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At some point, if you’re going to try to collect them all, you gotta start making concessions. Plutonium doesn’t really occur that much in nature - if you’re getting it, it was made in a lab and most isotopes have the stuff that governments get rightly concerned about people having.
Even the relatively harmless 238 that is the reason way the Voyagers are still voyaging is something that the government (by which I mean literally all of them) gets very strict on controlling. (‘‘Twas an incident where some of that ended up on the bottom of the ocean floor funnily enough)
Maybe he could have done a pacemaker, or a uranium rock with bits in it?
I am curious about what his collection looked like, if he got to the “committing forever jail crimes.” Probably would shit myself with jealousy - I had a hard veto on showing my high schoolers what sodium does in water :(
I had the pleasure of having a high school AP Chem teacher who showed us what (very small) samples of lithium, sodium, and potassium do in water in demonstration. Promptly followed by videos of Rubidium and Cesium.
Is there a way of getting such a small amount that it's legal and is still technically "some plutonium"?
Trinitite (which I have a sample of), some uranium ores (also have), radioactive lead (can’t afford). They used to use it for pace makers, so maybe an old one, but it’s probably all decayed out by now.
One time the government came and took all of my mercury thermometers, funnily enough.
Plutonium doesn’t occur that much in nature? you fool, there’s a whole dwarf planet made of it at the edge of our solar system
There is Przybylski’s star. (I love the suggestion that it could be some kind of ET nuclear waste dump)
Wonder what his plan was for the synthetics
The vibes I’m getting is that he is probably autistic and had no idea what he was doing. It comes across as more sad than anything.
I think I figured out the website he bought it from - I was trying to figure out how an American science website would have the stuff. It looks like you can get parts from Soviet smoke detectors with 239 that were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and that might be legal in the US? Sorta like how we used Americium over here (that’s how the nuclear Boy Scout slowly and sadly killed himself.)
My “plutonium” sample is a piece of “trinitite” - a piece of fused material from underneath the Trinity bomb tests. That would have been a smarter option.