Okay, so now what do I do with the lines already on the mirror? 
The easy way would be to build a small cloud chamber. It’s fun for you and the whole family!*
*No joke. We did this in high school Physics class. Even without the uranium ore, you’ll get events just from random cosmic radiation. With a little fissile material, you should get a pretty decent show.
It’s actually in the form of a dot of Americium-bearing foil in a stamped metal well, surrounded by baffles. That, coupled with the plastic body of the detector itself is sufficient to contain the alpha emissions. Alpha particles are stopped by something as thin as a sheet of paper. Or your outer layer of dead skin. It’s a very, very tiny amount–you’d need a million smoke detector guts to get even a gram quantity. But, if you somehow managed to grind it up into dust and inhaled it, that tiny amount could prove very dangerous. The cells lining your lungs are not protected by anything, so even the lowly alpha particle can plow through them and shred the delicate DNA inside. The half-life of AM-241 being 400-and-some-odd years, you’d be stuck with it for decades.
Nevertheless, in the form it’s in I’ll say it’s relative safe to expose and handle provided you take reasonable precautions in doing so.
We may not know
How to split an atom
But as for whiskers
Let us at 'em
Burma Shave
If you need some thermal neutrons, get a bucket load of americiam 241 (smoke detectors already mentioned) then get some Beryllium and grind them up, I assume you have a blender (this could be a whole new entry into Will it Blend!)
Then you need to compact the two together, prehaps a pestle and morter or put in the bottom of a metal beaker and use a rolling pin on its end to squash it in there. Anyway, a few thousand psi shold do the trick.
You should now have a fairly spicy fast neutron (4 or 5 MeV) emmitter. As you want thermal neutrons, you need to slow them down so anything with lots of hydrogen will do, common water is fine, although as mentioned some prefer heavy water.
Just makes sure your water is unchlorinated as chlorine has a habit of mopping up slow neutrons, which is not what we want.
oh better go, someone at the door , who the hell wears dark suits in this weather?
Emphasis added
Q.E.D., you’ve forgotten that the body does have means of dealing with particulate contaminants that enter the lungs - there’s a mucous coating on the bronchi that does a good job of collecting airborne dust, and would act as a shielding membrane for alpha radiation. I agree if any of the dust gets into the aveoli, bad things happen with alpha emitters screwing up the cytoplasm, but that’s not the same thing as saying that the lungs have no protection from alpha emitters.
“Reasonable precautions” meaning: don’t grind it into dust and inhale it; don’t lick it; be sure to store it inside a container at least as thick as a piece of paper. Correct?
No, it’s the same thing as saying they don’t have any internal protection against alpha emissions. Which is what I said.
golf clap
That mucus coating may trap the particles, but it will still allow some to be adjacent to membranes. Given a sufficient (and quite small) quantity of finely pulverized americium one would essentially be guaranteed lung cancer, and likely other cancers even from material that is encapsulated in mucus as it is coughed up and then swallowed. Here is what the EPA says about americium. At higher exposures radiation poisoning could kill a subject quickly; however, this is not typically an issue because americium is not particularly chemically reactive (significantly less than plutonium), pyrophoric, or otherwise generally found in quantities and configuration that would cause result in massive radiation sickness. I can’t find the the decay series of [sup]241[/sup]Am on line and don’t have a reference at home that shows it, but I believe the main branch of the decay series is all alpha and fairly low energy betas, so immediate radiation sickness from any reasonable quantity is probably a nonissue.
All of this business about waiting for spontaneous decay is amateur stuff, though. Who wants to sit around checking on the cat to see if it is, in fact, alive or dead? Build your own fusion powered neutron source and go to town causing any of a number of fissionable materials to split and transmute.
I’m not sure about the legalities of an active neutron source; you might need to get some kind of DoE licensing. Better check into before the Black Helicoper Crack Commando Squad comes busting through your windows.
Stranger
I am not planning to manufacture crack. I just want to split an atom.
What if you simply want to split one atom, at least with a reasonable statistical probability over the course of the experiment. I don’t think that would require any truly elaborate or even dangerous setups. Uranium Ore or uranium glass is avaiable as a neutron source. Place it next to, or grind it up with something that can absorb a neutron then split and maybe you can at least claim that you have split an atom. No fair counting the uranium in the ore as a neuron absorber since that would be a natural occurance not by design.
Of course it wouldn’t be a dramatic experiment in any way, but at least you could make the claim that you have split the atom. I also don’t know anything about the probability of such an event taking place over any reasonable amount of time. It’s just an idea on how to split the atom without creating a waste nightmare.
If you want an actual piece of the aforementioned uranium ore or uranium-doped glass (which is really neat–it glows green under UV), other other items of interest to prospective radiation experimentalists, go here. I bought some U-doped marbles which came with a free sample of ore to test a Geiger tube I’d acquired. Yes, both were measurably more radioactive than the background. As a notr of interest, a sample of material from a smoke detector proved a couple orders of magnitude “hotter” than either one. As a further note of interest, it only took a distance of an inch or so in air to significantly attenuate the level of alpha emissions from the Am sample.
Am241 has a 59 kev Gamma ray, which is not exactly sparkling, and also would be pretty eailsy attenuated.
I tell ya chemical neutron source are way easier than that fusion stuff, you don´t need an extension cord either, just a cople of thousand smoke detectors, some old porshe break disks, a blender and a orange jucier to squash it all togeather.
I think the OP was talking about splitting an ATOM not necessarily the NUCLEUS.
So, with that understanding, thats whats happening in your old CRT TV or any fluorescent bulb in your home : electrons are being zipped out of the atoms
As if the process wasn’t confusing enough!
What can you do with half an atom? Where would you keep it? What if it gets lonely for its other half and wants to recombine?
There’s an old Scientific American collection that includes an article entitled something like Build a Homemade Atom Smasher. The thing they tell you how to build uses, IIRC, a van de Graf generator, a linear accelerator, a thin window of Aluminum foil, and a vacuum pump to evacuate a long straight glass tube.
That’s no feat; electrons are constantly zipping in and out of the orbitals surrounding the nucleus; that’s how electrochemical bonds are formed. Now, exceeding the binding energies of the lower orbitals in a higher number element or forming an alpha particle directly from a neutral helium-4 atom would be more impressive, but just kicking an electron away from hydrogen, lithium, or nitrogen, not so much.
Stranger
On this note, even if you could make half an atom, wouldn’t it be attracted to something else and want to recombine with something else in order to remain stable?
Tripler
Not that I’m a nuclear scientist or anything. I just play Curtis LeMay on TV.