Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Not all heroes wear capes.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

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White supremacy is terrorism.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Bark louder, little dog.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Addendum: How Much Plutonium Is In That Photo?

Addendum: How Much Plutonium Is In That Photo?

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As a followup to my earlier post, I’ve been asked how much plutonium is in this photo, so I did a calculation.

It’s pretty clearly a sharpie in the bottom of the photo. Sharpies are about 13.5 – 14 cm long. Scaling from there to the rods gives 12 cm long for the top four, and 5.7, 5.1, 4.5, and 3.8 for the bottom four. All have rounded caps of about 0.3 cm radius. I’m approximating, so we’ll neglect the rounded caps. The article says something about the yellow-and-black tape being raised, and the shadows agree, so the lengths of all the rods may be more than what I measured, depending on the angle of the photo. So the estimate is likely to be low, although probably less than tens of grams per rod.

Length (cm) Radius (cm) # of rods Mass in g (alpha phase, 19.86 g/cm3) Mass in g (delta phase, 15.92 g/cm3)
12 1.1 4 906 726
5.7 0.83 1 248 199
5.1 0.83 1 222 178
4.5 0.83 1 197 158
3.8 0.74 1 129 103

 

We can’t tell by looking what phase the plutonium is in, and the densities of the alpha and delta phases are quite different. So a high estimate, for the denser alpha phase, is a total of 4,420 grams in all eight rods; for the less dense delta plutonium, the total is 3,542.

Wikipedia gives the critical mass of plutonium-239 as about 11 kg, about 3 times what is in the photo. But there could be other isotopes. A critical mass depends on its surroundings, so depending what else is in the glovebox and the presence of a human body nearby, the critical mass could be less.

I have additional questions that pertain to the involvement of management and the safety procedures. How did the technician come to have that much plutonium? Plutonium is kept in the vault and must be signed out. Getting a photographer into PF-4 used to require a requisition for the services, and then there are procedural issues about taking a camera in that would have to be signed off by someone above technician level. Who signed off on the photo shoot?

Many thanks to Christopher Willis (@BeCurious) for checking my math and Alex Wellerstein (@Wellerstein) for doing a parallel calculation.

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  6. 6.

    divF

    During the 1980’s I had a friend / colleague who worked at Los Alamos in a building next to a plutonium facility. His standing joke whenever I would visit was that there was a cafeteria next door, and he would be happy to take me for lunch. I declined.

  7. 7.

    Mike J

    Is a criticality accident possible with less pu if there’s a reflector a la the tungsten bricks around the demon core? Would anything common act as a reflector?

  8. 8.

    kindness

    I didn’t know that the critical mass for plutonium is 11 kg. What is the critical mass for U 235?

  10. 10.

    John Weiss

    Looks very much like fresh-cast lead. What sort of idiot photographs real plutonium? Not only radioactive but poisonous as well! What could go wrong?

  12. 12.

    ArchTeryx

    @Mike J: Human bodies. We’re mostly water, and water makes for an awesome neutron reflector.

    Putting your hand between a pair of Pu or U ingots in criticality would increase the neutron flux and rate of reaction, not reduce it!

  15. 15.

    Sayne

    Radiation question.

    How much of a danger do those rods represent on their own? My limited understanding is that plutonium, like uranium, is primarily an alpha emitter and on its own not a strong source of radiation in comparison to some other elements like Radium.

    Is that correct?

  20. 20.

    efgoldman

    @Marcopolo:

    here is a copy of a book list for summer reading by a high school in Alabama.

    I’d like to think that’s just an elaborate joke, but somehow I know it isn’t.
    OTOH, some of that shit is a real difficult slog, because RWNJs don’t write any better than they do anything else.

  21. 21.

    Steve in the ATL

    @efgoldman: I settled a case this afternoon which means I don’t have to spend most of next week in Augusta when it is not Masters week, so I’m in good spirits. I’m also drinking spirits. Symmetry!

    Shit, that sounds like more math.

