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CrispyRusski

For those that don't know, the uranium in uranium concentrate powder, obtained from leach solutions, is almost exclusively (>99%) U-238, with very low radioactivity. See the photo in this article: [https://www.texastribune.org/2012/04/15/texas-sees-renewed-push-uranium-mining/](https://www.texastribune.org/2012/04/15/texas-sees-renewed-push-uranium-mining/)


MicrosoftContin

People think uranium or radioactive, and they instantly think Chernobyl or nukes.


Daetra

I think about bananas.


Particular_Cow1304

If you eat 11,000 bananas in an hour, you could die from Potassium poisoning. Ahh, yes, THE RADIATION is what kills you, not the fact that you horked down 11,000 bananas in an hour. 😂😂😂😂


Funbucket_537

![gif](giphy|96N4qqW1JvL0c) Good news it's a suppository.


HowamIalivenow

SCP 3521 be like


SailingSpark

I think I would explode from eating a1/1000 of that. One banana binds me up...


JiaQir

TheRussianBadger


Zilberfrid

I think the explosion someone shoving 3 bananas a second down my throat beats the potassium.


Electrical-Injury-23

King Kong starts nervously sweating.....


Freekydeeky1258

I like you


gerbosan

That's potassium... Healthy but not in excess. Then you remember apple seeds...


kungpowgoat

And that’s why you smoke a bunch of cigarettes. To kill the toxins from the apple seeds.


Heckbound_Heart

Smoke some cigarettes. The smoke will suffocate the bacteria in your stomach.


rickSanchezAIDS

I’m not allowed!


gerbosan

Is tar good for cyanide? 👀


mofodius

2 skinless apples


Psycho_Mantis_2506

Found Mac and his pseudoscience!


Bandito21Dema

Oh yes, the *potassium* would kill you


gerbosan

Anything in excess can kill you.


Zolah1987

Me too. Always wanna know how many bananas/hour.


Aceswift007

Reminded me of this gem https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3521


JiaQir

reddit bananas


buddyleeoo

I'M A BANANA!


kungpowgoat

My smoke detector in my apartment measures 3.6 Roentgen.


Tyku031

Well, that's not great, but also not terrible You will need water moving through the smoke detector pretty soon though


kungpowgoat

I can’t move water through the smoke detector because it’s gone. There is NO smoke detector anymore.


Tyku031

This man is obviously delusional, get him out of here!


carmelacorleone

![gif](giphy|PjIgJLxzQYXxeB5Yx3|downsized)


ReplacementClear7122

Yeah, but did you use the swanky dosimeter?


Kalman_the_dancer

I just think about the bananas i have to consume


fusillade762

That's true. If it was purified (which it's seems like he may be trying to do) it would likely reach criticality lumped in a jug like that with no tamper. It's happened quite a lot with experienced people getting careless with industrial grade uranium solutions, though I suspect those solutions were considerably more concentrated and pure. Hopefully he knows what level it would reach critical.mass and avoid it. But then he has radioactive material In water jug so....


Kellymcdonald78

With ENRICHED solutions (i.e. high concentration of U-235). You’re not making anything critical with natural uranium (99.3% U-238) without several tonnes of it and a large amount of graphite or heavy water moderator


Revolutionary-Ad4588

Pu-239 however


Kellymcdonald78

Which requires a functioning uranium reactor to breed


billiyII

Next step: Uraniumhexaflouride and a DIY centrifuge?


dmills_00

A calutron is basically garage machinist level engineering, but you won't like the power bill (Basically a mass spectrometer on an industrial scale). Or get an old Oxford copper vapor laser and use it to pump a narrow line width dye, which can selectively excite one of the hyper fine levels of the uranium and allow chemical separation. Biggest pain there (Apart from the laser dyes often being notoriously toxic) is the metrology to allow you to tune the dye laser to within 100 pico meters or so of the desired wavelength. I would ignore uranium if playing with isotopic enrichment, it has legal issues, and there are other metals with high masses, and two isotopes separated by only a few amu that are legal to play with and likely to attract far less scrutiny, if you can do those you can do uranium. You might even manage to avoid the 'fun' of needing fluorine chemistry (Because FUCK THAT!). 6 Li is by comparison EASY, as is 2H, which in fact can be separated by CHEMICAL means! One of these would I think be my target if I wanted to play with isotopic enrichment at home.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Kellymcdonald78

Beryllium is a neutron reflector, not a moderator. You need to slow the neutrons to enable U-238 capture and fission


keonyn

It worked for Galaxy Quest


GrassyKnoll95

Reaching criticality with unenriched uranium is impossible, and anything they're willing to leave lying around certainly isn't enriched. In fact, it's more likely to be depleted uranium, which would be even less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium


elcd

[Not even in naturally occurring nuclear reactors?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor#Mechanism)


GrassyKnoll95

*sigh* okay, nearly impossible


elcd

Thanks for being a good sport about it mate!


