Smoke Alarm

Keeping cigarettes, incense, and other smoky stu away from radioactive specimens is especially important. For safety’s sake, you should never eat or drink while handling radioactive minerals. Applying a quick smidge of lip balm’s another no-no. And smoking is right out, too. “The thing about smoking is one thing that you do is that you handle the rock and you put your cigarette to your mouth and you’ve immediately got rock dust on your lips,” says Alysson Rowan, the author of Here Be Dragons or The Care and Feeding of Radioactive Mineral Species. What’s more, let’s say some of your specimens contain uranium. As uranium goes through its multiple stages of decay, it eventually releases radioactive radon daughter products and radon gas. “The airborne activity from radon daughters and radon gas itself will attach themselves to smoke,” Rowan continues. “So, when you re-inhale smoke, you’re inhaling the radioactive contaminants in the atmosphere.” In her work, Rowan writes, “It has been noted that the presence of blue smoke from cigarettes (the plume that rises from the burning tobacco) collects the radioactive radon daughter products more surely than any other means of concentration. This means that the spent smoke you breathe in a high radon concentration area is bringing those radioactive materials into your lungs in a form which tends to remain inside your body.” Such radiation exposure in the human body is cumulative. Rather than dissipate, the radiation exposure adds up. “The consensus of scientific opinion is that a given dose from radon is possibly 10 or 15 times as dangerous to a smoker as to a nonsmoker,” Rowan notes. To mitigate this risk, never smoke in areas where you keep radioactive specimens.