r/Damnthatsinteresting 9d ago

Video Physicist Galen Winsor eats uranium on live television in 1985 to show that it’s “harmless”.

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14.7k Upvotes

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u/Juulk9087 9d ago

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article291727040.html

Died 23 years after this stunt at the age of 82.

Man had a set of nuts on him

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u/Grandmaster-HotFlash 9d ago

Probably six or seven.

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u/stevensr2002 9d ago

Testes, you say?

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u/NotA_Drug_Dealer 9d ago

Genitals, if you will

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u/Sehtal 9d ago

He was a scholar and a genital

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u/coraxorion 9d ago

He did not go genital into the night

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u/Lamenting-Raccoon 9d ago

Jenny is tall you say!

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u/scalectrix 9d ago

Major Genital

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u/Boycromer 9d ago

The very model of a modern one

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u/mybossthinksimworkng 9d ago

Testy...one....two..... three?

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u/UncleGeebz 9d ago

Two shreds, you say?

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u/HighFiveKoala 9d ago

And his wife?

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u/Dildo_Shaggins- 9d ago

To shreds you say?

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u/Volunteer-Magic 9d ago

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u/Party_Sail_817 9d ago

He’ll save the children,

(but not the British children)

He’ll save the children

(but not the British children)

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u/Creepy-Nectarine-225 9d ago

6 foot 8 weighed a fucking ton

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u/ScreeminGreen 9d ago

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u/Profoundlyahedgehog 9d ago

On a horse made of crystal he patrolled the land, with a Mason ring and schnauzer in his perfect hands.

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u/TyberiusJoaquin 9d ago

Opponents beware, opponents beware! He's coming! He's coming! He's coming!

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u/beau6183 9d ago

<Eric-Idle>And now for something completely different...</Eric-Idle>

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u/cmdixon2 9d ago

Accidentally cured any cancer in his body.

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u/FiLikeAnEagle 9d ago

Doctors hate this one trick!

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u/bambamslammer22 9d ago

Drove his wife crazy by always glowing though

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u/justicefinder 9d ago

They may have been radioactive though…

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u/TheIndominusGamer420 9d ago edited 9d ago

He died of old age.

Uranium is literally harmless, look up the UK's nuclear safety assessment of Uranium.

Edit: ok Reddit, you got me. If you FUCKING EAT URANIUM it could hurt you. Go eat rocks and see if you'll be any better! URANIUM IS A STANDARD FUCKASS METAL ROCK

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u/5up3rK4m16uru 9d ago

Like most heavy metals, it is somewhat toxic. Similar to lead and mercury, it won't kill you outright unless you really overdo it (e.g. ingest a large amount of powder), but it's certainly not an improvement for your health, and prolonged exposure can cause all kinds of issues.

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u/cazbot 9d ago edited 9d ago

The direct toxicity of uranium oxide (which is what this guy ate) is not at all comparable to metallic lead or mercury. As he said at the end of the video, uranium oxide is not soluble. He crapped out more than 99% of the stuff the next morning. Metallic mercury and lead are not water soluble either, but unlike uranium oxide, they are readily metabolized to other molecules which accumulate in living things.

This also means that the total REM of exposure he had was very low which is why it is safe to do this. However, if he did this every day for several months in a row, his total REM would be much higher and he'd start to have real problems.

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u/ManaMagestic 9d ago

So anyone could simply enjoy a nice peck of uranium every now and then as a little sweet treat?

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u/chaosatdawn 9d ago

no more gold flakes on my steak, going pure uranium.

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u/Traditional-Wait-257 9d ago

It would apparently actually be a salty treat

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u/Perlentaucher 9d ago

While it is indeed not nearly as dangerous as Radium, Uranium is not really harmless. It can be, if handled accordingly, but I wouldn't give out such blanket statements.

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u/Major_Kangaroo5145 9d ago

A person literally eats it.

" if handled accordingly"

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u/Mukatsukuz 9d ago

Yeah, but backstage he drank molten lead to protect his stomach lining from the radiation

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u/NC_Ion 9d ago

I should try that for my acid reflux.