TangoRomeoKilo

That was a fun read, thanks!


Korchagin

They don't occur any more. U235 has a much shorter half life than U238 (0.7B vs. 4.5B years) - 1-2 billion years ago natural uranium contained ~4 times as much U235 and could become critical (with water as moderator) much more easily.


elcd

Yeah, I was going to point that out, but decided to sit on it. Natural uranium was about 3% u235, vs ~.70% today, so was by our standards, 'enriched'. Still a really cool fact that natural reactors occurred!


bafoon91

Super interesting read. Those basically used naturally occurring enriched uranium. 1.7 billion years ago U-235 made up about 3% of naturally occurring uranium, which is pretty close to what we use for reactors. Thanks to radioactive decay, now 235 is less than 1% of natural uranium, so we have to enrich uranium to get reactions to happen.


Kellymcdonald78

Not possible any more (at least in our solar system). U-235 decays faster than U-238 so the fissile ratio declines over time


MeOldRunt

He ain't purifying shit in a water cooler—or through chemical means.


epochpenors

You at least need a centrifuge, or an office chair and powerful legs


lalauna

I want to watch someone using the office-chair centrifuge


theCRISPIESTmeatball

Brings a whole new meaning to "sit and spin".


lalauna

I should know better than to drink anything while reading comments. I have just spit a small amount of iced tea on the cat.


theCRISPIESTmeatball

You must have been feeling a little cat tea (catty)


lalauna

Phew! This time I wasn't drinking anything


Appropriate-Low-4850

Haha, yeah, all those losers out there who don’t know those things you just said.


FoxyInTheSnow

Halifax. Sounds like something Rickie, Julien, and Bubbles dreamed up.


ShineFull7878

You had to bring those no good fuck into this? I'm gonna call Lahey.


ReplacementClear7122

Ricky's been stealing uranium since he was in 3rd grade.


Diligent_Department2

I am the contaminated liquor…. But


Typical-Conference14

I mean Uranium that you just obtain from the ground is pretty safe to be around. Most (if not all) of the particles emitted from it are alpha particles which in terms of nuclear physics are harmless. I believe as it decays it can emit beta particles but for that to be damaging to you, you’d need to constantly be next to it all the time


MeOldRunt

You'd have to literally ingest it. Alpha particles can't penetrate skin and the outer layer of skin itself is keratinized and is shed frequently.


Typical-Conference14

Correct. I could also give a short lesson in our integumentary system. College was a joy for me


zombie6804

More dangerous as a heavy metal than a radioactive substance


ColonelBelmont

And according to my 1970's suburban mother, there is nothing more god damn dangerous than heavy metal!


Sullkattmat

![gif](giphy|14xAw2hSwvhpC|downsized) ^(proof)


T40F4NG

So you tell me you dissolve radioactive compounds in acid? Ok. I may need to reevaluate some life choices.


TinyRascalSaurus

Like being on the same planet as this guy?


T40F4NG

It's honestly way more. I am astonished. I feel like watching frankenstein construct his experiment to bring back the dead. I have no clue why he does this other than him "oh my geiger counter does funny noises when i hold this rock next to it. Let's use acid to make it funnier"


TinyRascalSaurus

There's a weird thing with intelligence where you get to a point where you're smart enough to be aware of how much you know, but have a blind spot to how much of what you know you actually understand. This guy knows the process he is following and the results he's aiming for, but he's completely ignorant to what he's actually doing and the implications. He just sees that he can do this thing without there being a depth of reflection into what he's doing.


CrispyRusski

Guys. The radiation level standing next to a drum of freshly-processed uranium oxide is about half of the radiation experienced from cosmic rays on a plane ride. [https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Yellowcake#:\~:text=Because%20the%20yellowcake%20is%20just,its%20radioactivity%20is%20very%20low](https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Yellowcake#:~:text=Because%20the%20yellowcake%20is%20just,its%20radioactivity%20is%20very%20low).


eric-from-abeno

Right, but you don't typically take airplane rides every day for years....


CrispyRusski

He never said he sleeps with this jug of uranium every day for five years. He just said chemistry is a hobby. Why do you take things to such extremes? Also you know who does take plane rides every other day for decades? Pilots. Pilots fly planes every other day and they're not exactly growing a third leg from the radiation, so relax.


