# How many radioactive lenses do you own?



## flowers (Jan 31, 2014)

Just curious! A little bit of fun (but honest answers please!)

I own one two.


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## Sella174 (Jan 31, 2014)

One, the *Asahi Super-Takumar 1:1.4/50* (Mark II).


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## RomainF (Jan 31, 2014)

How do ya know ? Is there some kind of a list ?


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## 49616E (Jan 31, 2014)

I have never tested any of my lenses with my Geiger counter but I suppose I could. I am currently testing something else and will wait for that to finish first. I will report back after doing some quick tests sometime tonight if people are interested.


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## flowers (Jan 31, 2014)

shashinkaman said:


> I have 4! All sigma! F.Y.I. sigma is located in FUKUSHIMA prefecture and that region is effectively CONTAMINATED.
> So, ALL lenses manufactured there after 11/03/11 are in some extent radioactive. (I am serious by the way!)



Oh, then I'm sorry, I gave wrong information! I have... two radioactive lenses!


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## Sella174 (Jan 31, 2014)

RomainF said:


> How do ya know ? Is there some kind of a list ?



Yes, there's a list.


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## flowers (Jan 31, 2014)

zim said:


> RomainF said:
> 
> 
> > How do ya know ? Is there some kind of a list ?
> ...





zim said:


> Ah wait, that’s puberty my mistake :



haha 



RomainF said:


> How do ya know ? Is there some kind of a list ?



Sella174 said it, there's a list! Actually a couple of lists, and you can also search for the name of your lens and if you're "lucky" enough to own a thoriated lens, you will probably find a forum thread where someone has tested it for radiation! Then you know at least your lens might be one, and reading more will help you discover more.  In some lenses not all lenses of that kind were thoriated, only up to or after a certain year, or a certain batch.


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## AE1Pguy (Jan 31, 2014)

I have an early Leica 50 f/2 collapsible Summicron. A few years ago, I had it recoated. The guy that did that said there was some degradation of the rare earth lens elements. He said it was due to radioactive decay.

Great lens though. Almost worth buying an A7r or something, just to put that lens back in service.


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## NancyP (Jan 31, 2014)

Probably zero or one. 
My M42 lenses date from that time, but aren't on the list. Not all lenses were made by the name on the lens label, however. My normal lens focal length and f/stop (55mm f/1.4 Mamiya_Sekor) is not on the list in a likely name (there is a Carl Zeiss Jena Pancolar , and I am unsure if these were still made in Jena by 1968). I also have inherited an old Canon AE1 which I don't use. It has one of the lenses said to be thoriated, the 50mm f/1.8, but I haven't checked this particular one, either by looking for the characteristic yellow tinge or by geiger counter, which I do have access to at work.


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## mackguyver (Jan 31, 2014)

I was living rather close to Chernobyl (lucky me) when it melted down, so I probably am irradiating my lenses . Between that and living in London during the mad cow disease outbreak, I had a nice time in Europe during the 80s & early 90s


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## surapon (Jan 31, 2014)

mackguyver said:


> I was living rather close to Chernobyl (lucky me) when it melted down, so I probably am irradiating my lenses . Between that and living in London during the mad cow disease outbreak, I had a nice time in Europe during the 80s & early 90s




+1 for me too , Dear Mr. mackguyver.
My home for past 35 years is located with in 10 miles from the big nuclear plants---Yes, We get FREE IODINE PILLS from The Local Government in every years, The Local government give us the direction how to use these Iodine pill incase of the NUKE break down. Just Put in our A__ Hole, Incase of we have diarrhea, and our brown movement ( SH-T) will not contaminate the Soil. No, Not for take by Mouth, Because too late in the very close area like my home, to the NUKE Plants and I will die any way.

