I'm not so sure.
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks was quite a read.
He grew up during the blitz & had access to lots of elements. At one point he got to throw 2lbs of sodium off a bridge just to see what happens.
Although elements 93 and 94, neptunium and plutonium, were created in 1940, their existence was not made public until after the war. They were given provisional names, when they were first made, of “extremium” and “ultimium,” because it was thought impossible that any heavier elements would ever be made.
I try to buy my Mum interesting books for her birthday and Christmas and she always wonders how I find such gems so consistently. My secret - it’s comments like this on Lemmy or the other place, back before the great migration. So thank you - this is going straight on the list! She’ll love it 😊
pretty sure.... there's nothing illegal about buying plutonium for a elements collection. Pretty sure, also there's a lab supply somewhere in australia that keeps the samples in stock.
Also pretty the russians are having a pretty decent sale on polonium, if you're looking for that.
Is it stupid to want that stuff in your home? Certainly not without lead condoms. Is it something I’m offended at the government wanting to scoop up? Certainly not.
Did the guy deserve full on hazmat?
Well, I’d probably have pulled out the full containment tent and taken a lot of selfies riffing off the E.T. Movies, but I’m a weirdo.
They could have probably played it cool and that would have been better.
The thing is that got through customs. It was probably declared by the company, since they already got paid and probably warn people to check “local import laws”.
Out of curiosity and for strictly not-remotely-nefarious reasons, how expensive would a megagram be?
I assume they just bought Ike, a centimeter cube of the stuff. (Which is a common thing for this kind of collector. Most solids come in centimeter cubes if they’re not particularly spicy.)
Based on the Wikipedia article, it's $6,490,000/kg.
Assuming you can legally purchase that amount (which you can't), you could even find that much for sale (would you probably couldn't), and the price didn't go up as you purchased more of a very scarce resource (which it would), it would be about $6.5 billion US.
Cool, though I would assume the supercritical point would be a lot higher for Pu-242. I can't imagine that anyone would have knowingly sold this kid a fissile isotope.
Look into the Demon Core. Chunk of refined nuclear material that was perfectly fine to handle so long as it wasn’t bumped.
But bump it even slightly, and the part that got bumped became dense enough to experience a minor amount of sustained fission and throw off a lethal enough dose of radiation. Several scientists died because of it.
That's not at all what happened with the Demon Core. On its own, you could not do anything to it that would make it reach supercriticality. The experiments that were conducted on it involved neutron reflective materials. With the addition of neutrons back into the core, that pushed it closer and closer to criticality. Both incidents occurred when too much reflective material was added around the core and it reached supercriticality, a sustained chain reaction.
Yeah, for being brilliant physicists, they weren't particularly smart. From the second incident:
On May 21, 1946, one of Daghlian's colleagues, physicist Louis Slotin, was demonstrating a similar criticality experiment, lowering a beryllium dome over the core.
Like the tungsten carbide bricks before it, the beryllium dome reflected neutrons back at the core, pushing it toward criticality. Slotin was careful to ensure the dome – called a tamper – never completely covered the core, using a screwdriver to maintain a small gap, acting as a crucial valve to enable enough of the neutrons to escape.
The method worked, until it didn't.
The screwdriver slipped and the dome dropped, for an instant fully covering the demon core in a beryllium bubble bouncing too many neutrons back at it.
After an initial bout of nausea and vomiting, he at first seemed to recover in hospital, but within days was losing weight, experiencing abdominal pain, and began showing signs of mental confusion.
A press release issued by Los Alamos at the time described his condition as "three-dimensional sunburn".
1mg is still strictly illegal as you need an import permit, permit to posess, a valid reason and the entire country as a whole is not allowed more than a total of 1KG
The problem is that there are also lighter elements (like astatine) that decay so fast we can't make enough at one time to even know what it looks like. Randall Munroe of XKCD gave a google talk where he covered the problems you would have if you tried to assemble all of the elements, and the problems really maximize around the time of astatine, which he described as the element which maximizes the amount of paperwork you'd have to do. The explosion of heat and radiation from a chunk of astatine would be too large to sweep under the rug as a little woopsie, but not large enough to wipe out your whole neighborhood or city so that there would be no one left to submit paperwork to.