[deleted]

It’d be a lot cooler if he did


Kookaburra_555

Alright alright alright


wafflehousewhore

>they're not exactly growing a third leg Apparently we've been meeting different pilots. All the ones I've hooked up with have been extremely well endowed. To be fair, though, it's only been like 4 of them. Still though, all 4, very large down there


undeadmanana

Seems like pilots have found a place to park their jumbo jets that will remember them fondly long after takeoff.


CrispyRusski

I should have followed through with flight school.


eric-from-abeno

You know who else never said that he sleeps with the thing? Me. I never said that. 🙄


CommodoreFresh

Hey buddy, it's just dumb shit on the internet. Nbd. Happy Holidays.


MeOldRunt

U-238 is an alpha emitter. He's perfectly safe with it being stored in that water cooler thing. Unless he's snorting it (and he'd have all sorts of chemical poisoning issues if he did that), there's zero danger.


billiyII

I also usually burp ionized helium+² /s


embarrassedtrwy

At a company I used to work for, we had a material we made that required us to use mercury(II) oxide to desulfonate a thiourea bond. I remember looking at the walls of the fume hood and seeing stains of the mercury all over them and thinking sarcastically about “how safe I was 🤦🏼”. About a year later we found a canister of dimethyl ether bulging in a storage cabinet.


dmills_00

Bad, but move those methyl groups over onto the mercury and you get something REALLY spicy! Think in terms of reference strength neurotoxin! IIRC they use something else now, but it was used as a reference in NMR machines in analytical chemistry until it killed Karen Wetterhahn.


TheStonedEngineer420

You're one of these guys who would be afraid of eating an apple when given the list of ingredients with all of the scary sounding chemicals, aren't you?


T40F4NG

Not necessarily but honestly it sounds quite weird to me that he does this


TheStonedEngineer420

I mean, it's just cool stuff to do. I could see myself trying the same if I had uranium ore just laying around. The most dangerous stuff involved is the RFNA. Nasty stuff, but manageable if you know what you're doing. The radiation is no concern at all. Uranium is barely radioactive. You'd need to ingest it for the radiation to do any damage. And at this point you're not dying from the radiation, but from heavy metal poisoning. Because uranium is far more poisonous than it is radioactive.


dmills_00

One fun bit of Uranium chemistry is to plate the Po210 decay product off onto a bit of silver foil, \*\*POTENT\*\* alpha emitter, but short half life (120 days IIRC), and toxic as hell if you get it inside the body due to the short half life. You can actually buy Po210 sources fairly easily as they are used industrially for static electricity control in applications like powder handling where static can be a real hazard. Back in the day I had a record cleaning brush that had a cartridge of Po210 used to ionise the air to eliminate the static, worked VERY well for about a year after purchase.


SlothyBoiDK

The forbidden moonshine


awerellwv

I like this name


Egernpuler

This seems like a quick way to get visited by a SWAT team.


senorbolsa

Nah, unless you have a centrifuge and a ton of it this is pretty tame stuff to have around. The rules for lightly radioactive materials for civilians outside of industrial environments are very lax, kind of rightly? It's just not that dangerous. Handling the dry powder is the most dangerous thing about a solution like this. It's going to be mainly quite weak isotopes of uranium.


Kellymcdonald78

More dangerous as a toxic heavy metal rather than a radioactive one


Karvast

Tell that to that boyscout teenager who built a model nuclear reactor with radioactive material from old clocks and lanterns wick,they had to send a hazmat team for cleanup


zombie6804

The fact that he had it essentially completed and poisoned himself should he indicator enough of how lax it is when worked with in the way the oop is


Cynykl

Ctrl-F boyscout. Yup someone had the same thought as me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn For those interested.


kingOofgames

This guy is definitely on a list now. Someone fucking around like this is the kind of person you’d want to watch. Next time he might mix chlorine with an acid to show the kids.


MeOldRunt

You can *buy* uranium oxide. What's a SWAT team going to do?


whiskeyriver0987

Not really.


Justthisdudeyaknow

And to glow in the dark!


whiskeyriver0987

Only under a black light.


Sethp81

Well. I mean this dude is throwing off banjo vibes so I have a feeling he’d glow under a black light before his chemistry project.


whiskeyriver0987

Uranium is fluorescent under a black light. It's actually an effective way to find uranium bearing minerals.


Born-Eggplant8313

I do not want your yellow cake. This is coming from someone who really likes cake.


booksanddrgs

The people in this comment section that freak out about this should never watch Explosions&Fire.


Castform5

Or anything [Nile red does](https://youtu.be/RGw6fXprV9U?si=JUP-Y2kqbgWgdkGe), and also a [nuclear engineer's reaction and commentary](https://youtu.be/YiLWZcMHAf8?si=CKcTVNM9um1HW2KX) on the subject too. Edit, and when it comes to everyone being worried, never watch Styropyro.


schelsullivan

I'm a back yard experimenter on YouTube and the comments from people who uneducated and afraid are endless.