YES, Past 35 years, All of my Canon Lenses are Radioactive Lenses, Why ?---Because all of my Photos are Lousy/ Not Good Pictures, With Green Shade Colors---Not Good as my 2 weeks old Canon EOS-M, And M Lenses---Just New Lenses/ New Camera and do not get Contaminated Yet = Still great Photos ---Ha, Ha, Ha.
I must buy another 7 D MK II when she on the market, and Keep her in the Lead Box all the times, And Will improve my Photos quality.

Just Kidding/ Joking before the great Weekend start.
Surapon


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## sjschall (Jan 31, 2014)

I thought I had one, but it mutated and keeps duplicating. I think I have 8 now, wait . . . 16.


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## marcel (Feb 1, 2014)

Canon FL 50 1.8 and FD 50 1.8 chrome nose.


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## 49616E (Feb 1, 2014)

I tested all my lenses today. Most of the lenses tested did not show any significant levels of radiation above background but my EF 100-400 4.5-5.6 IS (1998 date code) was at 96 CPM above normal background levels. Additionally, I accidentally left a B+W XS-Pro UV filter on and it was at 50CPM above background levels. From that discovery I tested all my B+W XS-Pro UV filters and they all had about this same level above background levels. I also tested B+W kaesemann polarizers (the slim MRC ones) and they tested negative.

Each test was performed by putting a 2" highly sensitive Geiger-Muller tube up as close as possible to the front element (or filter) and performed a 10 minute timed test in order to figure out the average CPM over that time. 

Lenses tested:
EF 100-400 4.5-5.6 IS (96 CPM over normal background levels, 1998 date code)
EF 70-200 2.8 IS II
EF 85 1.2
EF 100 2.8 IS Macro
TS-E 24 3.5 II
2 different EF 40mm 2.8s (An older one and a newer one)
EF 8-15 4.0 (This one seemed to have a consistently minor reading above background, about 5 CPM and may not be significant.)
EF 2x extender III


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## ME (Feb 2, 2014)

I think everyone is missing an important factor: Does your equipment glow enough in the dark to aid your lowlight photography?? The white balance might have to be adjusted.


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## Sella174 (Feb 3, 2014)

ME said:


> I think everyone is missing an important factor: ... *The white balance might have to be adjusted.*



Actually, yes. I really don't use my Takumar lens enough in bright sunlight, so the thorium has turned the Canada balsam the colour of raw honey.


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## traveller (Feb 3, 2014)

Apparently, my M42 mount SMC Takumar 55mm f/1.8 is radioactive...


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## flowers (Feb 3, 2014)

traveller said:


> Apparently, my M42 mount SMC Takumar 55mm f/1.8 is radioactive...



Yes, it's a very safe bet to say that!
Also a hint: removing the yellowing won't remove the radioactive material... Ha ha ha!


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## jrista (Feb 3, 2014)

Hah! Interesting topic! I never thought to check if any of my lenses were radioactive. Most of my lenses were purchased before the Fukishima incident, and I don't know that Canon was manufacturing anything close enough to that for any of them to become irradiated. 

The only potential lens would be the EF 600mm f/4 L II...I purchased that only 8 months ago...


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

*Not likely*



jrista said:


> Hah! Interesting topic! I never thought to check if any of my lenses were radioactive. Most of my lenses were purchased before the Fukishima incident, and I don't know that Canon was manufacturing anything close enough to that for any of them to become irradiated.
> 
> The only potential lens would be the EF 600mm f/4 L II...I purchased that only 8 months ago...


http://www.canon.com/news/2011/mar13e.html
Canon only has one factory in Fukushima and they make printers there. Canon facilities were nowhere near enough to get irradiated. The scope of the earthquake was larger than the scope of the resulting nuclear accident.

Alas, you have no radioactive lenses! Now you'll have to buy a night light or flashlight separately if you need light in the dark.


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## jrista (Feb 4, 2014)

*Re: Not likely*



flowers said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Hah! Interesting topic! I never thought to check if any of my lenses were radioactive. Most of my lenses were purchased before the Fukishima incident, and I don't know that Canon was manufacturing anything close enough to that for any of them to become irradiated.
> ...



