More odd news worth sharing. Apparently the latest quack medical product is bracelets and the like embedded with thorium oxide. This seems a bit puzzling. They're not advertised as containing thorium or being radioactive, so why are the people building these bothering to put something expensive and dangerous in there? Wouldn't filling a quack medical device with sand or cement be cheaper? Not to mention a bit less unnerving to keep in your basement to sell on eBay or wherever these things get marketed?
ShawnG
UltimaDork
2/27/20 2:18 p.m.
They make your wallet lighter with the side effect of letting everyone around you know how gullible you are.
Do they advertise it as being “FDA cleared”?
Manufactures love to use the term as they know consumers are impressed but the designation can be used if the product is a class 1 or 2 device that is “substantially equivalent to another similar legally marketed device”.
In other words, they may be copying some other product that was available on or before June 1, 1976 (when formal design control regulations went into effect) to avoid full FDA scrutiny.
It’s kind of like saying “my kit plane is FAA Part 103 approved” which really only means that the FAA thinks your plane is such a trivial little joke that they aren’t even going to bother regulating it.
All I need to know is that Thorium was named for the Norse God Thor. Where can I buy some?
I wonder if it will conflict with my pyramid pajamas?
Fyi thorium is found in tig welding electrodes, specifically the "red" ones.
They're made of tungsten, but doped with 2% thorium.
There is always some talk about them being dangerous, but mainly from grinding them and breathing the dust.
Probably there is probably more radioactivity in a banana or an airplane ride. :)
MadScientistMatt said:
They're not advertised as containing thorium or being radioactive, so why are the people building these bothering to put something expensive and dangerous in there? Wouldn't filling a quack medical device with sand or cement be cheaper?
How much does it COST to properly dispose of radioactive thorium oxide? This seems like someone thought of a win-win. Someone pays you to dispose of your radioactive material and it gets "diluted" among all your far flung customers.
These bracelets could be genuinely useful for building HRNGs and testing radiation detectors!
SVreX
MegaDork
2/28/20 6:41 a.m.
(not) WilD (Matt) said:
MadScientistMatt said:
They're not advertised as containing thorium or being radioactive, so why are the people building these bothering to put something expensive and dangerous in there? Wouldn't filling a quack medical device with sand or cement be cheaper?
How much does it COST to properly dispose of radioactive thorium oxide? This seems like someone thought of a win-win. Someone pays you to dispose of your radioactive material and it gets "diluted" among all your far flung customers.
Don’t knock it.
I worked for a custom chemical company at one point. There was always huge money in the waste stream. The company business model was to take on costly product development and manufacturing, analyze the waste stream carefully, then sell an unrelated product made from the waste stream, successfully converting their waste expense (which was sometimes $500K or more in a single product) to a revenue generator.
There was often more money in the waste stream than in the product. Competitors were just trying to bill the customer directly for waste disposal.
slefain
PowerDork
2/28/20 8:49 a.m.
SVreX said:
(not) WilD (Matt) said:
MadScientistMatt said:
They're not advertised as containing thorium or being radioactive, so why are the people building these bothering to put something expensive and dangerous in there? Wouldn't filling a quack medical device with sand or cement be cheaper?
How much does it COST to properly dispose of radioactive thorium oxide? This seems like someone thought of a win-win. Someone pays you to dispose of your radioactive material and it gets "diluted" among all your far flung customers.
Don’t knock it.
I worked for a custom chemical company at one point. There was always huge money in the waste stream. The company business model was to take on costly product development and manufacturing, analyze the waste stream carefully, then sell an unrelated product made from the waste stream, successfully converting their waste expense (which was sometimes $500K or more in a single product) to a revenue generator.
There was often more money in the waste stream than in the product. Competitors were just trying to bill the customer directly for waste disposal.
When I worked at a graphics shop we installed some sort of filter on our film developer machine that captured silver somehow. Every few months a company would buy the cartridge from us. The owner would also sell the used aluminum printing plates to the recycler and take the print shop out to lunch.
SVreX said:Don’t knock it.
I worked for a custom chemical company at one point. There was always huge money in the waste stream. The company business model was to take on costly product development and manufacturing, analyze the waste stream carefully, then sell an unrelated product made from the waste stream, successfully converting their waste expense (which was sometimes $500K or more in a single product) to a revenue generator.
There was often more money in the waste stream than in the product. Competitors were just trying to bill the customer directly for waste disposal.
Yep, "chocolate diamonds" used to be, to the precious gems industry, sort of a waste material. They were still useful for making cutting tools, but you couldn't sell them for big bucks to jewellers. One quick marketing blitz though, and now those unattractive brown gems that were only useful for their hardness are "chocolate diamonds."
This is also done a lot with computer CPUs/GPUs. Models that are similar apart from their clock speeds or core counts are often all the same chip with the clock lowered/cores disabled to work around manufacturing defects. An 8-core with 1 or 2 bad cores becomes a 6-core, or a 4Ghz ultra-high-end CPU that only runs stable at 3Ghz becomes a mere high-end model.
SD Cards are the same way! They're 'made' in the final shock by the thousands at once and then sold based on how many bits are aligned for 16GB/32GB ect.
There's a lot of talk that there's a potential market in carbon sequestering once we figure out how to remove so much extra CO2 from the atmosphere at scale and not by plant life, as in use for huge compressed "blocks" of carbon from processed CO2.
