Oh yeah? What about Sky King? He was finding uranium* all the time*, and it never killed him.
Yes, YRC. That’s what I’m guessing happened, also.
But it sure would be fun to have a baseball-sized-hunk of sodium!
I thought it was a pretty good one myself, thank you very much! 
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.
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?
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!
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.
I’d hate to think what Phineas T. Phreak would do with some weapons grade Uranium. Thermonuclear bong hit, anyone?
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.
If you can call that living.