# Making Uranium Glass With some Unusual Properties!

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Thoisoi2 - Chemical Experiments!
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcDT3GQlRw
- **Дата:** 20.09.2025
- **Длительность:** 19:00
- **Просмотры:** 13,066

## Описание

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Applied science video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUcUy7SqdS0
Hello everyone! In this video, I explore how to create glowing glass that lights up under UV light, just like uranium glass, without using any radioactive or toxic materials. Through a series of experiments, I test different rare-earth metal oxides such as europium, neodymium, and terbium to achieve vivid red, purple, and green luminescence. I also demonstrate how to melt and form custom glass using homemade mixtures and a high-temperature furnace. The result: safe, beautiful glass with stunning optical effects.

Welcome to my channel! It's dedicated to experiments in inorganic and organic chemistry! Here you can find a lot of chemical experiments, each of which contains explanations that will be understandable even to people who are not into chemistry. In my video experiments, I also indicate chemical equations that will help you understand the essence of chemical reactions and transformations. If you have problems with the perception of difficult chemical reactions and chemical equations in school, then you can use some of my videos as a self-help guide in chemistry. Also, some experiments from my videos can be repeated at home, of course, in compliance with all safety rules. Many of the experiments that are shown in my videos are shown to children and used as classic demonstration experiments for schoolchildren or students. Each experiment will be explained as clearly as possible. Chemistry is easy for everyone, even for beginners!
#Thoisoi2 #chemistry

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcDT3GQlRw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Hello everyone. I look at my uranium glass and wonder, is it possible to make something similar, but without using rather toxic and radioactive uranium? And can the resulting glass also glow beautifully green under ultraviolet light? Or maybe even in some other shade? Do you think that's possible? H, let's figure it out. In chemistry, it's not just about running an experiment. Processing the results correctly is just as important. I often have dozens of research papers, reaction schemes, and lab journals on hand. And that's where UPDF 2. 0 comes in. UPDF isn't just another PDF editor. It's a tool I can fully adapt to my workflow. I can quickly edit text in a manual, insert images like spectra or reaction schemes, or take notes directly in a paper. What I find especially useful is UPDF's OCR feature for scanned documents. I can upload an article and ask the AI assistant powered by GPT5 and Deepseek to summarize it, translate it, or explain a complex term in simple words. It's also incredibly helpful when handling large volumes of PDF files. For example, reviewing numerous reports from chemistry experiments. And when I'm preparing a lecture or presentation, I can turn a PDF into a clear, visual mind map in just a couple of clicks. What I also love is that UPDF works on Windows, Mac, and iPad. I can start reading an article at home and then continue with it in the lab. And all of this comes at just 16th the price of Adobe. If you're also working with lots of research papers, reports, or manuals, give UPDF 2. 0 a try. There's a special launch promotion available right now. You'll find the links in the description and in the pinned comment. Interestingly, uranium glass appeared about 2,000 years ago when people figured out how to add certain uranium containing minerals such as automite, which is a uranial phosphate with up to 60% uranium content to molten glass. In addition to its remarkably high radioactivity, this fascinating mineral also possesses a truly very beautiful and captivating luminescence, which is quite striking. Apparently, because of this, uranium containing minerals began to be added to glass as far back as ancient Rome since some pieces of glass in a mosaic at one of the ancient Roman villas were found to contain uranium. However, due to the rarity and inaccessibility of uranium ores, as well as the limitations of glass making at the time, uranium glass only became popular in the 19th century when glass makers of that era mastered the technique of annealing glass. As a result, table wear made from it finally became perfectly transparent and could beautifully shimmer in the sunlight. In addition to uranium, compounds of other metals were added to glass to give it various shades. For example, one of the most common colors of glass found today is green glass, which naturally contains ferrris oxide. To make ordinary brown glass, for instance, sulfur is added to the molten green glass. And beautiful blue glass is produced by adding cobalt sty oxide to the glass batch. Modern glass blowers can create glass in virtually any color and shade, even producing the rather rare red glass by adding gold compounds. Although in principle, this color can be achieved with less expensive methods. For example, by adding selenium and cadmium oxide to the glass batch. But still, all these additives from various metal oxides simply color the glass in different shades. And only radioactive uranium compounds can make the glass glow beautifully under ultraviolet light. H or is that not the case? Until recently, I thought so too until I watched a video on Ole Gyson's channel where he examined a radioactive Chinese pendant made from so-called thorium glass. It turned out that nowadays the Chinese are getting rid of unwanted thorium oxide simply by dissolving it in glass and selling it as some kind of magical pendants with healing energy, which are actually just radioactive glass trinkets with no beneficial properties whatsoever. However, they do have one interesting property, a bright luminescence under ultraviolet flashlight, which is very unusual for thorium compounds. After all, they usually do not glow under ultraviolet light. Perhaps this is all because in the composition of the glass, atoms of certain metals such as thorium form ions that react more readily to ultraviolet radiation than they do when simply part of salts or other compounds. Yes, of course, that's all very nice. And in principle, it turns out that besides uranium dioxide, thorium dioxide can also be added to glass, which like uranium glass will start to glow beautifully green under ultraviolet light. The only problem is that like uranium, thorium is radioactive and quite toxic. Therefore, in principle, the question remains open for now. There must be something else both radioactive and relatively safe. After some thought, I remembered my experiments with the so-called lanthanes, which in the periodic table of chemical elements are located a bit apart from all the other metals and have somewhat similar chemical properties to uranium and thorium. And besides, they are not radioactive. Many lanthanitis are obtained as rare earth metals from