I've got me my handy little headband light, with a red mode for when I'm stargazing. Best flashlight ever! (Although I'm not sure if it's irradiated...better if it ain't, for my addled little brain.)


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## lion rock (Feb 4, 2014)

Would a radioactive lens help photograph the backside of a lens cap?
And will it cause light leak like the first mkIII?
:
-r


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## Sella174 (Feb 4, 2014)

traveller said:


> Apparently, my M42 mount SMC Takumar 55mm f/1.8 is radioactive...



As far as I know, this lens is not radioactive ... but I might be wrong. Can you possible confirm?


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

Sella174 said:


> traveller said:
> 
> 
> > Apparently, my M42 mount SMC Takumar 55mm f/1.8 is radioactive...
> ...


http://forum.mflenses.com/introduction-of-thorium-oxide-into-super-takumar-lenses-t35568.html http://digitalgeigercounters.com/blog/radioactive-lens-smc-takumar-551-8-measured-with-polaron-pripyat-and-rksb-104-dosimeters/


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## Sella174 (Feb 4, 2014)

flowers said:


> http://digitalgeigercounters.com/blog/radioactive-lens-smc-takumar-551-8-measured-with-polaron-pripyat-and-rksb-104-dosimeters/



Thanks. I was under the impression that only the Super-Takumar lenses had the thorium-based coatings.


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## mws (Feb 4, 2014)

Super Tak 50mm, but technically isn’t everything on earth somewhat radioactive?

It’s a cool lens if you have never used one. Super sharp and gives a great warmth/glow to everything.


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## jrista (Feb 4, 2014)

mws said:


> Super Tak 50mm, but technically isn’t everything on earth somewhat radioactive?



If that's a joke, then yes...we even have radioactive personalities! 

If it's not a joke...no, not everything on earth is radioactive. There are radioactive elements and non-radioactive elements. The difference is that radioactive elements have no stable primordial isotopes (in other words, they will be stable for so long as to effectively be stable forever.) There are some elements that theoretically have unstable isotopes but their half life is so long that they don't naturally decay at a rate we can measure or observe. The rest have half lives that can be measured or observed. All artificial elements are unstable and will radioactively decay.

Little bit of trivia. When it comes to the most dangerous radioactive elements, plutonium is considered the most toxic material on earth, as a handful of atoms are apparently enough to kill.  So...if your lens is made of plutonium...best ditch it.


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> mws said:
> 
> 
> > Super Tak 50mm, but technically isn’t everything on earth somewhat radioactive?
> ...



Haha! On a related note, most of my grandmother's glassware was made of uranium glass. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was a child so a large portion of the food I ate during the first 15 years of my life I ate from uranium glass plates











Don't be surprised if I glow in the dark!


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## jrista (Feb 4, 2014)

flowers said:


> jrista said:
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> 
> > mws said:
> ...



 Yikes. Does your tongue glow?  (Or, for that matter...has your tongue fallen off yet? ???)


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## jrista (Feb 4, 2014)

Jackson_Bill said:


> You all realize that bananas, potatoes, and even beer is radioactive due to the presence of the naturally occurring K-40 (potassium 40) isotope, right?



8) Yeah, but that's one of those semi-stable isotopes with exceptionally long half-lives. K-40 has a half life of 1.25 billion years! The dose in a banana is about 0.1µSv, or 0.0000001Sv. For the average human, radiation doses under 100mSv (0.1Sv) per year have no measurable health effects. You would need to eat one million and one bananas in a year to experience the most minimally measurable health effect due to potassium-40 radiation exposure. (I actually don't think that is humanly possible, to eat that many bananas.)


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

jrista said:


> flowers said:
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> > jrista said:
> ...



