• Cort@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    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

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      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.

    • Adalast@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      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.

    • rekabis@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      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.

      • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 days ago

        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.