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcDT3GQlRw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

minerals like monazite or for example gadolinite which can be easily detected with a doceimeter. The fact is in terms of their chemical properties, leninities are very similar to the radioactive actinides and often occur together. That's why rare earth ores most often contain thorium or less commonly uranium. For example, here in an old disused mine near the small Swedish village of Italu, there is a very large vein containing many valuable rare earth elements mixed with thorium, which is precisely what my doimeter is reacting to. Today, after carefully extracting compounds of certain important lanthnodities from such ore, thorium dioxide is often left behind, which is hardly used or utilized nowadays. As a result, the Chinese dispose of it in the most ingenious ways, for example, by incorporating it into thorium glass. After several years of experiments, I have accumulated an entire collection of various lanthnide compounds and rare earth metals. Some of them possess very unusual properties. For example, holmium oxide can change its color under different lighting conditions. Under a bright LED light, it appears a bright yellow, but under a regular fluorescent light, it turns an orange hue. The same thing happens with a solution of neodymium chloride. Under an LED lamp, it appears purple, but under a fluorescent lamp, it turns yellow. But if you shine a UV flashlight on all the lanthnide oxides, you can notice that europium oxide starts to glow faintly with a reddish tint, which is extremely unusual for a metal oxide. This unusual property of the metals and their compounds from the lenthnide series is due to their unique electron shell in which the outer electrons of the atom are located on the f subshell. To put it more simply, in the atoms of these metals, the probability of finding electrons farther from the nucleus is higher than near the nucleus, which is why they are more susceptible to external electromagnetic influences. I think that makes it a little bit clearer. Based on previous experiments, I found out that europium oxide, like its other compounds, for example, nitrate, can indeed glow very bright red under ultraviolet light. I think that glass with added europium oxide will also glow quite red, similar to the compounds of this metal, but it's certainly better to test my assumptions in practice. To do this, I first need to make glass. That is to say, to mix certain substances and melt them at a very high temperature, thus obtaining a transparent glass mass. The simplest and cheapest recipe for glass mass today is the composition of so-called soda lime glass. And you can now see the exact proportions of its components on the screen. This type of glass is used today to make transparent bottles as well as some inexpensive glassware items. Since this glass contains soda that is sodium carbonate, it first needs to be produced. For this, I took regular baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate, and poured about 250 g of this substance into a beaker made of heatresistant quartz glass. As a result, the total mass together with the beaker was about 315 g. Now, it is necessary to heat the contents of the beaker to 300° C, so that the baking soda or sodium bicarbonate begins to decompose into sodium carbonate and carbon dioxide, which eventually breaks through the mass of the substance and forms these jets on the surface of the soda. After another 30 minutes of cooling, I weigh the beaker again, which has become lighter by as much as 40 g. This indicates that almost all of the sodium bicarbonate has converted into carbonate. And I now have pure soda in the beaker for making soda glass. Now all that's left is to weigh out the necessary substances in specific amounts to create what's called the batch or the material for melting the glass mass. In addition to soda, you'll also need quartz sand, which is almost pure silicon dioxide. But instead of that, I simply used high purity silicon dioxide since nowadays it's actually easier to buy than quartz sand. In addition to that, I'll also definitely need calcium oxide or quick lime, which is also known as burnt lime, as well as aluminum oxide. Well, after I've carefully weighed out all the individual components, they then need to be thoroughly and completely mixed together. And yes, for making truly high-quality glass, I think simply mixing them in a basic plastic container probably won't be nearly enough. Each and every component of the glass needs to be mixed as thoroughly and completely as possible with all the others. To properly mix all the components of my homemade batch, I used a regular coffee grinder and after 5 minutes of grinding, all the glass components turned into a fine powder. So, I think this level of mixing should be sufficient for me. I learned this particular technique as well as some other interesting glass melting tricks from the excellent applied science channel where in one of the episodes Ben Krano specifically talked about various effective methods for making and melting homemade glass. There's a link to his channel in the description just in case. Initially, I decided to melt the glass in small quartz crucibles using a regular microwave. Yes, it turns out this can be done extremely easily, which is why I bought special mini furnaces from the Chinese coated on the inside with a layer of silicon carbide. This material heats up very well under the influence of microwaves, and melting glass this way is much faster than in a conventional muff furnace.

