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No, quite the opposite. Bombs and reactors use fissile materials with long half lifes, i.e. 235U (700 million years) and 239Pu (24 thousand years). Isotopes wit
by fsh 5y ago
No, quite the opposite. Bombs and reactors use fissile materials with long half lifes, i.e. 235U (700 million years) and 239Pu (24 thousand years). Isotopes with short half lifes are very difficult to handle since they produce a lot of heat and emit high levels of dangerous radiation.
- boxed 5y agoClassic example of talking past each other. The previous poster is clearly right in the bigger picture. You don't treat hydrogen as a scary radioactive material! There's a sweet spot. So you are bott right and both wrong ;)
- fsh 5y agoThe sweet spot would be a fissile material that can sustain a chain reaction but is not radioactive at all. Unfortunately, such an isotope does not exist. 235U and 239Pu are the next best thing.
- ouid 5y agoNot at all, plutonium is essentially safe enough to eat. Fissile isotopes require free neutrons to undergo fission. The dangerous components of radioactive waste are the fission products. When I break apart a large nucleus in fission, I get random configurations of protons and neutrons as a result. These rnadom configurations are very likely to themselves be unstable.
- lazide 5y agoPlutonium is definitely not safe enough to eat, it’s chemically highly toxic. A nearly immediately lethal dose is estimated at around half a gram, though that is mostly due to the radiation effects. Think methyl mercury or organic lead salts bad.
- parineum 5y agoI was definitely _technically_ wrong and I appreciate the correction but, practically, nuclear fuel stored in any density has an effective half life lower than that of it's individual constituents because it's capable of spontaneous fission and sustaining a chain reaction. It is more radioactive when used as fuel but not when handled responsibly. Which is it's attractiveness as fuel.