baptista@pccf.net wrote:
On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, F. Marc de Piolenc wrote:
detonation. You can actually hold a subcritical mass of plutonium in your hand for awhile - I'm told it feels warm. Can't say I've tried it myself.
hold on mr. expert.
you hold a sub critical mass in your hand and in a few days you end up shitting out your guts, lose your hair and die.
Look it up. The _Reactor Handbook_ is a good source on spontaneous decay rates of fissionables. Plutonium dust is a deadly chemical poison, but a properly formed (and protectively plated) mass of plutonium has very low radioactivity. Consider that nuclear weapons could not be built if the fissiles had high rates of spontaneous decay - the stuff would detonate prematurely, resulting in a fizzle. That, incidentally, is why plutonium cannot be used in a gun-type device - two isotopes are inevitably present, one of which (forgot the mass number, but you can look that up, too) has a spontaneous decay rate that is too high for the (relatively) slow assembly rate of a gun. Marc de Piolenc