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcDT3GQlRw&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

Before heating, I think it's best to remove the plate from the microwave as well as the plastic holder so they don't get damaged by the high temperature. After I place the crucible with the batch into the microwave, I cover it with this mini furnace and set it to heat at full power for 7 minutes. If you look inside the microwave, you can see how quickly the contents of this mini furnace start to glow red hot. And after just 7 minutes, I think that liquid glass and a mixture of different oxides have already formed in the crucible. Yes, judging by the color of the furnace's glow, the temperature here has exceeded 900°, and the glass should already be molten. But for some reason, this still didn't happen, and the contents of the crucible remain somewhat semi-olid. Perhaps I didn't put in enough batch, so I decided to add more to the crucible and heat it again in the microwave. While my glass is heating up, I decided to prepare a place for casting glass ingots. For this, I took an ordinary graphite plate since glass doesn't stick to it, and I also heated it over a gas burner so that the freshlymade glass wouldn't cool down too quickly and crack from thermal shock. After reheating the crucible for the second time, I decided to pour out a bit of homemade glass for testing. But for some reason, even after 10 minutes of heating in the microwave, it remained almost solid and practically opaque. Perhaps some of the glass reacted with the quartz crucible. Or maybe the composition of this glass just isn't very suitable for simple experiments. Apparently, it's better to look for something more easily fusible and transparent. For the second test, I decided to try making not soda lime glass, but optical glass based on barium borat since it should be more fluid at high temperatures and also have extremely high transparency. For this, I took 33 g of boron oxide and 16 g of barerium oxide and mixed them very thoroughly in a coffee grinder. Because only the smallest crucible fits into the small microwave kiln, and it's not possible to load much glass batch into it, I decided to get myself a real muff furnace for the next experiments, one capable of heating up to 1200° C. For now, I set it to heat up to 1,000°. I think that temperature should be enough for the time being. After heating the furnace to the required temperature, I place the crucible with the batch for optical glass inside and leave this mixture for about 40 minutes so that the boron oxide melts and reacts with the barerium oxide forming berium borate. After 40 minutes, you can see that the volume of the contents in the crucible has decreased, which means all the oxides have melted and formed a glass mass. I think I can pour a small ingot of the resulting glass onto a preheated graphite mold. Yes, I was right. And this type of glass really turned out to be very fluid and spread over the graphite-like sugar syrup. But for some reason, it turned out to be completely opaque. After a while, the resulting glass started to become cloudy right before my eyes and also developed something like cracks, which was quite strange. Once it cooled down, the material cracked all over and didn't even want to come off the graphite mold. Apparently, working with optical glass requires a more complex technology. For example, it might require a long annealing process in special furnaces rather than simply pouring the glass melt onto graphite. Well, so far neither soda lime nor optical glass has worked out. So perhaps it's worth trying the composition of heatresistant glass. I remember a few years ago I visited a factory that produced heatresistant chemical glassware. And the glass made from this material withtood temperature fluctuations very well and was also soft even at a relatively low temperature around 700°. For another one of my tests, I decided to make a batch for glass with a fairly simple composition. 15 g of sodium carbonate or soda, 15 g of silicon dioxide, and 15 g of boric acid, thus creating a batch for heatresistant borosyic glass. At the same time, to test glass coloring, I added 3 g of neodymium oxide to the mixture and then ground everything thoroughly. After placing it in the muff furnace, I heat the contents of the crucible for about 30 minutes. During this process, you can clearly see the boric acid and sodium carbonate starting to decompose. After which they fuse with the silicon dioxide to form borosilicate glass. Finally, the moment of truth has arrived. Will I be able to make something resembling colored glass? I think so. The resulting glass mass turned out to be moderately fluid and did not wet the surface of the graphite much. So, most likely it won't stick to it. And the color of the glass I got is simply excellent. I managed to successfully produce real neodymium glass. All that's truly left is to carefully anneal it on the hot plate for a couple of hours and then I can thoroughly test its properties. After annealing, the glass did not crack at all and I ended up with a rather beautiful piece of neodymium glass which much like the oxide of this metal can subtly change its color depending on the lighting. Under LED light, it prominently appears purple. But under a fluorescent lamp, this piece of glass distinctly turns blue, which is indeed quite unusual. In addition, this type of glass is capable of blocking the yellow spectrum of light, for example, from an incandescent bulb or from a sodium

