That green color associated with radiation is actually the color that glass takes on when it's doped with uranium. And Uranium doped glass glows in the dark, too, that's where the green glow myth comes from. It's not the radiation, it's the Uranium itself.
Uranium gets guilt by association more often than it deserves. I had a very brief argument with someone who was all fired up about the veterans coming back sick from exposure to DU. He was mad because nobody believed them at first, since their symptoms weren't typical of radiation sickness. And I had to break it to him: "that's because they don't have radiation poisoning, they have uranium poisoning. The radioactive type of Uranium, 235, occurs naturally as a trace element in raw uranium ore, which is pretty safe in itself. Well, they mine that out of the ground, then they process it to extract all the good 235 from the ore, and the now highly purified non-radioactive byproduct is depleted uranium, that's why they call it that, and it's as non radioactive as uranium can get. The reason they use it for armor piercing bullets is because it weighs 60% more than lead, inertia = mass x momentum, so these hit unbelievably hard. That being said, Uranium is a HEAVY METAL, so it stands to reason that it's poisonous in the exact same way that other heavy metals are, like lead and mercury, those will kill you, too, and they aren't radioactive. Nobody has ever had Uranium poisoning until now, because there is no practical way to get exposed to it in a form fine enough to be absorbed systemically. But it seems that making a bullet out of it, and shooting it at a hard target like a tank will do it."
That completely enlightened the poor guy, who noted that the symptoms the vets had were almost identical to lead or mercury poisoning. Everyone is always so quick to assume that if it has to do with Uranium, it must be radioactive in some way, what rubbish.
