jdurg

Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, with other random impurities in it based upon what 'type' of steel it is.

Here's a good one. A penguin is driving his beat up old chevy down an Arizona Highway. He suddenly starts seeing smoke coming out from under his hood. He pulls over into the nearest gas station and talks with the mechanic. The penguin asks the mechanic if he could take a look at the car for him. The mechanic says "Sure, but it will take a little while." The penguin replies "No problem. I'll just go for a walk and come back in about an hour". So the penguin starts walking down the highway. Now ya see, penguins are from the cold north so they aren't aware of how hot the Arizona sun can get. After about half an hour, the sun really starts beating down on the penguin and making him quite uncomfortable. As he starts walking back to the gas station he notices an ice-cream cart. Desperate for something to cool him off, he runs over to the cart and buys an ice-cream cone with 3 scoops of vanilla ice-cream in it. He pays for the cone and starts to gobble it down, but it's so hot that it begins to melt and get all over his face and the front of his chest. The penguin is hot, however, so he doesn't care that he's now covered in ice-cream. It feels good and is cooling him off. Covered in ice-cream, he walks back to the gas station and sees the mechanic. The mechanic notices the penguin and goes up to talk to him. The mechanic says "Hey. Looks like you've blown a seal." The penguin is a bit puzzled, but then says "Oh, no, no, no. That's just ice cream."

Uranium is also a VERY hard metal, so when trying to 'chip it' you would create a fine powder of it and risk it catching on fire. Uranium will also oxidize in the air in a similar manner that neodymium does. Even with a small sample, it takes a great deal of time to transmute it into plutonium. You have to slow the neutrons down to an acceptable speed in order for the uranium to absorb it, and the entire process is not exactly 100% efficient. You would need a HUGE amount in order to get a sizeable sample of plutonium, and the radiation that would be emitted when even trying this would be deadly. There's also the fact that trying to manufacture plutonium is 100%, completely and absolutely illegal. It breaks numerous laws here in the USA and also a few international laws. You will be sent to jail if you attempt to do it and are caught. The only legal ways of doing it require licenses from the NRC and various other federal groups which cost thousands of dollars and would require you to have a certified lab as well. Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, it's not worth it. Plutonium is moderately reactive, and after you've irradiated your Uranium for a good long while and then separate out the Pu after a long and dangerous (chemically and radiologically speaking) process, you then need to purify it. Pu will burn like Uranium does in the air, so when you have your fine powder of 0.5 mg Pu at the most, when you try and heat it to melt it into a single piece, it will catch fire and you'll then inhale plutonium oxide particles in the smoke. As a result, you WILL get lung cancer and various other cancers from this. So what I am I trying to say? DON'T DO IT. There is absolutely no benefit to trying to get a sample of plutonium, and the risks involved are akin to inhaling the Ebola Virus in order to try and become immune to it.

You would also need to deal with the potential corrosion of the tower itself, unless you wanted to make the tower out of a non-oxidizing metal. To do that, it would cost an absolute fortune. The amount of fossil fuels you would need in order to erect and maintain those towers would completely eliminate any potential gain as well. As has already been mentioned, the amount of energy in a bolt of lightning would take any water and vaporize it instantly. You can't electrolyze water in a controlled manner when it's in the form of a gas. With lightning, you also have to deal with the formation of ozone and nitrogen oxides in the general area where the lightning strikes. If you were to somehow get lightning to strike in the same general area over and over and over again, the levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides there would make it very unhealthy to be anywhere near it.

I'm a Type I diabetic myself, so I'm very used to looking at the amount of sugars in food. I was always taught to not really look so much into the amount of sugar that's listed, but in the amount of carbohydrates, since as was pointed out earlier carbohydrates generally wind up turning into sugars. As I've gotten older (Dear god puberty was hell with diabetes) I've had a much easier time controlling my blood sugar. I am now very comfortable with the amount of insulin I need in order to cover the amount of food I'm going to eat. As a result, I'm able to take in things with mild amounts of sugars in them as long as I compensate properly. I still avoid things like fruit juices, non-diet sodas, and any fruit-based product as they are completely loaded with sugar. But every now and then I'll eat some cookies or have some pizza even though I know there is a good deal of sugars in them. It's a big matter of moderation. One thing I do have to be happy about, however, is the craze associated with this Atkins(sp?) Diet thing. Now there are tons of low-carb, and hence low sugar, foods out there which I can eat and not have to compensate all too much in terms of my insulin. I wish they had this stuff when I was growing up with diabetes. Now I see ice-cream that is either completely free of sugar, or so low in sugar that it doesn't even affect me; cereal's that used to be loaded in sugar when I was growing up are now 1/3rd or less of the sugar, etc. etc. The big thing I've always taught myself is that you can really eat anything you want, as long as you know when to stop. Food is a lot like alcohol. In small doses, it does no harm to you. In large doses and in excess consumption, it can kill you.