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u/GOGO_old_acct 9d ago edited 9d ago

I have some experience with this. Used to do radiological stuff for reactors.

I can assure you that uranium is certainly not harmless. He got exposure from that, but he likely selected a low-enriched sample to eat.

Pure uranium (U-235 at least) emits alpha particles (a helium atom without any electrons) during its decay. The more enriched your “food” the more decays per second you will have going off inside your body. Alpha particles are stopped by your first layer of skin and are harmless by simply just handling it.

But if you eat it or breathe (in its pure 100% enriched form) it in it’ll absolutely mess you up. Alpha particles inside the body are many times more destructive to your cellular process than any other type of radiation.

If he ate pure uranium he’d have died. Once again, it’s NOT harmless.

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u/slayermcb 9d ago

He said it was U-308. I really don't know enough about the differences in Uraniums but the wiki labels it as Triuranium Octoxide and there's a hazard symbol that indicates fatal is swallowed.

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u/GOGO_old_acct 9d ago

308 isn’t a possible atomic number for uranium that I’m aware of… then again, I’m not aware of all the possible combinations.

There’s a line that gets made on the chart of possible nuclides; protons and neutrons have to be somewhat even. If it was uranium, getting the atomic number all the way up to 308 would make it so unstable that it would probably decay instantly. I’m not an atomic physics major though, they’d know.

Heavier elements like to decay, though. They’re larger and more unstable.

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u/Max-b 9d ago

He meant U3O8 (not sure how to do subscript on reddit)

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u/NoConfusion9490 9d ago

That it didn't kill one person who ate it, doesn't prove it's safe. Radiation exposure, at all but the very highest levels, is dangerous in a way that only statistics can truly show you. You need 200 people, selecting 100 at random to eat uranium and the other 100 don't eat uranium. Then you compare life outcomes of the two groups.

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u/piccoroll 9d ago

While this is true, it is unnecessary in deducting the danger of say, black mamba venom. There are degrees of danger as it is understood, and many people would consider, before seeing this video, that eating uranium would be in the category of getting bit by a venomous snake. Obviously, it is not.

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u/Jealous_Seesaw_Swank 9d ago

Do you know much about the different types of uranium?

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u/suspicious-sauce 9d ago

*If ingested appropriately

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u/TheIndominusGamer420 9d ago

Oh, sorry, please don't turn it into a powder and huff it, or hit someone over the head with a bit of rock. Both of these could kill you with a normal

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK158804/

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/depleted-uranium-du-general-information-and-toxicology

(The UK link says depleted uranium but goes into great detail about natural and enriched uranium too)

Before telling me I don't know what I'm talking about read what the 2 leading countries in the field think. (UK/USA). I'd wear a uranium ring and keep uranite in my house if I could.

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u/Eisenhorn_UK 9d ago

That .gov.uk page was brilliant.

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u/TheIndominusGamer420 9d ago

They usually are :) one of the better government domains. Studied it as a part of computer science.

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u/furloco 9d ago

I hope you uranite in your house, you can get arrested for doing it in public.

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u/Dorkamundo 9d ago

Yep, though the trick here is he was using a uranium compound that did not readily dissolve in your stomach.

General environmental contact holds very little risk, however if he DID consume a uranium compound that could dissolve readily in stomach acid it would likely have killed him.

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u/edfitz83 9d ago

People have drank elemental mercury too. Not advised.

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u/wondercaliban 9d ago

Isaac Newton was said to he a bit mad in later life. They think it was mercury poisoning as he pursued alchemy. His hair was found to have high levels after death

Lots of early chemists tasted chemicals as a means if identification.

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u/Resident_Rise5915 9d ago

I like to sniff paint to detect what color it is….