Ha ha! No, I still have my tongue! And it's red, not green  According to wikipedia the glass is only slightly radioactive (no worse than our radioactive lenses) but I'm not sure if they mean the uranium glass with 2% or 25% uranium  I'm pretty sure my grandmother's dishware had a high uranium content in it though because it glowed bright green even in sunlight  No joke, they really glow green. But I've always been healthy!


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

Jackson_Bill said:


> jrista said:
> 
> 
> > Jackson_Bill said:
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The amount of radiation in some areas in Fukushima at this very moment is 25 Sieverts/hour. Not millisieverts, sieverts. Every hour. Of course those areas are very close to the reactor, but with all the contaminated water and the workers running out of places to put it and more and more of it spreading to the ground water plus all the other radioactive waste and gases spreading it's a little naive to say that it's impossible that the radiation levels of lenses manufactured so close to the plant haven't increased at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyqsN38BSc
Takumar 50/1.7, radiation: 0.08 mSv/hour (back of the lens), 0.007 mSv/hour other parts, average. That's 61 mSv/year from most parts of the lens, 700 mSv/year from the back of the lens. That's sixty-one and seven hundred, the latter number is more than 100.

Please at least find out the numbers before you speak up.

Of course if the radiation levels were really so users of those lenses were in significant increased danger of getting cancer (which starts from a *single* mutated cell by the way) I guess we wouldn't be joking about it with such levity. Or would we? Who knows. Like all artists, photographers are crazy  Crazy!

edit: oops, I got the numbers crazy wrong! I blame the meter... I watched the whole video again after I realized the numbers didn't make any sense. Ha ha! Numbers corrected.


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## hanifshootsphotos (Feb 4, 2014)

flowers said:


> Just curious! A little bit of fun (but honest answers please!)
> 
> I own one two.



I'm not reading this thread, but man did I laugh when I read the title post.


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## flowers (Feb 4, 2014)

hanifshootsphotos said:


> flowers said:
> 
> 
> > Just curious! A little bit of fun (but honest answers please!)
> ...



Well the whole thread is supposed to be a little lighthearted fun!  Just interested in how many people own.


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## Don Haines (Feb 4, 2014)

Jackson_Bill said:


> You all realize that bananas, potatoes, and even beer is radioactive due to the presence of the naturally occurring K-40 (potassium 40) isotope, right?


I was working in New Brunswick, Canada, when the Point LePreau reactor came on line.... The next day there was a huge headline in the paper loudly exclaiming "LEVELS OF RADIATION FOUND IN POINT LEPREAU CONTROL ROOM". the next day there was a tiny retraction in the back of the paper explaining that the levels of radiation found were less than that found naturally occurring in nature 

Radiation makes for catchy headlines.


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## jrista (Feb 4, 2014)

flowers said:


> Jackson_Bill said:
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> 
> > jrista said:
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@Jackson_Bill: Oh, I totally agree with you about Fukushima! Totally overblown by media hypersensationalistic fools who wouldn't know their asshole from a rathole. 

The problem is people don't understand that there are different kinds of radiation, from EM to beta particle decay to hard alpha decay. They also don't understand that not all radioactive sources are the same. Release of plutonium would be a serious problem, especially at 25 Sv/hr, but that isn't what's happening.

There are heavier unstable isotopes like plutonium and uranium that, as they decay, produce both hard radiation (_alpha _and beta particles as well as ultra high energy gamma ray) and further radioactive materials that will continue to decay, sometimes via the same hard alpha-particle process. There are also lighter unstable isotopes, like the stuff at Fukushima, that decay quickly into smaller STABLE isotopes. The energy levels of lighter weight isotopic decay are much lower than with heavier isotopes as well, and it is usually not the same kind of highly reactive and dangerous alpha particles or ultra high energy gamma ray radiation...instead you get beta decay (release of a free neutron, which further decays into an proton, electron and a neutrino within seconds) and low energy gamma ray radiation.

