Difficulties in Characterizing Uranium

While chemistry gives me bad flashbacks of outliers on my report card, I do find this blog intriguing. But while that may be so, I would like to not have traces of uranium in my path! I find it would be just as much bad luck as crossing a black cat in an alleyway!

Lab work is definately not everyones cup of tea. Toxic chemicals, radioactive aerosols, field work that may include possible exposure and other health risks are abundant. Have you read about fume hoods and the influence someone can have on the airflow simply by walking at a face past a workstation?

I have never heard of the dangers of a scientist briskly walking past fume hoods. It is funny because our high school redid the science rooms and added fume hoods for chemistry and such. The only difference is getting high schooler to even move to begin with is a daunting task! Are brisk walks now considered hazardous to our health?

It is a difference of perspective. Working chemists take much greater risks than most people in doing their jobs for less than almost any other normal person. There are always efforts to minimize the risk, though many of these are directed at minimizing public exposure, and exposure of the non-chemist workers. The chemists just accept the lower pay and health risk as part of doing the job. They buy into the idea that they understand the risk more than others would and therefore must be willing to take greater risks as part of their job properly.

A good example, when i was younger i worked at a haz waste facility in the lab as a chemist characterizing waste samples for recylcing or disposal. We dropped an unknown sample on the floor that was in the process of characterization. Every chemist in the building came to see the sample and discuss cleaning it up while we were cleaning it up. Everybody, including the secretaries and salesmen, in all the other building evacuated like we had a nuclear bomb fall in the lab, and the firemen , well they could not even get in the facility gate (they would have been absolutely no help anyways). There was the expectation amongst management standing way out in the parking lot that the chemists will clean everything up. FYI fume hood capacity to recover vapors is easily influenced by local air flows, they are there as much for the general public to keep opinion that the environment is safe for the workers, and unsafe for others, as they are for any real safety measure. It is just a good thing that acetone is pretty much non-toxic, though you do feel like taking an immediate nap sometimes just wherever you happening to be standing.

"Before you can analyze a sample, you must grind and dry it. In this state, health concerns become a risk because powdered samples are highly susceptible to forming aerosols, and inhalation of this known carcinogen could lead to fatal outcomes. After your sample has been ground to a fine dust and dried thoroughly, you still have the large complex molecules present. "

Glove boxes, baby. Glove boxes.

milo

"Before you can analyze a sample, you must grind and dry it. In this state, health concerns become a risk because powdered samples are highly susceptible to forming aerosols, and inhalation of this known carcinogen could lead to fatal outcomes. After your sample has been ground to a fine dust and dried thoroughly, you still have the large complex molecules present. Several digestion steps to free up the organic and inorganic matter include the use of other caustic substances such as HF or nitric acids."

One thing to consider is that if your final sample contains substantial amounts of metallic uranium in the form of a "fine dust," you risk fire or explosion. Powdered U is pyrophoric and can ignite spontaneously in air. You should, furthermore, prepare your samples in an inert atmosphere because U oxides rapidly, even if it doesn't catch fire.

Your assay techniques also do not include mass spectrometry which does reveal the proportions of isotopes present in a sample, uranium and otherwise.