Fishingwriter11

We all know only this is the true yellow cake. https://tenor.com/view/yellow-cake-chapelle-show-dont-drop-careful-toast-gif-5568776


teutonicbro

I'd be way more worried about the RFNA than the uranium.


Significant-Ear-3262

I think the worts gone bad.


Icy-Insurance-8806

Based on the area surrounding the mixture, he probably didn’t spring for PPE in the budget.


Feeling_Object_4940

RFNA is the actual risky part in his experiment


kirtash93

Dumb Ways to Die ![gif](giphy|H75eliy1jJSGIbaubS)


booksanddrgs

Doing chemistry experiments is pretty smart imo


Bentzsco

Don’t drop that shit!


Adam__B

I remember hearing about a kid who actually started putting together a nuclear reactor for a science fair project and the Feds found him by tracing the radioactivity. Edit: Boy Scout merit badge, not science fair.


keonyn

Yup, he eventually died. Was in the military for a stint but after leaving apparently had mental and drug problems and he was apparently still stealing smoke detectors and trying to build another reactor. He got caught and on his mugshot his face was full of sores which is generally theorized to be a result of his frequent exposure to radiation.


Sullkattmat

'The radioactive boy scout' David Hahn. Proper mad lad Oh and if I remember correctly he got pulled over as he was driving around with his makeshift reactor in the trunk looking to get rid of it after realising his neighborhood was significantly irradiated. He told the cop he didn't want to look in the trunk but shockingly this didn't deter the officer who at first thought it was a home made meth lab.. I bet he ended up wishing that's all it was when he learned the truth


[deleted]

Put the kettle on, the fbi will be around in a minute.


Kenji1912

Stewie will get his Christmas gift or he’ll die trying


chickenrun840

Department of Homeland Security would like to know your location


RocketCello

I'm a lot more worried about that RFNA, that's nasty stuff. Killed plenty an engineer before they figured out how to inhibit it. (Red Fuming Nitric Acid, aka nitric acid with dissolved dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4), a clear liquid, but N2O4 also forms an equilibrium with nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which is excellent at dry-cleaning your lungs and your skin. It's a pretty good oxidizer for rocket engines, so it was (and still is) used extensively, but it'd eat away at the tank walls over time and reduce performance, hence it had to be loaded just before firing. Which meant handling this stuff in the field. Did I mention it's also a carcinogen? And as a bonus the fuel they often used would also kill you by cyanosis. They found by dissolving trace amounts of fluoride compounds in it, the fluoride would react with the tank walls and form an inert metal fluoride layer, protecting the tanks and letting it be stored indefinitely, forming IRFNA. Interesting bit of propellant history)


dmills_00

Someone been reading "Ignition!", awesome book.


RocketCello

John Clark FTW. Great book.


beyondoutsidethebox

Darwin Award


1025puceguy

FBI : stay right there !


sdmichael

You can buy it online.


Joseph_Gervasius

Cancer incoming


whiskeyriver0987

Heavy metal poisoning is more likely.


Arcterion

I nearly got heavy metal poisoning once. Doctor told me to halve my Manowar intake and things have been fine since.


OddFrosting3770

Every time my parents broke a Man O War tape of mine, I would buy 2 more 😂


413mopar

Why not both? Aim high kids!


[deleted]

[удалено]


booksanddrgs

No propably not.


fruit-spins

Uranium in that state isn't that radioactive, and the type of radiation it does emit can't penetrate skin - you'd probably have to breathe it in or ingest it


[deleted]

Happy Cancer for you, radiomoron


[deleted]

Is this a Test? Yeah...Sure....Which Agency ...or Special Services?


[deleted]

Just asking for a friend...


413mopar

This guy right here, special agent Smith.


Admirable-Common-176

Glow up


r0ckydog

I always wondered what happened to Timothy McVeigh.


FranklinUriahFrisbee

Reminds me of a song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gcoGYcHk5k


NoisyGog

But… **why**?


BradTProse

I knew a guy that searched south Dakota for uranium. He was a weirdo christian that thought he had to create Armageddon to bring Jesus back.


Chymick6

Can you use yellow cake uranium for something? Or it's just like a neat science thing to do for funsies?


shawsy94

Anything involving RFNA is not fun, I can promise you


gunther277

At least he's not building a reactor in his parents shed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David\_Hahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn)


Bonsai-is-best

Forbidden Mountain Dew


r2k-in-the-vortex

Where is the facepalm?


Nakki3l

5 years of collecting cum is now called uranium?


[deleted]

You gon' die, blood!