El Reg regains atomic keyring capability It's official: El Reg's merchandising tentacle Cash'n'Carrion has regained its atomic keyring capability with the arrival in our virtual emporium of the Nite Glowring. The six flavours of glowring You demanded the return of the legendary tritium-powered Traser, but sadly they'e no longer available. Instead, we've sourced …
Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a cashiers check drawn on my account at the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran for £5,990,000. I would like to order one million (1,000,000) of your delightful (and legally exportable) Traser mini-key rings. They will make wonderful gifts for my distant relations to the west.
Please send to:
Mr. Michael Smith esq.
Secret Santa Coordinator
Complex #7, Reactor Assembly Building
Bushehr, Iran
B00M1E
It's more a "might start looking ropey" rather than a "will stop working after" thing; tritium has an half life of a bit over 12 years, so after that long the glowring will only be (at best) half as bright as it was originally. Dropping to a quarter as bright as it started after another 12 years, etc...
(That's assuming the phosphor doesn't degrade, or any other factors creep in to nobble it...)
Remember that your eyes' response to light is pretty much like the ears' response to sound - logarithmic. The bright daylight today is clocking up ~50,000 lux on my light meter whereas a room at night lit by a single light bulb may be about 100 lux or less but your eyes adapt, so a factor of 2 or 4 is no big deal.
"I still have some of he original Traser glowrings, still glowing away quite brightly. I'd say the ten year estimate on them was conservative to say the least"
Half-life. The half-life of tritium is 12 years or so. That means that statistically, roughly, approximately half of the tritties should have gone "ping" and changed into helium every decade or so. Which roughly, sort of implies that the juice should kind of die in about fifty years or so. Ish. About, give or take a while.
It's all very quantum and probabilistic and stuff, involving the weak force,, but these things might visibly glow in the dark for a century or more. They'll just glow less and less brightly as time goes on.
It's entirely possible that the phosphors are set up to be super-saturated at birth, so the first decade or more is just un-flattening the top of the brightness curve and no *noticeable* change in brightness will be seen for a couple of decades. At least, that's how I would design them.
Just remember, if you have one of these things you are carrying around a thermonuclear device, a nuclear reactor and a generator of beta-rays.
Cool, yes?
You are not allowed to ship the larger one world wide but you can ship the smaller one? What if some nefarious overseas individual buys two of the smaller ones? Or even a whole box full?
TRIIITTIIIAAMMMMAGEDDDON !11!!!!11
Oh, my bad. Here I was assuming the export restriction rules might actually be based on common sense...
"...and why can't I have a large green one…?"
Because the Guardians of the Universe forbid it.
However, you need an awful lot of tritium and it is a little hard to handle in these quantities. When we had 500Ci or so on site I did actually calculate what volume it would occupy if converted to tritium oxide, and how hot it would get if I could keep it all together long enough. It would easily fit into one of these lights, until the case either exploded or melted locally.
Because of its short half life and low atomic mass, tritium really is very radioactive. Fortunately it benignly emits low energy electrons and does no harm till you breathe it in or swallow its oxide. If it is bound in a nonvolatile compound it's pretty harmless and the byproduct is helium 3, which is innocuous. Fortunately because the preferred route to disposal for the British government has been from Windscale sorry Sellafield straight into the Irish Sea, and the last I heard it was well into the gigaCi.
Ah, yes, the "Castle Bravo" effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
One presumes that they've also tried Lithium Trinitide as well as Lithium Deuteride, although I couldn't find any references while doing a very quick search. ("Hi guys/gals!" I always include a friendly greeting to any spooks who may be reading my stuff, based on selected/sensitive keywords.). Then, again, most aspects of nuclear weapon design are somewhat classified, well, excepting for all of that design information on wikipedia/wikileaks/etc. :-/
Dave
Slip on the appropriate key and apply with 2-sided tape above the keyed switch for the generator/UPS/battery supply so you can find it when the power is cut, especially after it was left in the wrong position after the once-monthly test last done sometime last year.
Actually a glob of silicone cement would be better, make someone work to remove it.
Without the ring, you can use the hole to screw one to the door frame to keep the keyhole illuminated. Lots of fun possibilities.
Slip on the appropriate key and apply with 2-sided tape above the keyed switch for the generator/UPS/battery supply so you can find it when the power is cut, especially after it was left in the wrong position after the once-monthly test last done sometime last year.
I tend to install proper emergency lights where the switches and controls are - that ensures I have light exactly where I need it, when I need it. It's also on the testing regime, for obvious reasons :).
"No1 Gadget Store UK" sells them on Amazon.com, for considerably more. Supplies seem rather limited though. "Free" shipping with those high prices. Don't see "UK only".
http://www.amazon.com/Original-Nite-Tritium-Glowring-keyring/dp/B00F3887SQ
Limited supply, high prices... Smuggling? Not the worse thing that's been brought in lately. Not like it's drugs, explosives, biological weapons, or radioactive nuclear materials...
Not to mention Canadian terrorists smuggling Kinder Eggs of Mass destruction
canadian-kinder-surprise-smuggling-ring-broken-up-by-us-officials
{DHS goon sweeps geiger counter over device}
And picks up nothing at all. Those weedy little electrons average around 5keV, I think, and they can't make it through paper let alone glass.
