• skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    17 hours ago

    Who measures uranium in pounds? I feel like if you’re not using metric you probably shouldn’t be handling uranium.

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    GOD DAMNIT! Who touched my Uranium-235?? I left it RIGHT HERE where this lead is.

  • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    So I ran the numbers. U-235 decays into Pb-207, which means about 12% of its mass is radiated away in alpha decay. Which sounds like a fuckton.

    Also, it’ll mean that that chunk of lead will be a touch heavier, at 13.2 lbs

    The Maths:

    U-235 decays into Pb-207. To three significant digits, 207/235 = 0.881, equivalent to 88.1%, meaning 11.9% is radiated away.
    88.1% of 15 lbs = 13.2 lbs.

    • sga@piefed.social
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      19 hours ago

      also, uranium’s half life is 700 million years, so we expect (207/235)*7.5 (of lead) + 7.5 (uranium) ~ 14.106382978723405 lump.

      also, a lot of the helium produced will remain trapped inside (most heavy metal lumps act as sponges for little gasses). but 700 mil years is also a large amount of time, so much of it would diffuse out. I could checkup diffusion statistics for he d pb-u but i would have to probably do a double integral (as pb-u combination is not fixed, and we can not simply do the error function calculation), so skipping that. but it is safe to say that we will have a lump of ~50% U, 44% pb, and 6% He (by mass), and a significant amount of he will remain in

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      And that’s ignoring spontaneous fission which is probably happening to some extent to some of the isotopes

  • jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    Reminds me of my ingot of invar. Every fee years I try to think of something to do with it, but still haven’t come up with anything.