Marcatlas
SOC-12
At these TLs the suit would warn the user...
Cargo Capacity and volume and mass
- Thread starter Badenov
- Start date
Most “radioactives” are fairly benign unless they have been in a neutron field.
Weapons grade Plutonium and Uranium are safe to handle unless / until either they are subjected to a neutron field or you manage to pile up enough in one spot to start to create a neutron field. It is worth noting that the second method is hard to do. Sustaining a chain reaction requires neutrons to be at the right speed in the same space as the target fuels.
A simple method used to store refined materials was to form it into hollow cylinders and put it into stainless steel cans. The hollow cylinders ensured that one could not stack enough material to get to the necessary concentrations. The stainless steel cans kept other materials (like water) from filling those voids. If the engineers on Earth today can design this, one could imagine this to be a shipping standard in a star faring civilization.
Now lets look at the farm boys stealing fuel rods scenario…. Either the fuel rods are not yet used or the farm boys die. XKCD describes this well.
The radiation coming off a spent fuel rod will take care of theft scenarios.
If we want to play with other radioactives, we can imagine things like Depleted Uranium. Sounds bad, right? Again, unless subjected to a neutron flux, that stuff is inert. Lead is more toxic.
We can certainly wander around the list of radioactive elements to find something that meets the plot reasons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_by_half-life
Personally, I like to head off to the “Island of Stability” and summon elements that we Earthlings have not discovered yet.
Island of stability - Wikipedia
Hard for the nuclear physicist at the game table to tell you your radioactives are all wrong when you are using stuff that is still beyond the known space of our tech level.
I was under the impression plutonium was flat out toxic, for a long time.
Thank you for the explaination.Most “radioactives” are fairly benign unless they have been in a neutron field.
Weapons grade Plutonium and Uranium are safe to handle unless / until either they are subjected to a neutron field or you manage to pile up enough in one spot to start to create a neutron field. It is worth noting that the second method is hard to do. Sustaining a chain reaction requires neutrons to be at the right speed in the same space as the target fuels.
A simple method used to store refined materials was to form it into hollow cylinders and put it into stainless steel cans. The hollow cylinders ensured that one could not stack enough material to get to the necessary concentrations. The stainless steel cans kept other materials (like water) from filling those voids. If the engineers on Earth today can design this, one could imagine this to be a shipping standard in a star faring civilization.
Now lets look at the farm boys stealing fuel rods scenario…. Either the fuel rods are not yet used or the farm boys die. XKCD describes this well.
The radiation coming off a spent fuel rod will take care of theft scenarios.
If we want to play with other radioactives, we can imagine things like Depleted Uranium. Sounds bad, right? Again, unless subjected to a neutron flux, that stuff is inert. Lead is more toxic.
We can certainly wander around the list of radioactive elements to find something that meets the plot reasons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_by_half-life
Personally, I like to head off to the “Island of Stability” and summon elements that we Earthlings have not discovered yet.
Island of stability - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Hard for the nuclear physicist at the game table to tell you your radioactives are all wrong when you are using stuff that is still beyond the known space of our tech level.
What would happen in an asteroid mining operation that was casting 30kg bars of natural uranium and stacking them on pallets in vaccuum cause that is safe to do, and then the farm boys grab the 27 pallets, load them into the cargo hold in the previous 3x3x3 stack then pressurize the cargo hold with normal atmosphere with say relative humidity at perhaps 60% at 18 degrees C. Let's further assume the local star is a proto star still forming from a cloud of supernova ejecta, and the local U is already way beyond weapons grade enrichment (well not enrichment, let's just say it has not had the 8 billion years of half life reducing the isotope that is so radioactive). Obviously the danger can be lessened or increased by the assumptions one cares to put into the scenario. Real question: Does atmospheric water act as a moderator?
Such as the assumption that the miners are not ignorant idiots and take whatever proper precautions are necessary.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Weapons grade enrichment is 93%. A 30 kilogram bar is border-line critical mass depending on its configuration. Stacking a load of bars on a pallet and then stacking the pallets puts you into a likelihood of a meltdown if there is a neutron flux. You would not need atmospheric water as a moderator. The men at Los Alamos when determining critical mass for the U-235 gun device used in the Little Boy bomb did what they called "tickling the tiger". The made a hollow cylinder of highly enriched U-235 and then dropped a can of highly enriched U-235 that was small enough to cleanly drop through the hollow cylinder. The natural neutron flux was sufficient to start a chain reaction as the smaller cylinder dropped through the hollow cylinder.
I have read the story about the guy that was tickling the tiger using two hemispheres of fissile material, and the screwdriver slipped, and the chain reaction started, the guy shoved the hemi spheres apart with his hands, saving the other men in the room from dying, but he himself died.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
He was working with Plutonium, which has a lot lower critical mass than U-235.
