I was browsing an old issue of National Geographic, specifically an article about nuclear waste; one of the pictures of the article showed a very small metal container, the note on the side said that it contained one miligram of Californium 252, valued U$$ 68.000 That´s 68 million dollars per gram of the substance!!! :eek:
Is it the most expensive substance in the world? the prize includes shipping & handling? 
This is first post on this forums, although I`ve been around for some months now.
Good heavens, my first post and I screw the thread name… :smack:
S not C… my fault, sorry.
Some options here at the Guardian newspaper site, including anti-matter at the equivalent of $1.75 quadrillion an ounce (although, how it can exist long enough to be a commodity, who knows?).
Welcome to posting at the SDMB, Ale. 
Anti-matter is just as stable as normal matter – so long as it doesn’t come into contact with the latter!
I saw a note in an article some time ago that a significant amount of antihydrogen had been produced and stored for a significant period (i.e., months) in some sort of inertial containment using magnetic fields, at CERN – details beyond that not remembered.
Cecil Adams–hallowed be his name–also names Californium 252 as the most expensive thing in the world.
The numbers cited in the column are likely out of date, since it was originally published a long time ago.
Thanks for that, Polycarp. I think antimatter has Californium 252 beat, with all due respect to the Master.
I don’t think antimatter counts as most expensive. Yes it costs a lot to produce, but then so does Darmstadtium (element 110). In fact, I’d hazard that Darmstadtium costs more to produce. The thing is, no one is selling antimatter so it doesn’t have a price.
Anyone want to get a little pool of cash together? I say we pick up an ounce of “Cali 2-fitty” (this is my hip and cool new street name for it) in Tijuana, cut it with a bit of baking soda and corn starch, then sell it on the streets for massive profit.
Takers?
I agree about the anti-matter beign out of contest, it doesn´t seem to have a commercial value, it´s not something you can actually buy, isn´t it?
Morkfromork, you´re idea seems good, I like the Cali 2-fifty name, has good catch; however when the… ejem… costumers start to glow in the dark it would be a bit of a give away, don´t you think? 
Nah, we resell the customers as night lights.
What would you do with antimatter if you could buy it?
At the rate I´m mangling the English language I´d be through with each and every word in about 2 or 3 days… :rolleyes:
“What would you do with antimatter if you could buy it?”
Can I use it to nuke the cockroaches in my kitchen?
I’d chuck it into the basement and hopefully annihiliate some of the matter (i.e., useless crap) that my wife has been storing for eons.
Okay, to refine the question what’s the most expensive subtance an average joe with no special qualifications like a nuclear weapons lab buy?
Are you kidding me? Antimatter would be the best energy producing substance there is. Perfect…100% extraction of energy. IIRC I read that one ounce of the stuff would be sufficient to orbit the Space Shuttle (maybe it was one gram…whatever the case it isn’t much). A few pounds could suffice for the electrical energy needs of the United States for a year. One kilogram of matter completely converted to energy is sufficient to power a 100W light bulb for over 28 million years.
Unfortunately it would also make the best weapon material on the planet beating out nukes handily. Enough antimatter to annihilate you (say you weigh 75Kg) would turn you into a 10,000+ megaton bomb. The largest nuclear bomb made to date was 100 megatons. The relevant equation here is E=MC[sup]2[/sup] so you can see how your numbers get big really quick.
As of right now I imagine that high energy particle physicists would be the only ones likely to want to buy any in the very tiny quantities that exist today since it can be used in their experiments.
Antimatter has indeed been produced and is hanging about in some labs around the country in magnetic bottles. Unfortunately it only exists as a handful of particles. The thing I read about orbiting the Space Shuttle with an ounce of antimatter said if you increased antimatter production a thousand fold from where it stands today it’d take about a thousand years to produce that ounce of antimatter. As a result I can see how it would be considered quite expensive if you tried mass production (which AFAIK requires a particle accelerator).
So, according to your info, and if my calculations are correct, I’ll need about 2,250 pounds of the stuff to get rid of the crap in my basement.
2,250 pounds of the stuff would probably be enough to get rid of Canada.
Actually, antimatter bombs are not feasible. The energy released (to quote the books I’ve read) is more a “foowph” than a “boom,” and though it is quite a large amount of energy, is not explosive per se.
Does it matter if there’s an explosion or not?
I mean, presumably, where the event takes place will get more than a tad hot…