I have to assume he's working backwards, because if he'd gotten to Astatine we'd know.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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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)
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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!
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.
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
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”.
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The country is not allowed more than 1KG in total
How does that work?
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Probably depends on how much they tried to import. 1mg is probably no big deal, but 1Mg would be.
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
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.
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".
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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.
A cubic centimeter is ~150th of a modern nuclear weapon's core. U-235 production accounts for every single gram, plutonium is even stricter.
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.
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 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 😊
I checked & found this in the footnotes:
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.
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…
And then he ended up with the Pine twins! Next thing you know, a damn triangle is messing up the space time continuum
It’s like half of this is a Back to the Future reference. And the other half I don’t get at all.
you should probably run for it, Marty.