[NHCOLL-L:5911] Re: FW: [RCAAM] radioactive minerals

[Helen Kerbey]

Hi,

Really you should test everything for radioactivity.  The things that are already in your collections and the ones that are brought in.  Just because they are labelled as carnotite doesn't mean they are, and I've often found non-labelled (and wrongly labelled) minerals and rocks that turn out to be radioactive.  

There are a number of articles written about storing UK radioactive mineral collections.  
Lambert, M.P., 1994. Ionising Radiation Associated with the Mineral Collection of the National Museum of Wales. Collection Forum, 10(2), pp.65-80

Freedman, J., 2011. Storage of the radioactive mineral collections held at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, UK. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals. Vol. 7. No. 2. pp.201-212.

I also note that there is a Conservo-gram
http://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/conserveogram/11-10.pdf


What you do with them does depend on any regulations you are governed by where you live, but I'd check their levels first and then decide what sort of danger they pose. 

Personally, if they set off the geiger counter, I normally put them in a sealed plastic bag to prevent contamination from handling and from breathing in dust or radon but then they go into our specially designed radioactive store.  We have hundreds of radioactive specimens so it's all on a slightly different scale!



Helen Kerbey
Reaserach Assistant - Laboratory Services
National Museum Wales



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Kieron 
  To: NH Coll 
  Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:16 PM
  Subject: [NHCOLL-L:5906] Re: FW: [RCAAM] radioactive minerals


  Hi,


  Just to put my  two cents in. First, autunite and carnotite are rather common minerals. Autunite/meta-autunite is ubiquitous in New England pegmatites and both are abundant all over the Colorado Plateau. There are tens of thousands of these minerals in museums and private collections in the world. The main concern with either of these minerals is that they easily dehydrate and flake. If kept in a poly bag or another airtight container in a wooden or metal drawer they pose little health risk in the quantity you have. Our geology drawers are 1/8" metal or have 3/4" wood fronts. My geiger counter does not pick up anything beyond background with the drawers closed or a foot away open (except directly over a large specimen) even with a number of the minerals in each drawer.


  On a side note, at some point in the past a health and safety inspector had the radioactive minerals heaped in old metal cabinet outside the general mineral collection. The funny thing is that only the brightly colored secondary uranium minerals were removed and the much more radioactive and uglier primary uranium minerals like uranpyrochlore, betafite, samarskite, and such were ignored. 


  -Mike Kieron




  Michael Kieron, Assistant Curator
  Museum of Natural History
  and Cormack Planetarium
  Roger Williams Park
  1000 Elmwood Avenue
  Providence RI 02907
  401.785.9457 x246
  Fax: 401.461.5146
  www.providenceri.com/museum


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/private/nhcoll-l/attachments/20120317/5805c1b0/attachment.html