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
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.
Enrico Fermi told him he’d be dead withing a year if he carried on using this dangerous method.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE8FnsnWz48&t=415s
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