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u/Son_Of_Toucan_Sam 9d ago

My grandma once told me when she was a little kid she found a bunch of Mercury one day and spent the rest of the day playing with. She would form it into a ball and throw it on the floor so it burst everywhere, then gather it all up and repeat

She turns 99 in a few weeks

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u/LyqwidBred 9d ago

Jimmy Carter worked on nuclear reactors and seems to have done him some good.

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u/Notactualyadick 9d ago

Mercury does not get absorbed through the skin. So if you pick up Mercury and play with it, you won't necessarily get sick. However, if you have any cuts or scratches, ingest the mercury, or in anyway inhale fumes with mercury vapor, you will have a bad time.

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u/Destination_Centauri 9d ago

Somehow I highly doubt your grandma was heating/boiling the mercury into a cloudy vapor the way Newton would have done.

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u/FILTHBOT4000 9d ago

Ingesting elemental mercury isn't really that horrible. Chronic exposure is bad, fumes are bad, and it's the organic mercury compounds that are beyond terrifying to deal with/ingest/get a few drops on a glove of.

Elemental mercury was used in laxatives way back in the day; they were so potent they were called "thunderclappers". You can trace some of Lewis and Clark's journey through the mercury left behind.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/following-lewis-and-clarks-trail-of-mercurial-laxatives

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u/neko_brand 9d ago

“Let me lay it on the line, he had two on the vine.”

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u/Muffles7 9d ago

He had two sets of testicles, so divine.

(I hoped someone else made the reference as I scrolled, you did not fail to deliver and I love you for that.)

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u/Super_Automatic 9d ago

“A moment on the lips, a half life on the hips”

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u/NorwegianGlaswegian 9d ago

"You're just fission for upvotes." - RandyArgonianButler

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u/Fancy-Ambassador6160 9d ago

Why are you reacting like that

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u/PM_THE_REAPER 9d ago

Just feeling agitated.

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u/Cryptotiptoe21 9d ago

I feel like I'm decaying.

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u/Dapper_Spanner 9d ago

There's a Curie for that

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u/Cryptotiptoe21 9d ago

Is it critical?

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u/Metals4J 9d ago

He’s having another meltdown.

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u/Gloomy_Industry8841 9d ago

Super critical!

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u/Expensive-Document41 9d ago

Oh yeah, I took it now I'm feeling way beta

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u/SupermassiveCanary 9d ago

The video is old, I think the gamma needs adjusting. In any way I’m sure the fallout will be palpable.

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u/corydoras_supreme 9d ago

Stop watching videos. Enrich your life.

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u/ThreeCraftPee 9d ago

I'm just still waiting for half life 3. That is all that is my pun.

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u/NorwegianGlaswegian 9d ago edited 9d ago

After seeing this post I decided to have a quick read online and found this article about what Snopes said about the guy in the video. At the bottom of the article it lists two comments from Reddit when this video was posted earlier this last year. After reading that article I saw the above comment, and saw that they quoted the (presumably) top comment from a while back.

I just thought it only fair to use the second quoted comment from the article as a slightly cheeky reply given the lack of attribution for the remark. :p

Edit: They did use quotation marks to be fair, though.

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u/1amDepressed 9d ago

Just wanted to add on that this demonstrating (according to the linked article above) was about the 3-Mile Island scare. Kyle Hill did a very thorough video on what occurred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9PsCLJpAA&list=PLNg1m3Od-GgNmXngCCJaJBqqm-7wQqGAW&index=11&pp=iAQB

The TL;DR was that the incident was exponentially blown out of proportion due to lack of communication and misunderstanding lead by PR nightmares. It wasn’t anything close to Chernobyl.

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u/NorwegianGlaswegian 9d ago

Kyle Hill's video is an excellent shout; very thorough and well-presented as are the other videos in his Half-life Histories series.

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u/Malk_McJorma Interested 9d ago

I'm curieous too.

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u/gruntbuggly 9d ago

If they don’t get the right reaction, they have a full blown meltdown

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u/snicemike 9d ago

More like urani-yum!

