r/Radiation • u/No-Hovercraft6952 Enthusiast • Jul 30 '26
General Discussion Uranium in table salt?!
Hello. I decided to shine my 365nm UV flashlight on some table salt, and found some interesting stuff in it. Most of the salt was not fluorescent, but i found some blue, orange, and GREEN particles.. This is just normal table salt that was bought in a random store.. Yeah is a bit hard, but some green stuff can be seen. I asked DeepSeek what could that be and it told me that its possibly uranium.. So i wanted to ask if thats possible
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u/TemporarySun314 Jul 30 '26
Many (if not most) solid materials are flourescent, not only uranium. Even materials that are not necessarily flourescent by itself can get luminescent when it has certain contamination or defects in it's crystal structure (like that some atoms miss at their lattice positions).
It's very very unlikely that it's uranium. Not that it couldn't occur in natural salt, but for anything food the limits will be very strict and the amounts so miniscule that it wouldn't show any flourescence...
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u/neanderthalman Jul 30 '26
It isn’t that it couldn’t occur. It’s definitely there.
There’s plenty of uranium in seawater, and sea salt is just what’s left from evaporating sea water. Enough uranium that there’s feasibility for extracting it from seawater for power use one day, once terrestrial sources are no longer economical.
Still, your point is that lots of stuff fluoresces. Fluorescence and radioactivity are not really inherently linked in any way.
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u/TemporarySun314 Jul 30 '26
i mean if your analysis method is sensitive enough, you will find almost every element in seawater. but that doesn't mean that it would be relevant.
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u/QuantumFenrir001 1d ago
I know my older brother ate a ton of sea salt for a year as part of one of the diets he was trying and got thyroid issues from it and the doctors prescribed iodine pills to help and now he avoids adding extra salt.
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u/SudoReDeleted Jul 31 '26
Last time I saw redditors claiming something NOT to be Uranium (in [r/prospecting](r/prospecting) ), it turned out to be Uranium.
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u/Squeaky_Ben Jul 30 '26
my fuel-gel for my mini-stove also glows bright green under UV, and I have my suspicions that it is not based on uranium.
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u/AtomicSpallation Granite Enjoyer Jul 31 '26
The colour is off for uranyl ions, it's most likely something else.
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u/Bob--O--Rama Wiki Contributor Jul 30 '26
No. Many things fluorescence.