5 Regrettable Things People Did With Uranium

Hearing something has uranium in it generally isn’t good news.

I mean, yeah, you might be a fan of nuclear power plants.

But those have systems to make sure you’re not hanging around any of the actual uranium…at least not for long periods of time.

That’s because we’ve known uranium is bad for our health for at least two centuries.

And yet, that hasn’t stopped people from putting it in a bunch of consumer products.

Like wine. And kids toys.

So here are five regrettable things people decided to do with uranium, and the reasons why they thought it was a good idea.

[♪ INTRO] One of the most common uses of uranium has been as a coloring agent.

You may have heard of a line of ceramic dishes called Fiestaware, which had uranium oxide in the glaze that gave it a signature orange hue.

And uranium inside transparent Vaseline glass would make the whole thing glow green under a blacklight.

But you know what’s worse than eating out of a uranium-colored bowl?

Eating with uranium-colored teeth.

False teeth, to be exact.

See, for a big chunk of denture history, people didn’t care much about making them look natural.

They were mostly worried about function.

And we went through a few types of materials trying to make the best fake teeth we could.

Some of the classics include wood, gold, and orangey-yellow ceramic colored by…you guessed it, uranium.

But when we finally started making porcelain teeth, they still weren’t quite right.

The teeth were white…but not “human teeth” white.

So, around the 1940s, people started adding uranium to the porcelain powder, but not to make it orange.

Instead, dentists were matching both the light-varying color of real human teeth and their ability to glow in the presence of ultraviolet light.

Which is most evident when you’re standing underneath a blacklight in an otherwise dark room, but our Sun emits it, too.

And I gotta be honest, just looking at them, these old fake teeth look pretty good.

But that does not override the whole radioactive thing.

Whatever uranium is in these dentures will eventually decay.

The unstable atoms will spit out tiny subatomic bits of themselves as they try to become less unstable.

In other words, they emit radiation.

Right into your mouth.

Radioactive substances can actually emit a few different kinds of radiation, the big four being alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron.

Alpha, beta, and neutron radiation are named after the actual particles being spat out of an unstable atom.

Meanwhile, gamma radiation is named for the gamma-wavelength energy the atom gives off. When uranium decays, it almost always sheds alpha particles.

And alpha particles are the chonkiest of our four radiation types.

So they usually wind up being too low energy to get through human skin.

The outer layer of which, you may remember, is already dead.

That makes any bits of uranium you come across in the wild pretty safe… at least compared to a lot of other radioactive compounds.

Unless you put them in your mouth.

Once uranium is past the skin barrier, the alpha particles can penetrate just fine, and give your squishy, living tissues a hefty dose of damaging radiation.

According to one investigation from 1974, a pair of uranium dentures would have delivered about 6 sieverts to a person over the course of one year.

A sievert is a funky unit that scientists use to express how dangerous radiation will be toward living tissue.

It ultimately has to do with how much energy that tissue is absorbing, but also has to account for the fact that different tissues handle different kinds of radiation, well, differently.

For the sake of this episode, all we really need to know is that, despite being a relatively low number, even a single sievert is… let’s just say not good.

It’s about 100 CT scans worth of radiation.

Or around three centuries of just going about your life.

But what’s worse than that is how long people kept making the little buggers.

Uranium dentures weren’t discontinued until the 1980s!

Hank was made in the 1980s!

But at least neither of us are old enough for our parents to have given us a toy made out of uranium.

Because yes, that really was a thing in the early 1950s.

It was, after all, the Atomic Era.

There were a ton of radioactive-themed products to buy a child in your life.

From boardgames to candy.

Thankfully, uranium-free.

But there was the Atomic Energy Lab, which was basically a 1950 version of those science experiment kits you can still buy in the kids section of a department store.

The biggest and flashiest version came with an electroscope, a Geiger counter, a cool on-theme comic book, a cloud chamber to help see the radiation, and four, count them, FOUR sources of uranium.

Thankfully, the Atomic Energy Lab wound up selling so poorly, it was discontinued within two years.

Not because of the radioactivity, though! Because they were expensive.

One of these bad boys would run you about 50 US dollars in 1950’s money.

Which, if you use the US’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, is over 620 US dollars today.

That is more than a PS5.

And because there was such a limited, ridiculous run, any kits that still survive are collectors’ items.

At an auction in 2024, one sold for a whopping $16,500!

Which is a lot! Probably not enough to pay for all the medical care you’d need if it gave you radiation poisoning, though.

So “buyer beware”, indeed.

If I tell you uranium has been used for war, you’d probably say something to the effect of, “No duh, Savannah”.

But I’m not talking about nuclear weapons.

I’m talking about the uranium left over from making nuclear weapons.

And also nuclear fuel for power plants See, the uranium ore that exists in nature is made up of three types of uranium atoms.

More specifically, it’s about 99% uranium-238, 1% uranium-235, and just trace amounts of uranium-234.

To turn that ore into a power source, humans basically have to isolate and amp up the concentration of that uranium-235.

The process is called enrichment, and once it’s done, the leftovers are known as depleted uranium.

And while it might not be bound for a nuclear reactor or bomb, we’ve certainly learned how to use it elsewhere.

