Hot Ice

Day 67: Humans have a dreadful tendency to omit looking before they leap. Back in the 1950s, nuclear energy was looked upon as being the upcoming thing, and radioactive materials were often treated as novelties without any concern for the hazards they might pose. Radium was used on watch dials to make the numbers visible in the dark, as well as being added to paints and plastics. Indeed, I had a whole galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the headboard of my bed (if you were wondering why I'm so weird, that may answer your question), and these radium-impregnated icicles have always been one of my favourite Christmas decorations. I never thought much about it until one year when I glanced at the Christmas tree after shutting out the lights. Not only were the icicles glowing, but so were the non-glow plastic snowflakes which had been stored in the box with them. I suppose the prudent thing to have done was to have trashed them right then and there, but that posed another ethical question: just how DO you go about disposing of radioactives, even low-dosage ones? Besides, I'd already lived with them for fifty or sixty years, and any damage to my health was undoubtedly already done. In the long term, radium's most stable isotope has a half-life of roughly 1600 years,, and although these don't glow as brightly as they did when I was a child, my "hot ice" will probably be capable of setting off a Geiger counter for many years to come.