When uranium is in a powdered form, it will immediately ignite under common atmospheric conditions and create a massive fire of radioactive material. It would kill you pretty quickly. Plus, the time it takes for the transmutation is on the order of months. The % yield isn't even close to 100%, so not all the uranium becomes plutonium. Some of it fissions from the neutrons, gets split apart when it turns into Neptunium, and some of it splits apart when it turns into Plutonium. So 3 grams may get you about .5 grams of plutonium if you're lucky. (As I said, the % yield isn't all that great). Plus, the separation of the metals requires chemical procedures as well as physical procedures which a human being, heck even some small countries, just cannot afford.

Hahn didn't make plutonium only because he used thorium and not depleted uranium. Replace his thorium with DU and he has plutonium. The process is 100% exactly the same. As for the atoms splitting as soon as they are formed, that's not really true. The massive quantities of plutonium that we have in this world was formed from the transmutation of U-238 into Pu-239. If it was accurate that the plutonium decays as soon as it is formed, then the idea of a breeder reactor would just be a myth, and plutonium wouldn't exist. Where you are correct is that trying to separate the plutonium from your starting material would require equipment that individuals just cannot afford or have the space to posses. (I think your neighbors would be a bit suspicious if you started builiding a gigantic ultracentrifuge in your backyard. lol).

But with a thermite, you generally produce a heck of a lot of it. (At least in the good thermites. )

So you just take the external layers and polish them off. The iron that is not exposed to the surrounding air cannot be oxidized.

This has already been done. Do a search for 'David Hahn' and you'll read all about it. The process of doing that is 100% illegal. The manufacture of transuranic elements without full licensing from the NRC can lead to massive fines and imprisonment, not to mention potential lawsuits from anybody in your area who can claim to have been exposed to the radiation. Plus, even after the Pu is formed you would have to physically separate it out from the rest of the junk that will exist in there. Frankly, you'd drop dead in the re-processing.

The method behind the thermite reaction is that the aluminum atoms vigorously rip the oxygen atoms off of the iron in order to form aluminum oxide and release a LOT of energy. In fact, so much energy is given off that the iron forms as a liquid. If you use copper oxide instead of iron oxide, you'll just produce copper. Whatever oxide you use is what pure metal you'll wind up with.

If he wants to dig it up, he could probably use a similar setup to the one I used to generate chlorine gas which I've described in a few other threads. Instead of having the one inlet for the HCl, he'd have an inlet for the oxygen gas.

Why not? That's exactly what Maalox is.

You could get a big beaker and use an oxygen tank from a hardware store. Connect the oxygen tank to one open tube going into the stoppered beaker, and have the other open tube going from the beaker into the peroxide solution. The oxygen won't dissolve to any great extent, but the formed SO2 will readily dissolve in the there. If you have a constant influx of oxygen from the oxygen tank, you'll be pretty sure that all of the formed sulfur dioxide is going where you want it to go.

When we made potato cannons in my freshman year of college physics class, we just used big PVC piping and a lot of compressed air. Compressed air is really the way to go.

Be cautious when working with 'used' glass tubing. You'd be amazed how much 'junk' can be absorbed into the glass. In high school we used some very old glass tubing that was perfectly clear and looked clean, but upon heating the glass it began to turn brown and emit a red-brown vapor. Apparently, the tubing was used in the past for bromine synthesis and the bromine had leached into the glass and remained embedded there until we heated it up. (That was the day where I discovered that bromine reeks like a skunk that took a bath in bleach. )

U-233 is fissile, but you still need quite a few kilograms to become critical. That's just not going to happen unless you have a massively large quantity of thorium to start out with, a massively large amount of americium for the neutron sources, a very large amount of moderating material to slow down those neutrons, and a large amount of space+time+money to isolate the newly created isotope. Trying to isolate any isotope is not something that people can easily do in their backyards. You need a great deal of equipment to do that. (One more thing, the 'reactor' that David Hahn created was not a self-sustained reactor. If he took away the neutron source, the reactor stopped working. This is because he wasn't even close to getting to the point of criticality). Thorium is available, but not very easy to find. Companies have phased out the use of thorium in the products that used to contain it since people freak out about radioactive stuff.

The problem is, sodium nitrate is an ionic solid so it will only dissolve in a polar liquid. Sodium will also react pretty readily with any polar liquid, so you're kind of screwed there.

