1mg is still strictly illegal as you need an import permit, permit to posess, a valid reason and the entire country as a whole is not allowed more than a total of 1KG
Comment on ONE OF US
Cort@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoProbably depends on how much they tried to import. 1mg is probably no big deal, but 1Mg would be.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Out of curiosity and for strictly not-remotely-nefarious reasons, how expensive would a megagram be?
I assume they just bought Ike, a centimeter cube of the stuff. (Which is a common thing for this kind of collector. Most solids come in centimeter cubes if they’re not particularly spicy.)
Cort@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
1Mg @ 19.8g/cc
1000000/19.8=50505cc
³√50505 = 37cm
So a little bigger than a cubic foot assuming you could prevent super-criticality somehow
Jolteon@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
Based on the Wikipedia article, it’s $6,490,000/kg.
Assuming you can legally purchase that amount (which you can’t), you could even find that much for sale (would you probably couldn’t), and the price didn’t go up as you purchased more of a very scarce resource (which it would), it would be about $6.5 billion US.
rekabis@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Look into the Demon Core. Chunk of refined nuclear material that was perfectly fine to handle so long as it wasn’t bumped.
But bump it even slightly, and the part that got bumped became dense enough to experience a minor amount of sustained fission and throw off a lethal enough dose of radiation. Several scientists died because of it.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
That’s not at all what happened with the Demon Core. On its own, you could not do anything to it that would make it reach supercriticality. The experiments that were conducted on it involved neutron reflective materials. With the addition of neutrons back into the core, that pushed it closer and closer to criticality. Both incidents occurred when too much reflective material was added around the core and it reached supercriticality, a sustained chain reaction.
Adalast@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Cool, though I would assume the supercritical point would be a lot higher for Pu-242. I can’t imagine that anyone would have knowingly sold this kid a fissile isotope.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
A cubic centimeter is ~150th of a modern nuclear weapon’s core. U-235 production accounts for every single gram, plutonium is even stricter.