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Marcopolo: @Steve in the ATL: @efgoldman: It is. The school district just yanked his Government Economics syllabus offline after complaints.
    https://www.bcbe.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=19

    The teacher’s name is Gene Ponder. If you do a keyword search for the email address on the reading list you get four hits. The now missing syllabus above. His about page at the school he teaches at. And two faculty listing sites for that school/school district.

    Here’s the news article about the thing:
    http://www.gulfcoastnewstoday.com/stories/spanish-fort-high-ap-reading-list-pulled-after-concerns-from-residents,50812
    Spanish Fort High AP reading list pulled after concerns from residents

    Posted online, this copy of Spanish Fort High teacher Gene Ponder’s summer reading list includes a majority conservative and right-leaning authors, a point that concerned local residents and led to several complaints being lodged with the Baldwin County School System.
    Posted Wednesday, June 21, 2017 5:55 pm
    By Cliff McCollum
    Concerns from local residents have led to a summer reading list for a Spanish Fort High School AP Government/Economics being pulled.

    Spanish Fort High teacher Gene Ponder’s summer reading list for his class included a number of texts from a majority of conservative and right-leaning authors including Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Ron Paul, Thomas Sowell, Chuck Colson and Ronald Reagan.

    Some of the titles of the books included “Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attacks on Our Borders, Economy and Security,” “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” “48 Liberal Lies About American History,” “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,” “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,” and “The Land of Fair Play: American Civics from a Christian Perspective,” to name a few.

    Ponder had previously been a Republican candidate for Alabama’s lieutenant governorship back in 2010.

    Posts shared on social media on June 21 questioned if the Baldwin County School System had endorsed the reading list and the perceived lack of diversity of ideas, as well as whether it met the reading levels required for a 12th grade AP class.

    Baldwin County Board of Education President Shannon Cauley said she became aware of the issue through social media and brought it to the attention of school system leaders.

    “As the school board rep for the SF area, I saw a concern and addressed it with the Superintendent,” Cauley wrote in a Facebook post. “As a courtesy, the school principal called to let me know that the list had been removed and assignment cancelled. He’ll be sending an email to all Senior students/parents to notify them that there will be no summer reading assignment for this AP government class.”

    In a statement released to the media, Baldwin County Superintendent Eddie Tyler said the list was removed by the teacher and will not be used.

    “Mr. Ponder’s reading list that is going around on social media has not been endorsed by the school system,” Tyler wrote. “The list has been removed by the teacher. Baldwin County Public Schools has a process to vet and approve reading lists so that a variety of sources are used. I expect all employees to follow our processes, procedures and policies.”

  26. 26.

    Marcopolo

    @Steve in the ATL: As to whether it is real or not, I came across it on Twitter while reading commentary on the Senate healthcare bill. The commentary was real & serious & there was no indication by the poster that it was a joke. And I can imagine some RWNJ ideologically driven teacher assigning it.

    Edit: did I mention in the last thread how hard it is to post in a timely fashion on this blog?

  27. 27.

    ArchTeryx

    @Sayne: Plutonium is pretty hot stuff. It’s primarily an alpha emitter, but can emit beta and gamma as well. It is correct that alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper but something as hot as plutonium can kill you from attaching to dust in the air. An alpha emitter gets inside you you’re in very deep, possibly fatal trouble.

    However, the #1 emission of plutonium isn’t alpha, beta, or gamma – it’s neutrons, and high energy neutrons are very dangerous in their own right. (It was primarily high energy neutrons that killed Daghlian and Slotin during the Demon Core criticality accidents).

    You really wouldn’t want to be too near that stuff without some sort of shielding and body protection against ingestion.

  29. 29.

    Another Scott

    Your math looks correct to me, but I haven’t checked it carefully. :-)

    The 2011 report says:

    W1 made several incorrect correlations between his normal work environment and the work
    environment of this event; in his normal work environment, a single glovebox is a single
    location, he normally works with very small quantities, and he had not seen an angle-iron
    delimiter before    . Additionally, he had seen the items of this event all together in a single
    location, as a single item [A3B3C05 Incorrect assumption that a correlation existed between two
    or more facts]. The fact items were stored in slip-top canisters was an interaction control and a
    computation assumption for criticality safety. In this event, the items were removed from their
    canisters for photography and placed together on the glovebox floor [A2B4C01 Material
    handling LTA coupled with A3B3C05 Incorrect assumption that a correlation existed between
    two or more facts].

