for me but while he was visiting he also offered to scan my work desk and any other areas I used which I gladly accepted. He found no trace of radium on my desk where I do all my assembly. The only suggestion he had was to move the radioactive watches I own out to the garage and open them out there as my workbench is near the kitchen and he had concerns with potentially getting radium on food.

The takeaway I had from his visit was that the precautions I take when working on radium watches must be at least semi-acceptable.

I put down paper towels before opening any radium coated watch and put on a mask. Once I've opened and removed the dial and hands and placed them in a zip lock bag I carefully fold the paper and throw it away. I then wipe down my desk with more damp towels and wipe down any screwdrivers/tweezers I use and also wash my hands well before starting on the actual movement.

 

My dad serviced many thousands of watches from 1947 to 1990. He never worried about radium. He died at age 93. Was not caused by radium.

[Nucejoe]

10 hours ago, mikepilk said:

I've watched quite a few of his videos. In my eyes he's being a bit blasé about the doses he's getting.  I remember he's handling industrial smoke detectors, and aircraft instruments in the 10s or 100s of thousands cpm. 

Have you seen them @Nucejoe 

(  It's not you is it ! )

Have not.