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilcDT3GQlRw&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 19:00)

street lamp. That's why neodymium glass is often used as a filter in the film or photography industry. Also, glasses with neodymium glass are often used by glass blowers since it effectively blocks the bright yellow light from sodium ions, allowing craftsmen to work with glass without unpleasant glare. E. Well, I finally found a truly suitable mixture for the glass and discovered that rare earth metal oxides dissolve perfectly and completely in it. I think I can try to make an analog of uranium glass that can glow under ultraviolet light. After my first successful experiment, I decided to make another mixture for borocyicate glass, but this time with the addition of 2 g of europium oxide, which in theory should make the resulting glass glow with a beautiful red light under ultraviolet. After half an hour in the furnace, I carefully pour the resulting glass mass onto graphite, then wait for it to cool and anneal. After 2 hours of annealing, the resulting ingot looks like ordinary bottle glass under normal lighting. But as soon as I shone an ultraviolet flashlight on it, the ingot glowed with a remarkably bright red light. It's truly amazing how a small addition of europium oxide can profoundly change the properties of ordinary glass. But still, my uranium shot glass glows green under ultraviolet light. So, it would be quite nice to make a type of glass that genuinely glows much like uranium, but importantly doesn't contain any radioactive elements whatsoever. After a brief and thorough search on the internet, I discovered that glass with the careful addition of turbium oxide can also glow brilliantly under ultraviolet light and with that very same beautiful vibrant green color as uranium. Fortunately, I happen to have some mixed turbium oxide in my collection which has an unusual dark color unlike all the other lanthnite oxides. Without much hesitation, I mixed up another batch of borosyicutate glass batch with the addition of 2% turbium oxide and then as usual ground everything up thoroughly. After loading the batch into the crucible, all that was left was to wait for everything to turn into a glass melt activated by turbium in the furnace. After casting the resulting ingot, as usual, I annealed it and 3 hours later decided to test the cooled ingot of the obtained glass under ultraviolet light. And as you can see, it worked out for me. Under a UV flashlight, this glass glows like uranium glass, but it is non-raactive. And its production is also much safer than working with toxic compounds of radioactive uranium. The only difference from uranium glassware is the color under normal lighting. But as far as I know, pure uranium glass like in this droplet has a yellowish color and the green tint is given by additional additives in the form of iron oxides creating the so-called Vaseline glass which was popular at the beginning of the 20th century. Well, in the end, I managed to make two pieces of unusual glass, which in my opinion even surpass uranium glass in their properties since they are not radioactive and their production can start right now without any special requirements from radiation safety services. By the way, after conducting these experiments, I found out that it's possible to make glass that glows not only green and red under ultraviolet light. For example, by adding 2% serium oxide to the glass batch, you can give it a blue glow. And if you add dispersium oxide to the glass, it will glow with a very distinctly yellowish green light under strong ultraviolet rays. Well, I think after watching this informative episode, you've certainly learned what other fascinating substances can be well added to glass to make it glow, such as uranium glass, and even make it much better by using non-raactive and less toxic materials. But if you enjoyed this episode, as always, don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to the channel to learn many more new and interesting things. Heat.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20443*