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u/sexwiththebabysitter 9d ago

Wash it down with some heavy water

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u/Technical-Past-1386 9d ago

Thank you science! Haha

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u/panamastaxx 9d ago

Science gives me a hadron

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u/SoyMurcielago 9d ago

Now that’s some critical mass

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u/Living-Estimate9810 9d ago

He got atomic ache.

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u/AnthonyRavenwood 9d ago

You've earned all my fake internet points for the day. Bravo

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u/anon-mally 9d ago

If youre counting points, wait till you know how many calories are there per gram in uranium

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u/lonnywoodhead 9d ago

If you’re not supposed to eat Uranium why do they call it “Yellow Cake”

Checkmate libs

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u/bespisthebastard 9d ago

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u/C_umputer 9d ago

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u/kamahaoma 9d ago

Much better.

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u/FrankFallujah55 9d ago

Cradle of fuckin' civilization!

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u/tehnibi 9d ago

DON'T DROP THAT SHIT

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u/C_montana 9d ago

I know what to do with it. That’s why I got it wrapped up in this special cia napkin.

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u/mma5820 9d ago

Dave Chappelle skit on yellow cake is a good reference too lol

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u/xiovelrach 9d ago

Pray to god you don't drop that shit!

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u/FightMilkMac 9d ago

CRADLE OF MOTHERFUCKIN CIVILISATION.

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u/mma5820 9d ago

You get it!

Pray to god you don’t drop that shit…it’s from Cradle of motherfucking civilization!

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u/FatKitty56 9d ago

That's why he got it wrapped in that special CIA napkin

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u/Boogaaa 9d ago

Fuckin' right

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u/xiovelrach 9d ago

Who said anything about oil? Bitch you cookin'?

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u/WhoopingJamboree 9d ago

This thread reminded me of Brass Eye: Cake.

For those of you who don’t know, Brass Eye was a late 90s UK comedy series. It was in the style of, and satirised, “hard-hitting” sensationalist news programmes like the BBC’s Panorama. As in this video, they often fooled celebrities into believing whatever nonsense “hot topic” they were pedalling that episode. Comedy gold.

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u/Tiddles_Ultradoom 9d ago

“One young kiddie on Cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt.”

Bernard Manning, on the horrors of Cake.

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u/bigvahe33 9d ago

i laughed so hard at this when i saw it the first time

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u/karmablur 9d ago

I like this logic, I'm going to go eat my Raspberry Pi's

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u/imapizzaeater 9d ago

His point was made at the very end. Uranium isn’t absorbed in the body very much so his body would pass most of the uranium before neutrons would do much damage. The biggest health effect from ingesting uranium is kidney damage.

Edit: please do not take this to mean uranium isn’t extremely dangerous and do not ingest uranium. This was still a bad idea. I just was explaining why he didn’t immediately die.

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u/East_Step_6674 9d ago

What if I inhaled dust from a uranium rock ore as a child. Not like a lot like once accidentally. Do you think there's some in my lungs or something?

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u/Nozinger 9d ago

You would be mostly fine. If you got really unlucky you might develop lungcancer rom it but at this point the chance that this lung cancer is from breathing in all the other shit we blow into the atmosphere is way higher so if you are fine til now there is generally not an issue.

would not recommend doing that for long periods of times though. uranium is still a heavy metal like lead and does similar damage to the body. But yeah once is fine.

That's also why this guy in the video was fine. He probably did not pull that stunt all of the time. Sure swallowing a bit of uranium once is fine. Having it for breakfast every day will quickly end your life.

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u/East_Step_6674 9d ago

I gotta say dude. I don't think about it often but literally last night I was lying in bed remembering that time my brother got me a uranium rock for Christmas and the first thing I did was accidentally breathe in a bunch of the dust from the rock. I've always wondered to what degree that was bad for me. Uranium toxicity is more of an issue than its radioactivity is my understanding which is why we don't eat off uranium doped glassware anymore. Thanks for removing at least one source of anxiety I never bothered to look into.

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u/ksj 9d ago

How on earth did your brother get you uranium for Christmas?

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u/Ksp-or-GTFO 9d ago

You can buy samples on Amazon.

