Radioactive Salts?

** Note: these are really just casual lab notes, expect no eloquence. I keep it a public page to bring happiness to friends lives, they see this - and it brings them happiness in that they do not have to live with me!

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I have read claims that Himalayan Pink Salt is radioactive. Now I am curious so I'm designing a simplistic test to check it out. I should do it somewhat right i.e. isolate it with shielding blocks, get control/baseline samples and etc.

An observation, pure table salt - sodium chloride (NaCl), cannot be radioactive, and cannot not be made so by nature or man. However any contaminants certainty could be active. "Contaminant" meaning here simply anything else but pure salt. Pure NaCI is exactly the same no matter its source. Anything that adds color/taste (or radioactivity) to salt has to be something besides salt. And, this doesn't mean its bad. I love the taste of grey French sea salt for example, but the color and additional taste we enjoy has to be from additional minerals/substances hitching a ride along with the salt. So, it needs to be checked out.

My initial finding here is that any claims of the pink salt being more radioactive than normal background are false.

First thoughts: the variables that I cannot discount, or am simply not willing to spend energy on eliminating, are numerous. With such low level readings the biggest uncontrollable wild card is natural local and cosmic radiation. With such low sample levels any differences less than around 10cpm are not worth really considering.

The biggest variable here I think is the fact that the pink salt can't be completely consistent across all possible samples. Where exactly any given piece of it was harvested from is going to change what contaminants/minerals are in it.

Pretty well everything is radioactive, including you. Its the dose not the poison. In such a test banana's will often show around 30-40cpm. Brazil Nuts can be more around 75-100

These are all primarily Alpha emitters, you'd have to eat hundreds of bananas a week for it to possibly change your cancer risk (and by an infinitesimal amount still).

This sample of Himalayan salt fell right in line with the other salts radiation emissions. I used to have some Hawaiian black salt, I suspect it might test a bit higher since the black in it is mostly carbon, and wherever there is carbon there may be some Carbon-14 and other isotopes present. Again though, I doubt enough to matter at all.

Once you get up over a couple hundred CPM its best not to eat it. Alpha emitters are not generally dangerous unless ingested. Even though that Fiestaware is coming in around 5000cpm (I've gotten 14,000+ off of some before!) it is perfectly safe to handle. And even perfectly safe to eat off of - as long as you don't accidentally scrape any of it off with a fork or knife now and then. Which I think we all know must happen constantly. So its not dangerous to have around, but I don't think its wise to eat off of it!

Anyway - the final takeaway for me here is that at least *this* salt is not radioactive anymore than local background is right now. I'd not give it a second thought safety wise.