Why is it safe to pick up a lump of uranium metal while wearing cotton gloves?
Alpha radiation has very little penetrating power. The only danger with an alpha source is if you eat it or breathe it or something. So wearing cotton gloves and washing your hands afterward before eating anything should be sufficient protection. A good example of uranium’s harmlessness is that they used to make the red-orange glaze for fiestaware out of uranium oxide. While we probably wouldn’t call it prudent today to put an alpha emitter in a glaze that might be absorbed into food, they did it back in the day and probably didn’t hurt anyone. In fact, if you ate uranium, you’d have a bigger problem form the chemistry (heavy metal poisoning not unlike lead) than from the radioactivity. So the same precautions you’d take for working with lead (in paint or electronics or whatever) are sufficient for uranium.