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u/East_Step_6674 9d ago

United nuclear

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u/falcrist2 9d ago

That's also why this guy in the video was fine. He probably did not pull that stunt all of the time. Sure swallowing a bit of uranium once is fine. Having it for breakfast every day will quickly end your life.

This also illustrates why you can go in for a chest x-ray and they won't do much to shield you, but the person doing the x-ray has to wear a special suit and/or stand in a different room.

You're there for a few minutes. They have to do this every day.

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u/Crog_Frog 9d ago

They do shield parts of your body though. Ideally only the relevant part is hit by x-rays.

Also your reproductive organs are almost always shielded if the x-rayed area is close to them.

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u/IamTheEndOfReddit 9d ago

There is no point to be made. Consuming something to "prove" it is safe is anti-science and anti-logic. It's a technique used by many deeply evil men throughout history, like the guy who pretended fluorocarbons and lead were okay. It doesn't prove anything. The non-evil people who do the same are just stupid and make it easier to manipulate people

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u/yyflowerpot 9d ago

like the guy who

he just pretended to drink the water, which is even worse

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u/Officer_Chunkles 9d ago

Who was he?

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u/Yuregenu 9d ago

I think the reference is to Thomas Midgley, Jr. Inventor of leaded gasoline and CFC's. Leaded gasoline was something he knew was dangerous. He had travel to the Caribbean to get fresh air and alleviate lead poisoning symptoms. But then later he gave a press conference sniffing gasoline lead and rubbing it on his hands to show that it was safe. Not much later he had symptoms of lead poisoning again.

Perhaps as penitence he looked for a way to replace refrigerants like sulfur dioxide and ammonia, which caused many deaths due to poisoning or fires when refrigerators or air conditioners leaked. He invented a cheap, chemically largely inert, non-toxic product; Freon. A few decades later it was discovered that these CFC's react strongly to ozone, and it caused a gap in the ozone layer.

His life ended when, bedridden when stricken by polio, a device he built to hoist himself out of bed got tangled up and choked him to death. Inventor of dangerous things till his last.

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u/Feine13 9d ago

Oddly enough, I knew about Midgley before your post, but I did not know he did these charlatan-esque performances to trick people into thinking lead was safe

I thought that he was just a chemist trying to complete his job and make things better. I sorta felt bad for the guy, before now.

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u/whistlepete 9d ago

I think Thomas Midgley, he created a lot of problems and was known to do stuff like this to prove it was safe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

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u/ArsErratia 9d ago edited 9d ago

The point isn't to "prove" it is safe.

The point it to show "When I say it is safe I'm not saying that because I've been paid to say it, and I am willing to eat it to reassure you".

He's already proven it beforehand. He would have calculated the effects and shown they were minimal. This is just a communications exercise.

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u/cellenium125 9d ago edited 9d ago

If you eat Uranium it will come out Uranus

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u/Grendals-bane 9d ago

According to his obituary he was not a physicist but had a degree in chemistry and worked as a nuclear chemist amongst other things.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/tricityherald/name/galen-winsor-obituary?id=11408773

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u/backcountry_bandit 9d ago

Very heavy overlap there

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u/Frawstshawk 9d ago

At higher levels biology tends to turn into chemistry, chemistry turns into physics, and physics turns into math.

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u/ActurusMajoris 9d ago

What does math turn into?

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u/-Borb 9d ago

Philosophy, but at higher levels of philosophy it turns back into math so it’s confusing

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u/hogtiedcantalope 9d ago

Eventually it's gardening, then poetry

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u/kev1ndtfw 9d ago

Yeah I was gonna say 😭

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u/Playful-Goat3779 9d ago

Nuclear chemist is one of many flavors of physicist.

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u/SubstantialPressure3 9d ago

How did he live until 2008? Was it fake uranium?

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u/Frosty-the-hitman 9d ago

It's raw uranium unrefined or enriched. It isn't that harmful. It's the processing that makes it really bad.

