Re:Potatoes in the Mail
by dreamcompiler on Thursday April 17, 2025 @11:50PM
(#43724826)
Depleted uranium would be my first choice for this; we had big bars of the stuff laying around the lab that we used for door stops. (The lab was a place that designed nuclear weapons.)
DU is harmless unless you eat or breathe it but alas it's now illegal to possess more than a minute quantity of it.
Tungsten is actually slightly denser and it has the advantage of being obtainable.
Isn't DU heavy metal-dangerous, but not radiation-dangerous?
Yes
Re:Potatoes in the Mail
by dreamcompiler on Friday April 18, 2025 @11:20AM
(#43728895)
It's both. DU is never completely "depleted" because radiation falloff is asymptotic. DU is primarily an alpha emitter and alpha particles cannot penetrate skin, but they can cause damage if you breathe, eat, or inject DU dust.
That's why our use of big lumps of DU as door stops was considered "safe" (at that time several years ago) but in labs where people machined the stuff they were a lot more careful.
Osmium is about twice as dense so yeah that would still be shippable at around 60 lb... I don't think that's even tens of thousands at that point? Isn't it going to be in the millions? I'm just thinking that like if you went for gold instead, 50 lb is 800 oz, at $3300/oz these days doing this with gold is $2.64M, no? And surely osmium blows gold out of the water by like 10x, right?
Jokes on you when the $100 of insurance is all you get back from the post office...
Edit: a sibling comment points out that you can probably do this under $100 with tungsten too and get up into that 50lb+ range.