Here is how you get your hands on plutonium legally.
In both cases it may still be illegal to smuggle into the country and therefor you will need a local supplier after obtaining the proper license. The permit process asks you what amounts you will obtain and who the supplier will be even before permission is issued. The easiest and least harmful would likely be an ore containing trace amounts of a safer isotope. For higher purity you would need a refined product likely only available at government facilities and contractors.
Ever since the Nuclear Boyscout incident it's been a lot harder to obtain radioactive elements without tons of paperwork and red tape, and for good reasons.
Get a certificate to use depleted uranium under a general license LINK HERE
EDIT: You WILL have a surprise inspection and tbey WILL confiscate harmful materials if you don't have a license and specific need for them, eg polonium.
Nope. In 1985, your best bet for plutonium was connections from Libya. A guy named Doc Brown was my hookup, had a really nice DeLorean he was working on for a project of his...
IMO if you are willing to go/risk going to jail for some time best reasons are either stealing millions of dollars or murder. Nothing else is quite worth it
I guess the situation truly worthy considering for me would be getting paid millions of dollars for killing someone really and I mean really insufferable. Then I would seriously think about it
A friend of a friend is dating a dude in prison for being a hitman (needless to say she has terrible taste in men and we've told her that many times). He apparently accepted $7k to travel across the country to kill someone then travel again to Mexico to collect the payout, meaning probably like $6k all said and done, and all I can think is that's way less than I ever would have thought one would accept for such a service, especially when I can't even get a second car key included when buying a car for 2-3x that!
You think it's too little because you're not keen on the idea of killing someone in the first place. Would you take the money if instead of murder you just had to go attend a work meeting? Some people treat crimes just as casually as that.
probably spend about billion dollars to make some particle accelerators, or ask some existing lab to let you move all your stuff into there lab, since ognassen would not last for even a second (all nearby elements are basically same in this, ognassen being most stable), so you would have to move your collection to their lab to have a "complete" set
I know of a hookup. Meet the Libyans in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot after hours. Be sure to wear a bullet proof vest.
That's the Lone Pine mall. Some crazy looking car took out the other pine in 1955, no doubt driven by a drunk spaceman!
Old man Peabody owned all of this. He had this crazy idea about breeding Pine Trees…
It’s like half of this is a Back to the Future reference. And the other half I don’t get at all.
This is heavy.
Get it? Where we're going we won't need to get it.
I fucking love Event Horizon. It's so campy, and it's even better if you imagine it as an unofficial Warhammer 40k movie.
And then he ended up with the Pine twins! Next thing you know, a damn triangle is messing up the space time continuum
Look, I'm sure in the year 1985 you can get plutonium at the local drug store, but in 1955 it's a bit hard to come by!
I'm not so sure. Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks was quite a read.
He grew up during the blitz & had access to lots of elements. At one point he got to throw 2lbs of sodium off a bridge just to see what happens.
I checked & found this in the footnotes:
I try to buy my Mum interesting books for her birthday and Christmas and she always wonders how I find such gems so consistently. My secret - it’s comments like this on Lemmy or the other place, back before the great migration. So thank you - this is going straight on the list! She’ll love it 😊
you should probably run for it, Marty.
This is the metal region, the non metal region, the metalloids are here and over here are the felonies.
They call them noble gasses, but I've never seen them owning land or anything that is typical of nobility.
It's because they don't do any fucking work
It's not their fault. They are full and content!
pretty sure.... there's nothing illegal about buying plutonium for a elements collection. Pretty sure, also there's a lab supply somewhere in australia that keeps the samples in stock.
Also pretty the russians are having a pretty decent sale on polonium, if you're looking for that.