Yeah, but uranium is barely radioactive. There's just as big a threat of someone putting a toxin inside a bomb and detonating that. It's just that radioactivity makes people panic more because such a small percentage of the general population really knows a lot about the subject. (People hear the word 'radioactive' and freak out, when in reality, there are very few radioactive things that could easily be made into a bomb without killing the people who came even remotely close to the making of it). (U-233 is fissile, but it's so vanishingly rare that it would be akin to saying that you could make an atomic bomb out of francium. (U-233 is not a naturally occuring isotope of uranium))

You can still make one with depleted uranium, but you would need a LOT of it, and I mean a LOT. Plus, you would need a bunch of other things and equipment, and frankly the radiation poisoning you'd receive trying to transmute the uranium into other fissile materials would kill you pretty damned quick. For a government institution it can be done, but you can't inconspicuously setup a fully functional breeder reactor with high yeild and ability to reprocess the materials afterwards and then convert it into a working fission device. If anyone tried doing that, they'd quickly be found out. Most of these 'stories' you hear are just that;stories. People get a little bit of information and fail to do any further research on it. Suddenly, they think they know everything and go spouting off stories claiming to be knowledgeable in the subject. Is it possible to create a nuclear weapon if you just have depleted uranium metal? Yes. Is it economically, physically, and safely feasible? God no. Not even remotely close.

On more than one occasion, however, the answers to the puzzles have been wrong. (I.E. based upon the wording to the puzzle you should have gotten one answer, but their reasoning behind how they got their answer contradicts the wording of the puzzle). So this could just be one of those questions where they messed up in the wording.

LOL. Sad but true. I can fully back that statement up.

I generally try not to think too much about how much money I've spent on my element collection , but from my best estimates of the money I've put into it, I'd say that it has cost me over $3000 thus far. (And I am constantly upgrading samples). Once you've put together the basic set, you start looking through your samples and thinking of which ones you want to upgrade. I'm constantly doing that, and as a result, obtaining bigger and better samples. Another thing I had on my side was timing. It seems as if whenever I was looking for a certain element, I was able to find it at a great price. (Like my Rhodium which I got for a bit over $200 but is now worth more than twice that, and the lab-made diamonds I purchased, the white phosphorus, the rubidium, the cesium, etc. I was able to find a seller of those items at a time in which I had money and was looking for them). I think the biggest thing to remember is that this is a collection and a hobby at the same time. So don't feel as though you have to rush out there to pick up everything at once. Start small and try to collect certain groups at first. What many people do is start out with the Lanthanoids. They are relatively cheap and fairly easy to get nice samples of at a good price. Once that is complete, move on to the oxygen group, or the halogens, or the noble gases, or the group 1 then group 2 metals. Etc. etc. If you set those small goals for yourself, it's MUCH easier to put together a full collection with great looking samples. Another thing to remember is that when looking to buy a sample, find a good price/amount ratio. If it costs you $300 to get a 20 gram sample of an element, but it will only cost you $350 to get a 28 gram sample, hold off on the purchase until you can pony up that extra 50 dollars. You'll thank yourself later for that. For the PGMs, many times it's easier to purchase smaller amounts on numerous occasions, rather than once big amount all at once. I now have over an ounce of gold, but I got that ounce by buying small 1-5 gram samples over the course of a few years. After a while, it all added up to over an ounce. While I probably spent far more on those little pieces than I did if I just saved up to buy a whole ounce, I didn't have to pony it up all at once. I guess you could say it was kind of like a credit card, and the extra amount I paid for the smaller pieces was like the interest on the credit card. I would have loved to have bought the ounce all at once, but psychologically it's a bit easier to spend $40 ten times than it is $400 all at once. For storage, I have a wooden cabinet in my bedroom which is what my computer is on. (It's a fancy computer desk with fairly large cabinets underneath it). Inside the cabinet are a couple of fireproof safes. They're small, but they do the job. The halogens are stored in one very small safe away from everything else, and the Alkali and Alkaline-Earth metals are stored in a separate safe. Everything else is stored in the containers they've been photographed in inside the empty space in the cabinets. The white phosphorus is kept inside the container it was shipped in which is basically a metal can with a foam center that has a little area cut out to accept the 20 mL vial. It does not see any daylight. My Depleted Uranium samples are stored inside a 20mL vial which is in a lead sarcophogus of sorts inside a custom made (by me) wooden box which is lined with lead sheeting. Absolutely no radiation is detectable outside the box. The noble gases and gas discharge tubes are wrapped in bubble wrap and stored in a closet. The cabinet holding the elements also has a lock and key to it for security reasons. (There's a lot of expensive precious metals inside there that I'm not about to let some low-life steal). I too would like to have a nice display cabient with sections for each of my elements, but that's something that I'll have to hold off on doing until I have my own house. (I already have my ultimate room setup in my mind. A nice wetbar, an arcade cabinet in the corner, a pool table, a bigscreen TV, and on one of the walls my element collection in a cabinet set up like a periodic table. )

I used to smoke, but I quit about 5 months ago.

This past weekend I was blessed with the experience of a sinus infection. I've had numerous sinus infections before, but this one is a bit strange. Typically, I get the sinus congestion, sore throat, sneezing, runny nose, and expulsion of green mucus. This time, I got all of that which eventually went away, but now a cough is forming. Over the past couple of days, the sinus problems have gone away but now I keep hacking up this green-yellow mucus when I cough. It looks as if the infection has moved from my sinuses to my lungs. Why is this? I haven't done anything differently with this sinus infection, but it seems to have migrated on me. How come some infections do this, while other times they die where they begin?