Just tell the goon you think there is a tiny battery in the end cap, if you get asked. If. As I understand it the DHS is staffed by the people who couldn't hold down a job collecting garbage because it was too intellectually taxing. (Apartheid South African police joke repurposed).
There's currently a fuss about terrorists using thermite to attack 'planes. The Air Marshall's are fretting because nobody has told them how to put the stuff out. (They're basically undercover DHS armed cops.) Luckily, igniting thermite is a little difficult, because there is no practical way of putting it out.
Or it may just be American journalists who are the idiots.
When I encountered thermite in a school chemistry lesson, the teacher used magnesium ribbon and a bunsen burner to start off the reaction, which you don't find on many airliners.
the teacher used magnesium ribbon and a bunsen burner to start off the reaction
I don't think I am giving anything away at all by observing that if you have a laptop battery, or even a large phone battery, it is very easy to ignite thermite. Ultimately the only way to ensure security for aircraft is to limit air travel to people who are adequately verified by webs of trust; and as the British government can't even prevent a trio of dangerously stupid schoolgirls from making it to Syria, this isn't going to happen.
There's currently a fuss about terrorists using thermite to attack 'planes. The Air Marshall's are fretting because nobody has told them how to put the stuff out. (They're basically undercover DHS armed cops.) Luckily, igniting thermite is a little difficult, because there is no practical way of putting it out.
The difficulty in putting it out bears no relation to how difficult it is to ignite something.
As for thermite ignition, it does take some heat but it is by no means hard (not helped by the fact that smokers are allowed a lighter in carry-on, and I suspect a strip of magnesium will not trigger any alarm bells). To extinguish thermite once it is ignited, however, strikes me as nigh impossible with the few means you have on a plane.
Having said that, I have no idea how you'd get thermite onto a plane - I suspect any usable quantity would show up quite well on carry-on luggage scanners. At least I hope so..
A fellow traveler told me today how he had been taking some Whitby fosils of ancient amonites into the US and the customs inspector attempted to impound them as it's illegal to take Seafood into the US. He got away with it after suggesting the customs office try BBQing and consuming them!
My father-in-law has been seeded with some for of radioactive stuff
A guy I once did some work with from Winfrith told me how his neighbour used to go on about the dangers of radioactivity right up until he needed radiotherapy for cancer, whereupon for some reason he went very quiet on the subject.
"A guy I once did some work with from Winfrith told me how his neighbour used to go on about the dangers of radioactivity right up until he needed radiotherapy for cancer, whereupon for some reason he went very quiet on the subject."
FWIW Rutherford's labs at Oxford were cleaned up and repurposed for other research many years ago. After a while staff started going down with various nasty cancers. It was assumed that material was missed and the place gone over wih a fine tooth comb - nothing found - and deep cleaned again.
Staff kept getting ill. After banging their heads against trying to find the source of radiation which was causing it, the source was found to be mercury.
More precisely, from broken mercury thermometers from decades ago which had seeped into the floorboards and been reacting with the atmosphere. Mercuric oxides are extremely nasty things and it only takes small amounts to cause trouble.
Radioactives are generally more benign, unless you're a smoker (Polonium buildups in the lungs are probably what causes most lung cancers that occur more than 6 months after a smoker gives up)
After getting my back and kidneys squidged a bit in a car accident in the '80s, the hospital pumped radioactive iodine into a vein and took X rays of various bits. The pics were quite amazing, like a glow in the dark road map of the body.
I also did a bit of work at Windscale when it was still called that, so I don' need no steenkin' glow in the dark keyrings when I already glow myself.
Having recently flown to the USA on business carrying a similar tritium glow device on my keychain I have not been bothered about it at either Düsseldorf or NY. I doubt they can detect them unless they look at them in the dark and realise it's something other than one of those "charge in the daylight and glow for maybe 30 minutes after that"
Also, hello worthless NSA peon forced to read this, don't you just wish you could get a real job like the rest of us goons? ;)
Betalights. More key British technology lost overseas. Saunders-Roe Developments pioneered this technology, but were sold off by Westland Aircraft. Why? Because Westland were out of cash after the Tories sat on helicopter orders for a few years........
The technology and manufacturing ended up in Canada, with Saunders-Roe closed. It is key military technology - powerless light sources for aircraft, vehicle controls, gunsights. And like we did with so much during Thatchers time in power, we gave it away overseas for peanuts
The guy you are looking for is
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM FRS[1] (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics.[2]
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_illumination.
Innovations are often patented, their time is always limited.
From the way you express the loss I have a feeling you have been hit by a virus called Jeremy Clarkson a spin master of massive proportions when it comes to inventions and history.
This post has been deleted by its author
Isn't obvious that to get rid of nuclear waste you use NukeAway. At least that is what is used in the land of Ork.
As for thermite, it is pretty difficult to get started. In my youth, I tried with magnesium ribbon and it failed miserably. Of course that did not deter me and my brother as we disassembled some firecrackers and used the KNO3+S+C mixture to get the thermite started. The next time I used road flare which did the starting job nicely. A few years later in the 10th grade (4th form) my chemistry teacher made a hole in the lab table with thermite results. It IS very hot!
Such fun!!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