    Having all items in one LANMAS location became an overmass situation [A2B4C01 Material
    handling LTA coupled with A3B3C05 Incorrect assumption that a correlation existed between
    two or more facts].

    The delimiter was not attached to the glovebox. The delimiter itself was an angle iron bar
    wrapped with yellow and black tape. This delimiter was set on top of the corresponding yellow
    and black tape that denoted the boundaries of the two existing LANMAS locations in the
    glovebox.     The delimiter was not secured to the glovebox in order to allow for easy cleaning
    underneath it and for future flexibility of the glovebox. While delimiters were not a common
    feature, the tape boundaries between LANMAS locations were common. In this event, the
    delimiter was moved and used in the photography task [A3B3C01 Attention was given to wrong
    issues coupled with A3B3C05 Incorrect assumption that a correlation existed between two or
    more facts].

    (Emphasis added.)

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, unfortunately the report doesn’t say how much plutonium was present.

    The yellow and black tape under the rods is covering the “legs” of a piece of angle iron. The “leg” seems to be roughly half the length of the Sharpie. Based on the length of the Sharpie, it seems to be roughly 3″ x 3″ angle iron – a standard size.

    There seems to be a huge training (and retraining) failure in this case. The tape on the countertop is nearly worn away. If the angle iron “delimiter” should have been in a specific orientation between the plutonium rods to avoid an “over-mass event”, then it should not be up to the operator to keep it in place with just some tape “guides” to illustrate the proper position. It should be bolted down, even if it makes cleaning the hood less convenient.

    The report makes it clear that there were lots of other failures as well. :-(

    Thanks for your writing on this. While few (if any) of us work with nuclear material, these lessons about taking safety rules seriously can apply to all of us.

    [eta:] Bah. Sorry about the extra carriage-returns. C&P from PDFs rarely seems to work as well as it should…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Marcopolo: You ever see the write up about what happened when they tried to pitch their ideas to Prime Minister Cameron. He basically, in that polite English way, threw them out of his office after they made their pitch about what he should do in terms of fiscal and monetary policy.

  32. 32.

    LosGatosCA

    But what is the street value?

    Does it taste like chicken?

    Can you smoke it?

    Inquiring minds need to know.

  35. 35.

    Marcopolo

    @Adam L Silverman: But but but it’s all about making sure the incentives are right to get the outcomes you want. I actually read the first book but all I really remember, and I hope my memory is correct, was the chapter comparing low level drug dealing to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

  36. 36.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Mike J: Yes, it is possible. The human body is a reflector, as some have said above. The limits for gloveboxes are calculated with that taken into consideration. But this was 25% above the glovebox limit.

    @kindness: Critical mass of U-235 is 52 kilograms. That and the 11 kg for plutonium are from Wikipedia, for an unreflected bare sphere, the simplest calculational case. Both can be less, depending on their surroundings.

    @Sayne: That is true. Metallic plutonium is not much of a radiation danger. The oxide forms small particulates that can lodge in the lungs and cause cancer.

    @John Weiss: These ingots are in a glovebox. It’s not uncommon for places like Los Alamos to take photos of plutonium inside gloveboxes.

  37. 37.

    El Caganer

    @Marcopolo: That’s why I’m in awe of Roy Edroso. If I read as much of that crap as he does every week for his VV column, my brain would dissolve and run out my nose.

  38. 38.

    hovercraft

    @Marcopolo:
    Just think, this may be a preview of what the Department of Education recommends in the future. Wait a minute, I thought that by now it along with Energy, and what’s the third one would be gone by now?. Anyhoo, between De Vos and Franklin(?) Faldwell in charge of educating our kids, this may be the high water mark for the next four years.
    I’m so old, I remember when Obama speaking to kids was indoctrination, but suddenly seeing Dept. of Ed. getting more involved in curriculum and reading list could become the norm with nary a peep from the people who fear a government takeover. Hey you could even see a decline in the number of homeschoolers now that godless liberals are no longer in charge and school prayer may be coming back by way of government subsidized charter schools.

