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They arrested this century’s Oppenheimer but they won’t arrest the CEOs of oil companies? The hypocrisy on display!
Well that’s stupid. In a couple of billion years he’ll have to get more!
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.
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!
you should probably run for it, Marty.
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
This nerd did nothing wrong, now they’re training him to be a hardened criminal
This is the metal region, the non metal region, the metalloids are here and over here are the felonies.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
(that was the joke, I think)
Oh shit, this guy is trying to summon captain planet. He can’t be allowed to succeed.
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.
I was importing plutonium for a friend I promise!
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
How to get Oganesson
