United Nuclear: The Online Store That Sells You Uranium Ore

United Nuclear is an online store where you can add uranium ore to a shopping cart. Also aerogel, sold by the bucket. Also thermite-grade metal powders, neodymium magnets strong enough to injure you, glow powders, Geiger counters, and a coffee mug commemorating element 115.

The website looks like it was built in 2003 and has been left alone ever since, which it more or less was. This is a feature.

What is United Nuclear?

United Nuclear Scientific was founded in 1998 by Bob Lazar and Joy White. That name will mean something to a particular kind of reader: Lazar is the man who claimed in 1989 to have worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a site near Area 51, powered by a then-unknown element 115. The claim has been picked apart for decades and remains, generously, unproven.

Whatever you make of that, the company is real and it works. It began doing design and repair work on radiation detection equipment, and grew into a general scientific supply house for the categories that ordinary vendors will not touch: radioactive mineral specimens, high-purity element samples, exotic chemicals, high-voltage components, laboratory glassware. Schools and universities buy from it. So do rockhounds, prop makers, metal detectorists and people who want to see what aerogel feels like.

The star product is the uranium ore. It is prospected by hand, sold as small mineral specimens with clear handling notes, and it is the thing everyone links to when they discover the site. The reviews section for it is a minor internet landmark in its own right.

The site itself is a genuine time capsule: a tiled catalog of small product images, dense category lists, warning text in bold, and a checkout flow that predates most current e-commerce conventions. There is no hero video. There is no lifestyle photography. There is a photo of a rock and a note about what it will do to a Geiger counter.

There has also been friction with regulators over the years, mostly concerning chemical products with uses beyond the educational. That history is part of the site’s reputation, and it is why the catalog carries a lot of legal language about what will and will not ship where.

What can you do on United Nuclear?

• Buy radioactive mineral samples. Uranium and thorium ore specimens, sold with activity information and handling guidance.
• Get a Geiger counter. The store sells detection equipment across a wide price range, which is the natural companion purchase.
• Order element samples. Small sealed specimens of most of the periodic table, the basis of a lot of homemade element collections.
• Handle aerogel. One of the few consumer sources for the stuff, available in chunks and, alarmingly, larger quantities.
• Buy absurdly strong magnets. Rare earth magnets in sizes that come with genuine injury warnings attached.
• Read the experiment write-ups. The site hosts project and demonstration pages explaining what to do with what you just bought.
• Browse the Area 51 section. Lazar-themed prints and merchandise, sold with no apparent irony whatsoever.
• Stock a home lab. Glassware, reagents, high voltage parts and the miscellaneous hardware that mainstream suppliers stopped listing.

Tips to get the most out of it

Read the safety text, all of it. This is not a novelty shop pretending to be dangerous. Some of the products genuinely require care, and the site tells you which ones and why. Skimming is the wrong instinct here.

Check your country’s rules before ordering. Plenty of items on the site ship domestically within the United States and nowhere else. Radioactive material and certain chemicals are regulated very differently across borders.

Browse the full product list rather than the categories. The all-products page is the fastest way to grasp the sheer range, and it surfaces oddities the category navigation buries.

Treat the magnets with more respect than the uranium. The ore samples are low-activity rocks. The large rare earth magnets are the items most likely to send someone to a hospital, and the site says so.

Read it as a museum piece even if you buy nothing. The layout, the typography, the writing style, this is what independent e-commerce looked like before every store became the same template.

Look up the company’s legal history. It gives useful context for why certain sections are worded so carefully, and it is a genuinely interesting story about where the line sits on selling chemistry to the public.

If you like United Nuclear, also try…

• Arngren: the Norwegian gadget shop with the most chaotic product page layout on the internet.
• Ling’s Cars: another real business running a deliberately deranged website, and thriving.
• Cockeyed: home experiments and measurement projects conducted with far more rigor than they deserve.
• Space Jam 1996: a perfectly preserved specimen of the era this site’s design belongs to.

More of the internet’s stranger corners in Weird & Wonderful, and the genuinely useful stuff lives in Tools & Utilities.