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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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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
How does that work?
probably treaties between other countries, and the IAEA probably would come and do inspections of where they would be able to keep any plutonium.
Every piece of plutonium is supposed to have a permit and be individually tracked
Yep, I read your original message.
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”.
Wasn't tracked, didn't have permits, it's illegal. I don't like it, I think its stupid, but that's the law that's enforced by the courts
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