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Hot StuffThe quest for radioactive items on eBay.

By Paul Collins
Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007, at 5:32 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

So, how much radiation are you getting from this stuff? In many cases, maybe not much more than naturally occurs in your home. The radiation collector's bible—William Kolb's self-published and utterly engrossing Living With Radiation—is quick to point out that lots of common objects are faintly radioactive. Bananas, brazil nuts, cat litter, granite countertops, sensitive toothpaste ... even dryer lint boasts 20 times the background rate of radiation. (Don't blame your appliance: Naturally occurring radioactive isotopes adhere to dust.) Exposure also varies greatly by distance—and there's probably more danger from a uranium oxide pendant on your skin than from that plate on your shelf.

Even so, Kolb and Frame both avoid one type of radioactive antique—and startlingly, it's the one the rest of us are most likely to own. "I shy away from anything that contains radium," Kolb tells me. "In most cases, radium is not fixed in a way that eliminates the risk of contamination or ingestion." And where would Joe Public find that radium today? Simple: in old watches. "There were probably 100 million watches made in the U.S. alone during the era of radium dials," Oak Ridge's Paul Frame says. "There's so many of these things."

Many stopped luminescing years ago, so their radioactivity is not obvious to the casual observer. But it's still very much present, and will be for millennia. The relatively short half-life of the RA-226 isotope (1,602 years) means that it has lots of decay going on—radium puts the active in radioactive—and inhaled or digested radium dust presents a particular danger because its bodily absorption mimics calcium. It can go right to your bone and marrow, as unfortunate dial-factory "Radium Girls" discovered in the 1920s.

One YouTube clip shows the dramatic squawk an old Timex watch face can still coax from a Geiger counter. Take off the glass bezel and you're asking for trouble—and not just from the radiation. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is about to clamp down," Frame warns me.

Amazingly, the NRC lacked regulatory control over consumer radioactives in the past; that was left to the desultory enforcement of states. But buried in regulatory language and unnoticed by any news media, last month the NRC quietly announced a change in policy: It can now require a general NRC license from any owner of an object containing more than 37 kBq of Radium-226. That's about twice the typical content of an old mantle clock, four times that of a pocket watch, and about six times that of a typical wristwatch. Collectors with particularly hot timepieces—or with many typical old ones—may now fall under the NRC's regulations, as may eBay auctions of multiple radium parts like this one. Any CDVer with an old crate of 100 luminous gauges (or radium chain pulls, or anything else that glows) will also need a general license—and so will Revigator owners. That means you can't export, disassemble, or dispose of the stuff without NRC approval.

The news has not even reached the happy hunting grounds of the CDV 700 Club yet. Instead, a recent post reminisced about how, "The hottest rock that is not 'ore' that I've Urban Prospected was in an antique store, appeared to [have] been a green marble smoking stand. It was hotter than a firecracker compared to most."

It's an appropriate find for radiation hunters: Because now, it seems, you'd better smoke 'em if you've got 'em.

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Paul Collins teaches writing at Portland State University. He is the author of the forthcoming The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World.
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