Australia has a treaty that says ALL plutonium in the country must be documented and accounted for. The country is not allowed more than 1KG in total
How does that work?
probably treaties between other countries, and the IAEA probably would come and do inspections of where they would be able to keep any plutonium.
Every piece of plutonium is supposed to have a permit and be individually tracked
Yep, I read your original message.
Doesn’t make it illegal.
Just, eh, “complicated”.
Is it stupid to want that stuff in your home? Certainly not without lead condoms. Is it something I’m offended at the government wanting to scoop up? Certainly not.
Did the guy deserve full on hazmat?
Well, I’d probably have pulled out the full containment tent and taken a lot of selfies riffing off the E.T. Movies, but I’m a weirdo.
They could have probably played it cool and that would have been better.
The thing is that got through customs. It was probably declared by the company, since they already got paid and probably warn people to check “local import laws”.
Wasn't tracked, didn't have permits, it's illegal. I don't like it, I think its stupid, but that's the law that's enforced by the courts
Probably depends on how much they tried to import. 1mg is probably no big deal, but 1Mg would be.
Out of curiosity and for strictly not-remotely-nefarious reasons, how expensive would a megagram be?
I assume they just bought Ike, a centimeter cube of the stuff. (Which is a common thing for this kind of collector. Most solids come in centimeter cubes if they’re not particularly spicy.)
1Mg @ 19.8g/cc
1000000/19.8=50505cc
³√50505 = 37cm
So a little bigger than a cubic foot assuming you could prevent super-criticality somehow
Based on the Wikipedia article, it's $6,490,000/kg.
Assuming you can legally purchase that amount (which you can't), you could even find that much for sale (would you probably couldn't), and the price didn't go up as you purchased more of a very scarce resource (which it would), it would be about $6.5 billion US.
Cool, though I would assume the supercritical point would be a lot higher for Pu-242. I can't imagine that anyone would have knowingly sold this kid a fissile isotope.
Look into the Demon Core. Chunk of refined nuclear material that was perfectly fine to handle so long as it wasn’t bumped.
But bump it even slightly, and the part that got bumped became dense enough to experience a minor amount of sustained fission and throw off a lethal enough dose of radiation. Several scientists died because of it.
That's not at all what happened with the Demon Core. On its own, you could not do anything to it that would make it reach supercriticality. The experiments that were conducted on it involved neutron reflective materials. With the addition of neutrons back into the core, that pushed it closer and closer to criticality. Both incidents occurred when too much reflective material was added around the core and it reached supercriticality, a sustained chain reaction.
Yeah, for being brilliant physicists, they weren't particularly smart. From the second incident:
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-chilling-story-of-the-demon-core-and-the-scientists-who-became-its-victims-plutonium-bomb-radiation-wwii
This is why WIS and INT are different stats.
If I remember right the people conducting the experiments using the screwdriver were told that this method was stupid and dangerous.
A cubic centimeter is ~150th of a modern nuclear weapon's core. U-235 production accounts for every single gram, plutonium is even stricter.
1mg is still strictly illegal as you need an import permit, permit to posess, a valid reason and the entire country as a whole is not allowed more than a total of 1KG
Well that's stupid. In a couple of billion years he'll have to get more!
if he had astatine, more like 20 mins
Wake me up when he has his vial of Francium ready.
Oh don't worry, it will wake up the whole neighborhood.
God forbid men have hobbies smdh
Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest.
But what is the charge? Collecting the elements of a succulent periodic table?
GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY PLUTONIUM!
I have to assume he's working backwards, because if he'd gotten to Astatine we'd know.
I doubt he's working backwards. Those heavier elements decay before you get halfway through blinking. And most of them kill while doing it.
(that was the joke, I think)
The problem is that there are also lighter elements (like astatine) that decay so fast we can't make enough at one time to even know what it looks like. Randall Munroe of XKCD gave a google talk where he covered the problems you would have if you tried to assemble all of the elements, and the problems really maximize around the time of astatine, which he described as the element which maximizes the amount of paperwork you'd have to do. The explosion of heat and radiation from a chunk of astatine would be too large to sweep under the rug as a little woopsie, but not large enough to wipe out your whole neighborhood or city so that there would be no one left to submit paperwork to.
most don't, most will just give you poisoning from ingestion (or plain old indigestion), or in off case cancers, but that is not "kill" enough
Here is how you get your hands on plutonium legally.
