Befuddled_Stoner said:Hmmm, how long can a person endure exposure to unshielded weapons grade uranium before they are incapacitated? Someone intent on suicide, hopped up on near-lethal levels of anti-radiation medication...not a pretty picture.
UtahBill said:but to suggest that a nuclear bomb can be made is media bias at its worst.
It could be worse, they could be political "science" majors.Scarecrow Akhbar said:Man are you generous, or what?
The clowns in front of the camera and the jokers writing the stories don't have the education you and I did. They're not biased. Well, okay, they're biased. More importantly they're more ignorant than a box of rocks.
They think a moderator is the guy that pitched soft-balls to Kerry in the Presidential debates, and that a neutron has just been driven off the showroom floor. And I could teach my parrot to say "isotope", too.
They majored in journalism in college, what should we expect?
UtahBill said:It could be worse, they could be political "science" majors.
I attended Navy nuke school, class of 66-1, served on SSN590, the USS Sculpin. You?
Scarecrow Akhbar said:Was the class of 80-2, and eventually wound up as a plankowner of the USS LaJolla, SSN 701. Machinists Mate.
Still got mine, 38 years as of Friday. Great cook!!! 145 Pounds when I met her, 190 pounds now.Scarecrow Akhbar said:MM A School on Great Lakes, Nuke school in Orlando, and prototype training on the good old S1W plant in Idaho. And, yeah, designing a cargo transport aircraft for the AIAA individual student design competition was easier than passing Nuclear Power School. I picked up a wife with the submarine. Left her with it, too. :lol: Those Connecticut girls weren't much different from the Idaho girls.
He was determined to irradiate anything he could, and decided to build a neutron "gun." To obtain radioactive materials, David used a number of cover stories and concocted a new identity.
He wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School. The agency's director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, offered him tips on isolating and obtaining radioactive elements, and explained the characteristics of some isotopes, which, when bombarded with neutrons, can sustain a chain reaction.
When David asked about the risks, Erb assured him that the "dangers are very slight," since "possession of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent) licensing."
David learned that a tiny amount of the radioactive isotope americium-241 could be found in smoke detectors. he contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number for a school project. One company sold him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece.
Not sure where the americium was located, he wrote to an electronics firm in Illinois. A customer-service representative wrote back to say she'd be happy to help out with "your report." Thanks to her help, David extracted the material. He put the americium inside a hollow block of lead with a tiny hole pricked in one side so that alpha rays would stream out. In front of the block he placed a sheet of aluminum, its atoms absorb alpha rays and kick out neutrons. His neutron gun was ready.
The mantle in gas lanterns, the small cloth pouch over the flame, is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons it produces uranium-233, which is fissionable. David bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and blowtorched them into a pile of ash.
To isolate the thorium from the ash, he purchased $1000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them in half with wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium ash together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. This purified the thorium to at least 9000 times the level found in nature, and up to 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing. But David's americium gun wasn't strong enough to transform thorium into uranium.
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