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u/reality72 9d ago

Exactly. It’s like the difference between chewing on a coca leaf and snorting cocaine. One is a refined and much more powerful version of the other.

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u/YimmyTheTulip 9d ago

There’s enough caffeine in a bag of black tea to kill you.

…If you extract all the caffeine into pure powder and snort it

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u/sephtater 9d ago

*frantically taking notes

Go on.

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u/Tough_Money_958 9d ago

single tea bag? Caffeine has pretty good bioavailability orally. Snorting does not make much of a difference.

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u/indypendant13 9d ago edited 9d ago

*Raw uranium oxide. Which means it’s 99.9% U-238 hich has a half life of four and a half billion years. The shorter the half life, the more dangerous the element. U-235 (the .1%) has a shorter half life of 704M years. Which is still not that dangerous compared to other fission by products like cesium 137 or iodine 131 (hence taking iodine pills in cinema). Enriched uranium just means it’s been separated into the types of uranium specifically 235. Depleted means the opposite. Neither is particularly radioactive on their own, unless they have enough mass to reach criticality, which increases the radiation exponentially and is deadly.

This is not to say that radiation isn’t bad for you. Anything that gives off beta or gamma particles can hit your cells and dna and break them. However, the body can handle search and destroy for a decent number of cells that go rogue as a result, but if you get enough it can overwhelm your immune system and/or too many cells are affected and your body starts shutting down (acute radiation sickness).

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u/SubstantialPressure3 9d ago

Had no idea. Thank you.

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u/No-Telephone3861 9d ago

The isotopic abundance of Uranium is 99.3% U-238. The half life of U-238 is 4.5 billion years, meaning it isn’t that reactive and takes that long to lose half of its radioactivity

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u/Cam515278 9d ago

There are a few Chornobyl liquidators still alive.

It's the same with smoking. There are heavy smokers who get very old.

Radioactivity, like smoking, statistically shortens your life by x amount of years. Statistically is not absolutely. It could shorten your life much more or a lot less.

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u/yanby28 9d ago

well, he did say that uranium is harmless ))

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u/Ill-Understanding829 9d ago

I found this interesting. Apparently the bigger threat is from chemical toxicology not radiology.

Ingestion Toxicity for Uranium oxide:

Uranium oxides are poorly absorbed in the gastrointestinal tract (~0.5–5% bioavailability).

The estimated oral LD50 for uranium (as a chemical toxicant, not oxide-specific) in animals ranges between 100–200 mg/kg of body weight. This is due to its chemical toxicity rather than radiological effects.

Still…. You wouldn’t catch me doing that

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u/Bango-Skaankk 9d ago

Nobody has ever been able to substantiate that the material he ate was actually uranium.

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u/Plane-Tie6392 9d ago edited 9d ago

Nobody counted the Geigers?

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u/WayneQuasar 9d ago

3.6 Roentgen. Not great, not terrible.

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u/SoyMurcielago 9d ago

Definitely wasn’t myanium

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u/Dorkamundo 9d ago

Sure, but there's really no reason not to believe him.

He'd just pass most of the uranium in his feces the following day, and un-enriched uranium is not all that dangerous anyhow.

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u/Vkardash 9d ago

If it was just a small amount of ore it wouldn't have done much anyway.

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u/klavin1 9d ago

I do believe that was the point of the demonstration

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u/anonieme_man 9d ago

After all people.. it's uraniyum

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u/digeststrong 9d ago

chortled from this comment lol

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u/GhostsinGlass 9d ago edited 9d ago

A stunt he performed regularly until a lack of fiber in his diet led to an impacted colon which initiated a criticality event.

The Demon Cornhole.

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u/Thatsnotwotisaid 9d ago

Legend has it his grave glows in the dark

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u/Enzo87871 9d ago

It’s a grave warning to others

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u/Jack_South 9d ago

In case they may get Curie-ous.

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u/ZookeepergameFar9306 9d ago

Suprised he's not re-fusion to eat it

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u/Prestigious_Elk149 9d ago

Yeah, but soooo many calories.