In both cases it may still be illegal to smuggle into the country and therefor you will need a local supplier after obtaining the proper license. The permit process asks you what amounts you will obtain and who the supplier will be even before permission is issued. The easiest and least harmful would likely be an ore containing trace amounts of a safer isotope. For higher purity you would need a refined product likely only available at government facilities and contractors.
Ever since the Nuclear Boyscout incident it's been a lot harder to obtain radioactive elements without tons of paperwork and red tape, and for good reasons.
In Australia:
Permit to Possess Nuclear Material LINK HERE
in the USA:
Get a certificate to use depleted uranium under a general license LINK HERE
EDIT: You WILL have a surprise inspection and tbey WILL confiscate harmful materials if you don't have a license and specific need for them, eg polonium.
This nerd did nothing wrong, now they're training him to be a hardened criminal
They arrested this century's Oppenheimer but they won't arrest the CEOs of oil companies? The hypocrisy on display!
How was he planning to get Oganesson?
Maybe he was oganessing a solution
Too bad it's not 1985. I heard in 1985 it would be available in every corner drugstore.
Nope. In 1985, your best bet for plutonium was connections from Libya. A guy named Doc Brown was my hookup, had a really nice DeLorean he was working on for a project of his...
#THE LIBYANS
Going down a Wikipedia Plutonium rabbit hole, I just realized that the Metropolis algorithm was named after a real person.
Dr. Metropolis sounds like a superhero
Spoliers: Dr. Metropolis is revealed to be a villain that was working against the heroes the whole time.
It's Dr Manhattan at home
I was importing plutonium for a friend I promise!
Article in The Nightly
Oh shit, this guy is trying to summon captain planet. He can't be allowed to succeed.
IMO if you are willing to go/risk going to jail for some time best reasons are either stealing millions of dollars or murder. Nothing else is quite worth it
I guess the situation truly worthy considering for me would be getting paid millions of dollars for killing someone really and I mean really insufferable. Then I would seriously think about it
A friend of a friend is dating a dude in prison for being a hitman (needless to say she has terrible taste in men and we've told her that many times). He apparently accepted $7k to travel across the country to kill someone then travel again to Mexico to collect the payout, meaning probably like $6k all said and done, and all I can think is that's way less than I ever would have thought one would accept for such a service, especially when I can't even get a second car key included when buying a car for 2-3x that!
They all think they are so smart and no one will ever find out while leaving traces all over. morons
Why does she date a loser that allowed himself to be catched for years for 6k, ask her. Terrible taste
You don’t date incels of crime but CEOs of crime
Tell her she can date me. I'll commit a sex crime for her ...:)
The fuck makes you think that's an okay thing to say?
Rape is never a matter to joke about, and anyone who thinks otherwise is not worth associating with.
You think it's too little because you're not keen on the idea of killing someone in the first place. Would you take the money if instead of murder you just had to go attend a work meeting? Some people treat crimes just as casually as that.
It's Discontinued. Dang.
How to get Oganesson
probably spend about billion dollars to make some particle accelerators, or ask some existing lab to let you move all your stuff into there lab, since ognassen would not last for even a second (all nearby elements are basically same in this, ognassen being most stable), so you would have to move your collection to their lab to have a "complete" set
I'll have multiple particle accelerators that constantly runs as they decay in my basement
Best of luck for the electricity bills
You think i can run particle accelerators from power grid??
I'll have a nuclear power plant
Ah, stupid me, obviously you have a nuclear reactor, what would you do else with loads on nuclear waste from the accelerators.
One man's trash is other man's wealth. Nuclear reactor's waste can also be in my periodic table collection
Who's your plutonium guy?