Backscatter
Collecting Radioactive Materials Having a hobby that includes acquiring radioactive materials is more popular than many people outside the world of radiation protection would realise.
Private individuals can legally buy radioactive materials without a permit in the UK, so long as the quantity and specific activity concentration of the item is below set thresholds defined as exempt or out of scope under environmental legislation.
Some collectors are interested in products which happen to be radioactive, such as watches with luminous radium-painted dials, but usually the fact that the item is radioactive is the reason for collecting it, such as uranium-containing Vaseline glass or radium-containing make-up e. g. Radior.
Other collectors aim to own a sample of every element in the periodic table, and possibly the most well-known element collector is Bill Gates, whose large wallmounted collection is famously displayed in his office. However, radioactive samples can be a difficult thing to own when even some naturally occurring elements have very short half-lives, e. g. francium ' s most stable isotope has a half-life of just 22 minutes. This is less of a problem at the other end of the spectrum … this 2009 one-star Amazon product review of a pot of uranium ore by Patrick J McGovern went viral:
What the Rod?!? Though rare, when radioactivity inadvertently enters the scrap metal stream, there can be significant health and environmental risks as well as it being potentially expensive to clear up.
Contaminated loads can be caused by discarded industrial or medical equipment that use radioactive sources. Other items might be metals that were contaminated and melted down, which may have been imported from countries with less stringent controls than the UK.
In 2000, workers at a West Midlands scrapyard spotted what turned out to be a Magnox fuel rod containing uranium. An extensive investigation by the Environment Agency was unable to identify where the rod came from, though it was believed it was probably made at Springfield in the 1960s. It is not known how it came to be at the scrapyard, and nobody could be prosecuted.
Best practice is that loads entering and leaving metal scrapyards should pass through a portal monitoring system that can detect radioactivity and operators should know what to do in the event of it being detected. Such portals are usually sited at weighbridges.
“ Great product, poor packaging. I purchased this product 4.47 billion years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”
Scrap metal parts
Radiation Protection Today Winter 2025 41