So the "reach" of the radiation being released at Fukushima is also not as high as it was in the case of Chernobil. (Chernobil was an unmitigated disaster propagated by the utter foolishness of the Russians (the Russians just work differently...have you ever watched those videos on YouTube about how the Russians drive and have car accidents all the time...it's rather insightful!! Them pplz is CRA-ZY!  :) The Russians built the least safe and least contained reactors I think the earth will ever see, so when their reactor melted down, it literally melted down and released a highly radioactive radiation cloud that rained down dangerous particles like plutonium, uranium, and closely related derivatives as well as a whole host of lighter radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment. Un-miti-gated disaster. Will never happen again. Because of Chernobil, the countries that use nuclear energy do so with ultra hardened reactors with multiple levels of containment. The general design is a central containment vessel for the actual nuclear reaction, where the fuel and control rods are, a surrounded by a containment vessel for coolant, further surrounded by a concrete core containment vessel designed to contain a complete meltdown of all nuclear fuels, and a final outer containment vessel surrounding the concrete core and the inner containment vessels. A disaster like Chernobil is practically impossible, even if an earthquake causes damage, you would effectively need the earthquake to be right on top of the plant and crack all the containment vessels right through to the core in order for plutonium and uranium to be released.) 

The kind of radiation that is occurring at Fukushima is due to the pumping of water through the reactors to cool them down. The reactions within the reactor cores are uncontrolled or nearly uncontrolled. I do not know for sure if there were full meltdowns or only runaway reactions that are barely controlled, but it still produces a tremendous amount of heat and EM radiation. That radiation has the tendency to produce lighter radioactive isotopes as it reacts with particles in the coolant water (which is seawater, which contains a number of stable elements that can be temporarily converted into radioactive isotopes under the right conditions.)

Fact is, those are really short lived isotopes, with half lives on the order of minutes, hours, or days. The radiation that makes it into the oceans is going to be absorbed pretty thoroughly. Within a month of any contaminated water leakage being finally stopped, it would probably be pretty tough to detect any radiation in the nearby ocean water. Another thing most people don't understand is that the ocean is a heavily buffered solution, and it'll absorb pretty much anything and everything without there being terribly adverse reactions to the ecosystem. (There may be some very long term benign affects over the coming decades and centuries, and for marine life right off shore, there may be some more immediate affects under prolonged exposure.) 

So, it may be 25 Sv/hr, but it isn't 25 Sv/hr of super deadly radiation from plutonium or uranium particles or anything like that which decay via alpha particles and high energy gamma rays (hard radiation) to further radioactive materials and so on (that's why plutonium is so dangerous, the radioactive decay continues on and on once it's in your system, continuously wreaking havoc). It isn't a cataclysmic issue like many would have you believe. It's short-lived light isotopes that decay quickly into stable isotopes that can't decay further.

The radiation is largely contained to Fukushima and the surrounding ocean, and is relatively short lived. So I wouldn't expect any lens manufacture nearby to result in a whole bunch of radioactive lenses.


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## dtaylor (Feb 5, 2014)

FYI - there's at least one app for the iPhone that can measure radioactivity: RadioactivityCounter. You have to cover your iPhone camera lens so that no light gets through, calibrate it by leaving it away from anything radioactivity for a few minutes, then place it very close to the source. It takes a while to get an accurate measurement but it does work. The app measures changes in noise output by the sensor.

Tested it with a few old lenses and found one radioactive one, the FL 50 f/1.8.


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## flowers (Feb 5, 2014)

I quoted those numbers because some people were talking about Fukushima as if the largest radiation dose anywhere near the place would be measured in single millisievers or less! But of course you're right, different radioactive materials emit different amounts if different radiation types which are dangerous in different ways. 

*Now let's put an end to this!* I made this thread as something fun and lighthearted so let's keep it that way. No one should worry about a little radiation, it's normal, or even a lot of radiation like multiple CT scans and x-rays. Life is too short to worry! But it's also not good to think radiation can't ever harm you.
edit: removed bleak stuff!


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