[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Bomb grade?
Not fake?
And unshielded?
Next to your skin?
He won’t live through his sentance.
[/QUOTE]
Oh yeah? What about Sky King? He was finding uranium* all the time*, and it never killed him.
[QUOTE=Joey P]
Way outta my league here, but IIRC from 8th grade science sodium reacts REALLY violently with water (ie sweat). I’m guessing his skin burned off.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, YRC. That’s what I’m guessing happened, also.
But it sure would be fun to have a baseball-sized-hunk of sodium!
[QUOTE=Duckster]
Not going there. 
[/QUOTE]
I thought it was a pretty good one myself, thank you very much!
[QUOTE=CurtC]
I recall seeing in college freshman chemistry class, pictures of a guy who had carried some radioactive stuff in his pants pocket. I don’t recall what exactly it was (this was about 27 years ago), so maybe Cesium? But I recall the series of pictures of this guy’s legs and lower torso taken over the next couple of weeks. He swelled up pretty bad and then his legs sloughed off, and he mercifully died a short time later.
[/QUOTE]
I remember this, too. The bad effects were due to radioactivity, not a chemical burn from an alkali metal, such as sodium.
The substance in question was almost certainly cobalt-60. Nasty stuff with a half-life of 5.27 years. It’s a gamma emitter, so you need dense stuff (like lead) to shield it.
[QUOTE=robby]
I remember this, too. The bad effects were due to radioactivity, not a chemical burn from an alkali metal, such as sodium.
The substance in question was almost certainly cobalt-60. Nasty stuff with a half-life of 5.27 years. It’s a gamma emitter, so you need dense stuff (like lead) to shield it.
[/QUOTE]
If that’s the case, and this guy knew enough about the stuff to know that it’d be cool to steal it, you think he’d know about its effects. I guess since we didn’t use any radioactive elements in general chemistry lab, they didn’t show us those pictures?
[QUOTE=sweeteviljesus]
Everyone knows that the best way to smuggle U235 is to hide it in a bale of marijuana.
Rob
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but then Fat Freddy drives the truck into an Ice Cream Parlor, causing Norbert the Nark to think all the melted ice cream is a nuclear meltdown and freak out.
FFFB!
[QUOTE=robby]
The substance in question was almost certainly cobalt-60.
[/QUOTE]
I was going to post that I thought it was cesium-60, but I thought that was too much to try to remember from 27 years ago. I guess I’ve always been better with numbers than names.
Our town had a big supply of cobalt-60. We had a big Johnson & Johnson Ethicon plant that made a huge number of surgical sutures, and they would kill the germs in the final packaged product with cobalt-60.
[QUOTE=The Sonoran Lizard King]
Yeah, but then Fat Freddy drives the truck into an Ice Cream Parlor, causing Norbert the Nark to think all the melted ice cream is a nuclear meltdown and freak out.
FFFB!
[/QUOTE]
I’d hate to think what Phineas T. Phreak would do with some weapons grade Uranium. Thermonuclear bong hit, anyone?
[QUOTE=robby]
I remember this, too. The bad effects were due to radioactivity, not a chemical burn from an alkali metal, such as sodium.
The substance in question was almost certainly cobalt-60. Nasty stuff with a half-life of 5.27 years. It’s a gamma emitter, so you need dense stuff (like lead) to shield it.
[/QUOTE]
Seconded.
I remember seeing a report in nuke school about a guy who just stumbled across a cobalt-60 radiography source laying on the ground somewhere and stuffed it in his pocket (radiography is x-ray photography on steroids). The device actually looked kind of cool, like a silver .22 bullet casing at the end of a stainless steel cable of the same width, coiled up neatly. I imagine that I might have picked it up myself had I been in his shoes.
Anyway, they had a sort of contour map of his body in the book, like those maps that show elevations using concentric rings with numbers on them, except these rings showed the levels of radiation exposure in REM that he received to different parts.
IIRC, the head of his crank got 3000 REM. Though he received levels in the thousands of REM to his body parts, they were only point exposures. Had he received exposure at this level to his whole body, he would have died very quickly.
The fellow lived, though everything from the waist down was removed.
[QUOTE=minor7flat5]
The fellow lived, though everything from the waist down was removed.
[/QUOTE]
If you can call that living.