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A comment on Potatoes in the Mail. Parent comment

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.

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Re:Potatoes in the Mail by KingMob on Friday April 18, 2025 @03:22AM (#43725805)
Isn't DU heavy metal-dangerous, but not radiation-dangerous?
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Re:Potatoes in the Mail by adastra22 on Friday April 18, 2025 @10:29AM (#43728409)
Yes
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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.

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