  41. 41.

    ArchTeryx

    @schrodingers_cat: Not true. If it’s hot enough, you can fatally contaminate yourself by touching contaminated surfaces then touching your mouth, or inhaling contamination-laced dust. Plutonium is really hot stuff when pure, and is treated as an extreme hazard with full protective gear being mandated.

  43. 43.

    Marcopolo

    @hovercraft: The third dept was Commerce, though there was another interview Perry did where he said Energy, Interior & Commerce & left out Ed. And this is the guy running the gov’t agency that oversees our Plutonium (thus connecting my comments back to the original thread topic!).

  44. 44.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @ArchTeryx: Working with plutonium in a glove box requires a change into coveralls and booties to go into the area, and gloves before you put your hands into the gloves in the glovebox. Also checking yourself with radiation counters before you leave the area. But “full protective gear”, as in breathing apparatus and moon suit, no.

  45. 45.

    ArchTeryx

    @Cheryl Rofer: Well, it’s in a glovebox so you don’t get oxides and various other nasty allotropes vaporizing where you can breathe it, but I figured that you’d at least need Tyvek pullovers, booties and a respirator if it was outside of the glovebox. I tend to think in BSL-terms, and BSL-3 is “full protective gear” to me, my bad. (That’s where you’re in full body Tyvek suits, but not “bunny” suits with positive pressure air supplies – that’s BSL-4, the highest rating.).

  46. 46.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @ArchTeryx:

    Not true. If it’s hot enough, you can fatally contaminate yourself by touching contaminated surfaces then touching your mouth, or inhaling contamination-laced dust. Plutonium is really hot stuff when pure, and is treated as an extreme hazard with full protective gear being mandated.

    Balloon Juice. Come for the pets, stay for the knee-tightening crotch-clenching terror.

  47. 47.

    Marcopolo

    I’m off to sleep but just want to leave this out there: is anyone else surprised the Trump administration hasn’t rolled back light bulb standards yet? It’s something tied to Obama & rolling back the standards would both make RWNJs ecstatic and force folks to have to use more electricity which could be generated by burning coal. Such low hanging fruit; such a missed opportunity. Sad!

  50. 50.

    Mobil RoonieRoo

    I didn’t remember to post this on the original post but I have to tell you how much I love your posts. Definitely are some of my favorite BJ posts over the many years.

  52. 52.

    Sayne

    @ArchTeryx: @Cheryl Rofer:

    Interesting, thanks for the info. Don’t lick / swallow / breathe the oxidized Plutonium. Got it.

    I love the smell of Alpha particles in the morning. Smells like… acute radiation syndrome.

    Question, though. Again, I’m not an expert, but Louis Slotin was killed in a criticality incident. The way I’ve read it, it wasn’t the “demon core” itself that killed him, it’s that he was careless enough to let the beryllium sphere slip off his fcking screwdriver and close around the core, which caused the excursion. He was certainly killed by a lethal dose of gamma and neutron radiation, but the core itself didn’t do it, it was the geometry of the beryllium around the core.

  53. 53.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Marcopolo: @Steve in the ATL: @efgoldman: So an additional point on AP government classes. One year I got roped into being a grader for the AP government essay tests. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. So here’s the scam: if the aggregate essay grades aren’t tracking in the same direction as the multiple choice test results did they come in, make an announcement that this is happening, that the grades for the essays and the grades for the multiple choice tests have to track in the same direction, and then provide instructions on how to adjust the grading of the essays to make it happen. They are tweak the grading in order to fix the results to what they want. This ignores that there are students that do really well on multiple choice, but have trouble with essays. And students that do really well with essays, but have trouble on multiple choice tests. Basically it’s a scam.

  55. 55.

    dmsilev

    @LosGatosCA:

    But what is the street value?

    High.

    Does it taste like chicken?

    Doubtful

    Can you smoke it?

    Yes, but it would kill you, so probably not a good idea.

    Hope this helps.

  57. 57.

