Tritium lamps
Katzenklavier
Regular
Tritium lamps are small glass tubes filled with radioactive hydrogen (tritium). The inside of these tubes are coated with a phosphor. When an atom decays it emits a beta ray (an electron traveling at ultra high speeds); this electron then hits a phosphor atom and excites it. That atom soon goes back to its ground state, emitting light.
Here are 3 different sizes of tritium keychains.
Small: Green Yellow White
Medium: Green Yellow White Blue Orange
Large: Green Yellow White Blue Purple Pink
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years, so in 12 years these things will glow half as bright as when you bought them. Yep, 12 years.
This is actually a good way to show how small atoms are. The small tritium keychains have about 1/50th of a milliliter of H3 inside. They also have an activity of about 1 gigabecquerel. That mean 1 billion atoms disintegrate each second. In 12 years half of those atoms will be disintegrated; so yeah those things are incredibly tiny.
Here are 3 different sizes of tritium keychains.
Small: Green Yellow White
Medium: Green Yellow White Blue Orange
Large: Green Yellow White Blue Purple Pink
Tritium has a half life of about 12 years, so in 12 years these things will glow half as bright as when you bought them. Yep, 12 years.
This is actually a good way to show how small atoms are. The small tritium keychains have about 1/50th of a milliliter of H3 inside. They also have an activity of about 1 gigabecquerel. That mean 1 billion atoms disintegrate each second. In 12 years half of those atoms will be disintegrated; so yeah those things are incredibly tiny.
Comments
A cool thing about these key chains, there is a little glass tube inside the plastic. If you crack open the plastic the glass tube full of the tritium falls out. A wire cutter is the best tool, just make sure you don't crack the glass. You could also use a hot knife to cut the plastic.
Then glue this little tube to light to anything you want; a lightswitch or even use them on a gun as a tritium sight.
PS: Green is the brightest.
You could also do like they did in the 20's if you want glowing paint. But don't lick the bushes when you paint it.
In fact, a few thousand of those signs were stolen from walmarts across the country (because they are so cool).
http://www.google.com/search?q=tritium%20watch&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbo=u&tbs=shop:1&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf&biw=1024&bih=599
C/O
"neither did I"
Some people do buy these and harvest the tritium for their homemade fusion reactors.
So that's $50,000 for a little over 686 litres? Hmmm, I thought they were exaggerating in Spiderman 2 but it would seems they weren't.
I can imagine these being pretty useful on night hikes, maybe not as good as a decent headtorch, but if you just want some low level lighting......damn, now I want one.