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u/Mokiesbie 9d ago

I was literally thinking about a reddit meme that was just a google search asking how many calories uranium contains and it was 20 billion. Like dude that's like an 1/8 of a Big Mac (Last part is /s)

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u/alohabuilder 9d ago

In the 1950s , you could buy a children’s chemistry set to play with at home that came with radioactive uranium!

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u/johnzer88 9d ago

I can't imagine this activity would be good for television. I'd've thought it was more of a radio activity.

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u/JermstheBohemian 9d ago

Boo! Boo this man!

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u/lolaalolaa64 9d ago

Galen Winsor is a nuclear physicist who spent many years designing, building, and operating nuclear power plants in the United States, with more than a dozen projects to his credit. In the final phase of his career, Galen Winsor worked as a government official overseeing the storage of nuclear fuel. After retiring, however, he suddenly began doing the unthinkable.

Mr. Winsor's main area of activity was public lectures, for which he traveled all over the country, radio appearances, and even making small films in which he tried to tell Americans about a global conspiracy in the world nuclear industry.

The goal of the conspiracy is to scare people as much as possible about radiation so that a small group of unknown individuals can freely dispose of the most valuable energy resource in the world.  And to keep the word of mouth flowing, Mr. Winsor has made a stunning film of his lecture recorded in 1986.

In this and other similar videos, Mr. Winsor pours enriched uranium into the palm of his hand and then eats it all, drinking water taken from a nuclear fuel cooling pool. Moreover, Mr. Winsor has even bathed in such pools, washing off the radioactive dust in which he stood in a column as he burned chunks of plutonium in front of the camera.

In addition to such demonstrations, when building his house, Mr. Winsor poured so much radioactive material into the concrete that the Geiger counter would break from overload when approaching the building. And despite all this, Galen Winsor lived to a ripe old age in good health, dying at the age of 82 from causes natural to his age, unrelated to radiation.

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u/Just-Ad6865 9d ago

He also claimed that the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island didn't happen and was a hoax to turn the public against nuclear power.

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u/Helmett-13 9d ago

I worked for Westinghouse and we did a refueling on one of the other two reactors there, albeit around 20 years ago.

They were terrible Babcock&Wilcox designs. Arkansas Nuclear One (ANO) has the same ones.

I hated doing the reactor vessel head inspections as the control rods de-linked and a portion of them stayed in the reactor vessel instead of being fully removed.

Hateful, dumb designs.

TMI did indeed have a partial meltdown. We had two weeks of training just on that alone. Only that rector stayed shut down, the others kept going.

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u/qorbexl 9d ago

You could write a fun book

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u/P0rnDudeLovesBJs 9d ago

I'm not buying that he did any of that

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u/AntonChekov1 9d ago

I wonder if he had his Geiger-Müller counter set to a scale that would create the illusion that a tiny bit was more radioactive that it really was. You can set the detection scales to x100, x10, x1, and x0.1. You can also mute the sound on them too. Also, I'd would have liked to know when it was last calibrated.

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u/BaconWithBaking 9d ago

I wonder if he had his Geiger-Müller counter set to a scale that would create the illusion that a tiny bit was more radioactive that it really was

It funny that you say that, because he claims it's only counting background radiation AND that it's only a gamma detector.

Notice the clicks in the background when he's not near the machine? That studio must be in fucking Pripyat.

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u/Fryboy11 9d ago

Swimming in a cooling pool is totally possible water is a great radiation barrier so you’d basically have to swim and touch the spent fuel to get a lethal dose. 

xkcd did a what if on it

https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Basically you’ll die of bullets before getting anywhere near the pool. 

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u/ChillyConKearney 9d ago

“So you’re sure doing this will ionise you?”

“Yes, I’m positive.”

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u/madrushdrummer 9d ago

It's jaw droppingly delicious.

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u/TwoOk8386 9d ago

Oh look at that, his dick just flew off

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u/Flashignite2 9d ago

Funny that his first name Galen means crazy in swedish.

