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[on:]

Post your guesses on what this is:



Hint:  The diameter of each is about 1 inch.

[Reply #1 on:]

Electric Glue ?

[Reply #2 on:]

Plutonium. What do I win?

[Reply #3 on:]

Plutonium. What do I win?

Heh - what tipped you off?

http://chemistry.about.com/od/periodictableelements/ig/Element-Photo-Gallery.--98/Plutonium.-iQv.htm

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

 

[Reply #4 on:]

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

[Reply #5 on:]

Gold button. give it to me

[Reply #6 on:]

Melted aluminium (or should that be aluminum?)

_____
Rob

[Reply #7 on:]

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

[Reply #8 on:]

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...

[Reply #9 on:]

Ironmans droppings?

Cheers,
Kari

[Reply #10 on:]

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.

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. 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.

[Reply #11 on:]

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.

[Reply #12 on:]

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. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium

[Reply #13 on:]

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...
 

Kari

[Reply #14 on:]

Plutonium. What do I win?

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