Gamma Spectrometry Forum

A few years ago i bought this bottle in a small market. It is an old bottle from around 1880, made in Vienna from a perfumery.

Now i wanted to know if there are any deviations from other uranium glasses. I have found no deviations from other glasses. Now the question was how high the total activity can be.
With a Geiger counter at a distance of 2 cm, the instrument showed 1.5 µSv / h. Since almost only the radiation comes from Th232 and Th232 has a dose rate constant of 298 ( µSv*m²/h*GBq) , an activity of ~ 2 kBq can be calculated. Of course, this value is associated with major errors. At the MCA I have a BKG of 16.7 CPS. With the jar it is 70.3 CPS. Of course, no activity can be calculated from this.
I am grateful for further information.
Peter

That’s a beautiful bottle! Thank you for sharing it.

Nice one!
Judging from the U235 peaks I would say it's depleted uranium which is expected.
I will do an uranium glass spectrum soon, I have a piece weighing 1 Kg (from a flea market in my case too), so it won't be hard to get some good activity.

I personally don't trust too much the doserate read from a geiger counter (mine included), we know it takes any single interaction for a Cs137 gamma ray and particularly when there are a lot of alphas and betas involved it's easy to be misleaded.

Best.

Massimo