From: Gary Tefft / locustent@aol.com
Location: Menomonee Falls, WI
Date: 12/8/99
Time: 10:51:20 PM
I'm always amused when I read or hear about someones alarm when they bring a "Geiger Counter" detector near a piece of red, yellow or orange pottery containing uranium in the glaze. What I find so funny is the technical precision of the level that was recorded. I'm no expert, and it's been quite a long while since I took a Nuclear Engineering course back in colege, but I don't recall that the scale on the detectors that I saw ever had a level labeled "CRAZY". (As in, "the counter WENT CRAZY!")
Up until it became unavailable, due to the government snatching it all up for the war effort, uranium was pretty commonly used in glazes and colored glass to produce reliable yellows and orange colors. It is naturally radioactive, as is radium, which we have in the water from deep wells here in Waukesha County. The amount of uranium contained in a set of dinnerware doesn't constitute an immediate danger, but it isn't very healthy for the workers back at the pottery, who deal with bulk quantities. I don't know of any particular health effects in Red Wing, but I've seen a couple of programs on cable TV about former workers at a company called Radium Dial, which I believe was in New York state. This company produced luminous dials for watches and aircraft instruments back in the '30s and '40s. A lot of those folks ended up with various cancers.
-Gary-