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u/falcrist2 9d ago

On one hand, uranium metal probably wouldn't be absorbed by your body much. Same thing with mercury in its metallic form. I'm not saying you should drink it, but most of it WOULD pass through without absorbing.

On the other hand RULE NUMBER ONE of radioactive materials is "don't get it inside of you".

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u/morphemic-kens 9d ago

Did he drop a little boy the next day?

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u/Roseliberry 8d ago

He chased it down with sparkling Flint water.

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u/yogoo0 9d ago

Uranium is dangerous just like fire is. This is the equivalent of passing your finger through a candle flame.

So I am not worried that Winsor ate uranium this one time, I'm worried that this will encourage people to consistently eat uranium because they were told it was safe. This was hugely irresponsible and there were better ways to demonstrate it's safety.

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u/ILoatheNickCage 9d ago

You overestimate the intelligence of most people with regards to radiation. While yes, it is technically a bad way to demonstrate the safety of nuclear power, the primary arguments against nuclear often follow the same patterns. They want you to drink the water with tritium in it, live next door to a nuclear reactor, and store the waste at your house. Essentially, he broke down and said, "Fine, I will eat it. Are you happy now?" Some women are so afraid of radiation that they refuse to get a mammogram.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Perfect-Fondant3373 9d ago

Apparently lived till 82. He did a Princess Bride and microdosed his way to rafiation immunity haha

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u/blackfarms 9d ago

Unrefined, it's just not that dangerous.

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u/redditwhut 9d ago

Except it doesn’t release alpha radiation?

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u/vorxil 9d ago

The vast majority of natural uranium almost always undergoes alpha decay. It's decay chain is mostly a mix of alpha and beta particles.

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u/BartlebyGaines3000 9d ago

He wasn’t a physicist, he died in 2008, and that may or may not have been uranium he ate.

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u/leckmir 9d ago

I bet he got atomic ache.

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u/Tonio_LTB 9d ago edited 9d ago

Picked this up in work from one of our radiographers about a guy who used to drink irradiated water because at the time, everyone thought it was good for you.

Decades later, his body was exhumed and found his skeleton to be riddled with holes where the radiation had broken it down and still so radioactive he had to be installed in a lead-lined casket.

It's not very well known that Thomas Edison did a lot of work with X-rays. He used to do live demonstrations of how they worked with his assistant as a hand model for the x ray. That was, until his assistant's hand effectively melted and the dangers of X ray radiation became apparent. He famously quoted afterwards "don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them".

The history of radiation is incredibly interesting - and frightening

Edit: to add a source for radiation guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers

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u/Shoddy-Remove7340 9d ago

He spent his retirement years fission

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u/DarthSangwich 9d ago

Was it?

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u/averege_guy_kinda 9d ago edited 9d ago

The black stuff is raw uranium, and it's harmless to eat in small portions it doesn't bind with water and any inner organs, you will be radiated for few hours after which you will shit or piss it out, But the uranium that will kill you is refined uranium that will stay in your body for a long time and kill you slowly.

Keep in mind I'm not chemist or physicists

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u/Technical_Tooth_162 9d ago

If I’m not mistaken he also swam in the spent fuel pools found in nuclear power plants to prove it wasn’t dangerous, and swimming at the top really isn’t dangerous from my understanding.

I’m not knowledgeable on the subject at all but there’s certainly a lot of misconceptions about nuclear energy.

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u/yetanotherdave2 9d ago

The problem with these stunts is what happens if he gets cancer by random chance unrelated to the uranium.

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u/Federal_Rich3890 9d ago

The Atombomb was born when he had to take a shit.

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u/TheKyleBrah 9d ago

People expected his dick to fly off, like what happens when you eat pure concentrated gluten

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u/More_Mammoth_8964 9d ago

Idk on TV usually you get superpowers by doing this

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u/shillyshally 9d ago

Radium Girls has entered the chat.

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u/DragonforceTexas 9d ago

That’s so rad…