Reply to post: Re: Plutonium left in SUV in Marriot Hotel

Crooks swipe plutonium, cesium from US govt nuke wranglers' car. And yes, it's still missing

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Plutonium left in SUV in Marriot Hotel

Plutonium is a low-level radiation hazard. Most isotopes emit alpha particles during their decay process; alpha particles can be stopped by a single sheet of paper. One isotope (241, I think, but I can't be arsed to look it up) emits beta particles. Betas can be stopped by a single sheet of plywood. Furthermore, as plutonium's half-life, again depending on isotope, is measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of years, it takes a Very Long Time to emit anything much. Plutonium is considerably more dangerous as a heavy metal than as a radiation source. If you ingest sufficient plutonium you will be dead of heavy metal poisoning within hours to days, though you'll need to have eaten a _lot_ of the stuff to die quickly. Note: if you get plutonium heavy metal poisoning, you won't think that you're dying quickly. Nope.

In order for it to go boom, you need a critical mass, something more than five kilos worth. (No, I'm not going to say how much more. Find out yourself.) Usually you get to the critical mass by slapping several subcritical masses together really hard and really fast; this requires explosives, and careful timing. If you want to make a big boom, and are short of really good explosives and all the special timer-thingies needed for a plutonium boom, use uranium. Classically you only need two subcritical masses with uranium, rather than the dozen or more with plutonium. It's much easier to make. One of the boys on the Manhattan Project (I can't be arsed to look him up, either, I saw the quote in Richard Rhode's _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_) once quipped that any schoolboy could make a uranium bomb, but it takes real talent to make a plutonium bomb.

A radiation source of the type mentioned would weigh grams, and would contain milligrams of plutonium at most. It's major dangers would be as a choking hazard, and might be interesting to pass out the other end. I picked up more radiation the last time I was in the New York subway system than I would from swallowing one of those things.

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