Depleted uranium is dense, which makes it both really good at shielding something you don’t want damaged, or damaging something that’s shielded.

So it’s often used in military technology.

To this day, you can find it being used in tank armor and some specialized rounds of ammunition.

And one of the justifications people give for using it is that it’s “safe”.

I mean, it is very much not safe.

It is still radioactive.

The word “depleted” doesn’t mean it’s done decaying, it means someone’s managed to remove most of the Uranium-235 from it.

It’s “safe” because the alpha radiation it continues to emit cannot penetrate your skin.

But as previously established, there are ways it can get past your skin.

Like if you inhale small amounts of dust.

Or drink contaminated water.

Side note -- Technically, depleted uranium doesn’t just emit alpha radiation.

It also releases beta and gamma rays.

But according to the EPA, not at high enough levels to be a, quote, “serious health hazard”.

But that’s not even the worst part.

As a chemical compound, depleted uranium is also super toxic, specifically to your kidneys.

It can cause what’s called heavy metal poisoning, the most common form of which is lead poisoning.

Basically, the uranium atoms can bind to cells and molecules in your body and stop them from carrying out various tasks that keep you alive.

Of course, we haven’t always known details like that.

Back in the 16th century, we started to learn just enough about medicine and the human body to be very dangerous.

The emerging idea at the time was that everything had poison, so if you used powerful poisons carefully, you could functionally weaponize them against an ailment.

Which is true, to a degree.

I mean, that’s what chemotherapy is: poison that kills the ailment of cancer.

But not every dangerous substance works that way.

And a lot of attempts were made to use poisons in this way that should not have been.

For example, by the early 1800s, we had both discovered that uranium existed and that it could damage living things.

The power of uranium as a toxin really excited medical professionals at the time, and they started playing around with what it could do.

Eventually, in the 1850s, a researcher named C. LeConte figured out that feeding uranium salts to dogs would eventually give them a kidney disease called nephritis.

Nephritis causes sugar levels in urine to spike, and it’s those spikes that allowed people to connect the disease to something much more famous: diabetes.

So, uranium was a “toxin” that could induce diabetes-like side effects.

And following the thought process of the time, experts began to question whether that meant it could treat diabetes as well.

This hope was amplified by physician Samuel West, who, around 1895, found that giving diabetes patients uranium salts reduced the sugar levels in their urine.

Diabetes keeps your body from regulating blood sugar levels.

So having more sugar wind up in your pee instead of getting processed by the body is a common side effect.

In West’s mind, less glucose probably meant better sugar processing, which indicated that the diabetes was being treated.

By the end of their course of treatment, his patients were taking as much as 1.5 grams of uranium salt…two to three times every day!

And, to be fair, the treatment did seem to help symptoms for a while.

But, as soon as the patients stopped the meds, their glucose levels popped right back up to where they were before treatment.

Their diabetes had, in fact, not been treated.

It’s not a cure for anything else, either, even though we definitely tried over time.

In the 1800s alone, we tried uranium for urinary incontinence, stomach ulcers, tuberculosis, and even head colds.

And it didn’t stop with medicine.

In 1889, one company made a uranium-infused wine and claimed it could treat your diabetes, give you energy, and make you better looking!

All you had to do was drink “three small sherry-glassfuls” a day!

Then in the 1920s and 30s, you could find uranium-lined containers to infuse your water not with the uranium itself, but with an element it would decay into: radon.

Just like uranium, radon emits mostly alpha radiation.

Which means it is very bad for you when you breathe or drink it!

And yet, this was supposed to have health benefits.

It did not. Please don’t drink radioactive water.

Which is something I have to say, because believe it or not, the uranium health craze is still not over!

Around the world, several decommissioned uranium mines have been turned into “health” spas where people can immerse themselves in naturally-occurring clouds of radon gas, breathing in the radioactive air, or bathing in radioactive water.

But just because something is natural does not mean that it is good for you!

One company in the Czech Republic named one of their “spas” after Marie Curie…seemingly ignoring the fact that her exposure to radiation did the opposite of keep her healthy.

Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization have cited radon gas as a leading cause of lung cancer.

But rather than increasing your risk of getting cancer, many of these retreats claim their radon treatments offer pain relief and anti-inflammatory results.

And to people with chronic pain who have yet to find another way to relieve their symptoms, those claims can sound very appealing.

Appealing enough to spend a lot of money to not only travel to one of these mines, but pay for the so-called “therapy”.

Now, it is true that radiation is used to treat disease.

Namely, cancers.

But the efficacy of any kind of radiation for diseases other than cancer is hotly debated.

And we use different types of radiation to go after cancers, anyway.

To treat disease in a hospital with radiation, doctors use a variety of methods.

These include shooting high-energy radiation beams, like x-ray or gamma, through the skin from the outside, inserting a radioactive source right near a tumor, or prescribing radioactive drugs that collect wherever cancer is in the body.

But most importantly, when radiation is applied in an actual medical facility, it’s targeted toward the exact spot you need it, and you get a fine-tuned dose.

Which is not what you get sitting in a decommissioned uranium mine.

Maybe one day, scientists will find a good use for uranium that isn’t one of many kinds of green fuel sources.

But in the meantime, let’s be sure to keep it in the hands of experts.

And out of our bodies.