Can you identify what is in this picture?

Post your guesses on what this is:

Hint: The diameter of each is about 1 inch.

Electric Glue ?

Plutonium. What do I win? :slight_smile:

logic:
Plutonium. What do I win? :slight_smile:

Heh - what tipped you off?

My best guess was "solder", to be honest...

:slight_smile:

I was on the same track, I thought maybe mercury, but it was too uneven/rugged

Gold button. give it to me :slight_smile:

Melted aluminium (or should that be aluminum?)


Rob

That was way faster than my Facebook friends. It is Plutonium.

And you're supposed to be able to distinguish a B&W photograph of plutonium from a B&W photograph of nearly any other metal in similarly sized blobs using exactly which clues? And how do you KNOW it's plutonium, anyway?

It reminds me of The Wooden Periodic Table of the Elements, which is really cool, but all the metals look pretty much alike...

Ironmans droppings?

Cheers,
Kari

cr0sh:
Heh - what tipped you off?

I probably would have gone with buttons or something like mercury, but then I checked the Internet to see if this wasn't a trick question. :wink:

And that periodic "table" is fantastic! I love that he's wasn't deterred at all by the prospect of storing the radioactive samples either. :smiley: You're not exactly going to be using that as an everyday reference, so it doesn't matter much if you can't immediately identify the types of wood. I don't dare show that to my wife, she'd insist I start construction immediately. :wink:

The rumor is that those pellets (20mm diameter, 20mm long) are the active elements of the fuel rods in many utility power generation reactors

Eh? Nonsense. First of all those (the pictures) aren't 20mm long, and they're not "pellets." They're "typical" globs of the shape created by surface tension when you let some liquid metal solidify on a flat surface (my guess would have been solder, too...)

Second, there are no reactor designs that use metallic (pure) plutonium, and few reactors that use plutonium as a fuel at all (Japan seems to have some reactors, including the troubled ones, based on MOX fuel rods - Mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium.) Most of the plutonium in the average reactor is a waste product produced when (non-fissile) U238 absorbs neutrons, and this requires a lot of additional processing to be concentrated enough to be useful as fuel.

Maybe I should have added, I found the picture on the Wikipedia article on Plutonium.

The recent events in Japan made me curious on the subject and I was surprised to see what Pu looks like.

Do you think that this kind of topic is in the right place anyway? And you have borrowed an image without permission from other web-site, that is a bad behaviour...
:roll_eyes:

Kari

logic:
Plutonium. What do I win? :slight_smile:

He seems to have two, maybe you'll get one if you're eh... not lucky. ]:smiley:

KE7GKP:
@GaryP, if you had examined the original photo (which James C4S identified as coming from Wikipedia), you would have discovered that it is public domain as are all works created by the US government.

Well, but you get the point. Links to pictures are often more suitable than direct borrowing.
:wink:

Source of that kind of material should always be mentioned at the first place. Many people thinks that internet is there for us to take what we want... Yes, you can take, but not everything is there for public uses.

Cheers,
Kari

GaryP:
Do you think that this kind of topic is in the right place anyway?

Ask a moderator to move the thread to Bar Sport.

And you have borrowed an image without permission from other web-site, that is a bad behaviour...

Accusing someone of committing a crime without a shred of evidence is also bad behaviour...

Photo: U.S. Department of Energy, 1945, released as public domain.

My bad, didn't see that when I visited the site, but you probably also admit the actual point. Even that I was wrong this time. People are easily "borrowing" this immaterial stuff from the Internet, they just don't think how it would feel if it happens to themselves.

My apologise if I heart anybodys feelings.

By the way, if moderators here don't care where topics are, I don't mind, I have four forums to run myself, I'll just keep my mouth shut from now and take care of my own business.
:wink:

Cheers,
Kari