For today you could do some of this with supplies from here: <a href="https://unitednuclear.com" rel="nofollow">https://unitednuclear.com</a><p>They actually feature a picture of this kit!<p>The sources required to do these experiments are low grade and not particularly dangerous as long as you exercise the same cautions you would with a chemistry set, model paints, etc., such as not huffing or eating them.<p>The most dangerous thing sold on that site are the magnets:<p><a href="https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=70_80" rel="nofollow">https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=70...</a><p>They need a louder more obnoxious warning banner for those. The big ones can literally crush you or fire metallic objects like bullets. People used to dealing with fridge magnets have no intuition for magnetic fields like that.
When you're selling a toy to kids, those warnings about not to remove something from its container are useless.<p>In high school, I was in summer biology when some slacker took up a vial of mercury and started monkeying around with it. It did not take long for the cap to come off and we had a mercury spill in the middle of the classroom. And then my classmates began trying to scoop it up with their hands and scraps of paper!<p>As the son of a scientist who worked in Environmental Health and Safety, I immediately recognized this as a hazard and sort of recused myself from the whole scene. It was embarrassing.
Well, I reckon that kit was somewhat more risky than the circular disc of uranium of about 1.5 inches in diameter and about 0.25" thick we experimented with at school. The beta and gamma sources were in the form of foil about 1cm square but I don't know or can't remember what the sources were.<p>As a kid, I'd loved to have had one of those Gilbert kits (at least back then we had chemistry sets that actually did exciting things).
In my UK high school in the 1980s, during a lecture from a visiting nuclear engineer to our science club (BAYS), we got to handle (and directly touch) various sources including a piece of Plutonium about the size of a 2p coin, edge-framed by lucite but not sealed. The point was to show that alpha was blocked by paper but I still wonder how wise that was.
I must mention that the Cloud Chamber exhibit in the science center was definitely my favorite thing for over a decade. It was definitely eerie to see these little contrails, basically produced by subatomic "micrometeors" that were all streaking through our atmosphere. It really gave you a sense of perspective.
If you like this, you'll love the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Fun for the whole family.<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/the_golden_book_of_chemistry_experiments" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/the_golden_book_of_chemistry_exp...</a>
It was quite safe, and it would be great for something like this to have a comeback.<p>Now you can build your own Wilson chamber with isopropyl alcohol and some youtube instructions, but you’ll have to spend a lot of time to (legally) procure your own test sources. This is sad.
An interesting example of early cancel culture in the Radar Magazine click farm, stoking nuclear paranoia for clicks. Unfortunately, many other click farms still have stories up about this today.<p>It's ironic and intellectually stifling that we accept risks to our kids from biking or sports, yet demonize learning nuclear science. Even when the former regularly harms more kids and in graver ways. Is this a result of unfounded nuclear fears, or is there more to this I'm missing?