    ArchTeryx

    @SiubhanDuinne: Well, you don’t exactly run into purified plutonium jogging around your average neighborhood. You have to try HARD to get around enough of the stuff to truly be dangerous.

    BSL-4 microbes are far scarier, frankly. Some of the stuff worked on can fatally infect you if you inhale 1000 virus particles – each a tiny fraction of a cell’s size – and BSL-4 agents have no vaccine or treatment. You get infected with them, you die. BSL-4 is where you deal with positive-pressure moon suits every moment you’re in the chamber.

    But again, you have to go out of your way to get that close to infectious quantities of most BSL-4 stuff, though there are a few BSL-4 agents (such as Ebola) that do flare up from time to time.

  59. 59.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Working with plutonium in a glove box requires a change into coveralls and booties to go into the area, and gloves before you put your hands into the gloves in the glovebox. Also checking yourself with radiation counters before you leave the area. But “full protective gear”, as in breathing apparatus and moon suit, no.

    I shuffle papers for a living.

  60. 60.

    Another Scott

    @Cheryl Rofer: TheBulletin: The Nagasaki Bombing Mission:

    Prologue to the flight. The heart of Fat Man was a grapefruit-sized core of plutonium—a newly manufactured, radioactive element that is more stable than most isotopes of uranium and more powerful. It was shiny, slightly warm, and weighed about 14.1 pounds. And someone had to carry it to the tiny Pacific Island of Tinian, where the bomb would be assembled and loaded on to a B-29 bomber.

    The task fell to a young scientist—he drew the short straw—named Raemer Schreiber, whose story is recounted here for the first time. His unpublished diary (shared with me by his daughter, Paula) recounts how on July 26, at Los Alamos, colleagues handed him the plutonium core, nicknamed “Rufus,” which he placed in a little, open-wire carrying case that resembled a milk crate. They also asked him to transport a huge wheel of cheese, presumably for the nuclear scientists waiting on Tinian. With the core in his lap, Schreiber bounced over dirt roads on the way to Albuquerque where he boarded an empty C-54 aircraft. He knew the core could not explode without a detonator.

    As described in his diary, Schreiber sat on a hard wooden chair strapped inside the big plane all the way to Tinian. Like everyone working on the Bomb, he was exhausted. So he slept sitting up, sometimes holding the bomb case in his lap. At one point, over the Pacific, he went up to the cockpit to get a better view of what was causing turbulence. One of the crew came up behind and tapped him on the shoulder: “Whatever that thing is you got, it’s rolling around the back of the plane. Maybe you want to corral it.”

    The wire container had tipped over, the first in a series of mishaps. Schreiber quickly fetched the nation’s most technologically advanced wartime treasure, tied it to the leg of his chair, and went back to sleep.

    Schreiber landed on Tinian on July 28, local time. Located in the Marianas archipelago, on the other side of the International Date Line, the island was hot and muggy; it rained almost constantly. No one had thought about where to put the plutonium carrier, so the Los Alamos scientists already on Tinian stuck it in the back of the Quonset hut where they slept. Then they took snapshots of themselves holding all the plutonium there was in the world.

    Those guys were crazy, but they got the job done…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  63. 63.

    ArchTeryx

    @Steve in the ATL: Don’t feel bad. I’m a molecular virologist, and now *I* shuffle papers for a living. It beats being turned out on the street if Trumpcare passes.

  65. 65.

    Steve in the ATL

    @ArchTeryx:

    It beats being turned out

    This really depends on the quality of your pimp.

    That’s right–you people go high with your smart people education stuff, I go low with a pimp and ho joke.

  68. 68.

    Peale

    @LosGatosCA: Now you have me wondering, were I to lick a rod, what it would taste like. More flavorless like aluminum foil, or like steel. Or maybe something unexpected.

    Also, if one put a chicken in a glove box, I assume it would die. But it might be well preserved. It might just dry out since there wouldn’t be bacteria to break it down. So could one mummify a chicken with plutonium?

  70. 70.

    Ruckus

    @Peale:

    Also, if one put a chicken in a glove box, I assume it would die.

