5 Everyday Items That Are A Tiny Bit Radioactive
The word “radioactive” immediately raises anyone’s hackles, and that’s probably for the best. If we want future humans to follow the current limb template, keeping an eye on radiation levels is healthy. We already have some evidence of what happens when we completely ignore it, as the Radium Girls could explain, through a hacking cough. At the same time, low-level radiation is pretty much unavoidable. Sunlight is a form of radiation, after all; so outside of Nosferatu, we’re all absorbing a little every day.
There are also some items you likely frequently interact with that are, by the letter of the law, radioactive. They might not cause your jaw to fall off, but they are emitting the stuff. Items like…
Bananas
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Bananas are a source of potassium. Potassium, in turn, is a source of radiation. Specifically, the potassium-40 isotope. That means pretty much any food with potassium is going to be responsible for beaming out a minuscule amount of radiation. It’s not enough to actually worry about, unless you’re a member of the Kong family, but it’s not unmeasurable either. For example, if you wolf down two-and-a-half bananas in an airport Au Bon Pain, that’s the same amount of radiation as the scan you went through at the security checkpoint.
Granite Countertops
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If you happen to slice up those bananas on top of a granite countertop? You might be dumping a double-dose of radioactivity into your Cheerios. Again, I have to stress, none of this is enough radiation to actually worry about, like some sketchy sidebar article might want you to believe. Again, the radioactivity here is just an unavoidable fact. Granite’s a stone, and by nature, there’s going to be a whole lot of random elements wrapped up in that mineral slab — possibly even natural sources of radiation like uranium. But thankfully, per the EPA, it’s not enough to rise above normal background radiation. Which is probably good, or else Home Depot would be making a lot of countertop deliveries to Iran.
Smoke Detectors
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It would be darkly hilarious if it turned out smoke detectors were harmfully radioactive and we just didn’t know it. Like finding out that airbags have been filled with mustard gas this whole time. Unlike the earlier entries, the reason smoke detectors are radioactive isn’t happenstance — it’s part of what makes them work. Ionization-based smoke detectors utilize a tiny little smidgen of a radioactive material called americium-241 to enable them to detect smoke.
Again, it’s not something you should consider a problem, especially as they’re shielded inside the detector, but the EPA does warn against cracking them open for fun.
Certain Gemstones
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Honestly, I think knowing a ring was radioactive would only make it cooler. Best-case scenario, you get a Green Lantern thing going. Certain types of gems are radioactive, and for more than one reason. Of course, there are some that, like granite, are naturally radioactive. However, there are also gems that are purposefully irradiated in order to change color, and some of them are fairly common. Blue topaz and colored diamonds are especially profitable targets for radiation.
Once more, it’s nothing you should worry about — as long as the people selling them followed guidelines that require them to keep irradiated stones off the market for a minimum amount of time, so that the radiation can decay.
Kitty Litter
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Radioactive kitty litter might not be harmful to humans, but what about our tiny, piss-filled friends? After all, they’re much smaller than us.
Luckily, though, it’s no more than trace radioactivity coming from the clay that helps soak up that unpleasantness, specifically bentonite. Unless your cat is a nasty little freak that loves to sit in their litterbox, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. If they are, you obviously now have multiple things to worry about.