    Depends if you put in feed. And how big the chicken is compared to the glove box. Also your car would probably smell in not all that long a time. I imagine it would lower the resale value.

  74. 74.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Omnes Omnibus: Don’t know military MOPP gear.

    @Mobil RoonieRoo: Thank you!

    @Sayne:

    The way I’ve read it, it wasn’t the “demon core” itself that killed him, it’s that he was careless enough to let the beryllium sphere slip off his fcking screwdriver and close around the core, which caused the excursion. He was certainly killed by a lethal dose of gamma and neutron radiation, but the core itself didn’t do it, it was the geometry of the beryllium around the core.

    The beryllium reflected the neutrons coming from the plutonium in the “demon core.” One couldn’t do it without the other.

  76. 76.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Peale:

    Also, if one put a chicken in a glove box, I assume it would die. But it might be well preserved. It might just dry out since there wouldn’t be bacteria to break it down. So could one mummify a chicken with plutonium?

    It depends on the glovebox. Most of the gloveboxes for plutonium work have regular air in them, circulated and exhausted through fine filters. Filtration on the way in is less, so I doubt that all bacteria are removed. But other types of delicate and dangerous chemistry require gloveboxes with inert atmospheres. A chicken would die in those. Could live quite a while in a plutonium glovebox if you fed it.

  77. 77.

    Aleta

    I read that the technician wasn’t authorized to handle the plutonium, yet he did. Fortunately the supervisor walked in and stopped him; unfortunately her instructions were dangerous and ignorant of safety procedure. Then the manager in charge ignored safety procedures and put lives at risk.

    I’m sick of the power the business culture has to make decisions, based on numbers they’ve chosen to represent cost-benefit and risk-benefit, while ignoring or overriding scientists and specialists and handwaving away lives.

    The Challenger exploded, minorities in poorly represented areas are harmed by, die from, chemical waste and other toxins, and now we’re hearing about the idiot Flynn. Who worked on a business plan for US and Russian companies to together build and operate nuclear reactors in partnership in Middle Eastern countries, which Saudia Arabia would pay for.

    Supposedly the material would remain secure because “Flynn was reportedly tasked with developing a security strategy for the network of reactors;” in fact, “proponents touted the potential security benefits of the arrangement, particularly the opportunity to secure radioactive waste that could be used to make nuclear bombs.”

    “Designers of the venture, Newsweek reported, sought not only to jump-start the sputtering U.S. nuclear industry but also to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran, two powerful impediments to U.S. interests in the Middle East.” The incompetence, greed and criminal mindedness boggle the mind.

  82. 82.

    Wapiti

    @Marcopolo:

    … just want to leave this out there: is anyone else surprised the Trump administration hasn’t rolled back light bulb standards yet?

    My RWNJ facebook friends were going on about this one a couple of years ago. I took the time to delurk and explain that while it was implemented under Obama, the actual policy was signed by Bush, and it was endorsed by industry. And frankly they were all engineers, and I didn’t see why they were wetting themselves over something being more efficient.

  83. 83.

    joel hanes

    so the lengths of all the rods may be more than what I measured

    I just held up an actual Sharpie in front of the photo on my screen, and it appears to me that the aspect ratio must be off.
    The Sharpie in the photo appears much too short for its thickness

  84. 84.

    TenguPhule

    @West of the Rockies (been a while):

    Have you played the table top game Pandemic? It looks entertaining.

    That fucking little island will drive you to madness when you try to infect and kill them all.

    /Yes, I have played the game, I have only managed to achieve 98% fatality of the planet’s population so far.

  86. 86.

    Original Lee

    @ArchTeryx: IIRC, when I took my radiation safety class about 20 years ago, the instructor told us that 5-10 ml of heavy water was sufficient to kill us if ingested. Essentially, 5-10 ml of heavy water has enough tritium to stop most of the chemical reactions in the body (cf. Marcus theory).

  88. 88.

    oldster

    Where can I collect my prize?

    I looked at the pic, read the text, and said out loud, “too damned much…I’d say about…4 kilos?”

    And it turns out to be about 4 kilos!

    I have a witness–my spaniel heard me. And he never lies.

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