Ask me anything about plutonium. I don't want to get to 10,000 too

[NNadir]

quickly.

[Call Me Wesley]

1. Is it true that it's pink?

[NNadir]

4. Plutonium exhibits many oxidation states, some of which give pink

solutions.

Wikipedia has an excellent picture of solutions of plutonium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium

You can click on the pictures to get an enlargement and see what the oxidation states are.

Plutonium oxidation states are of variable stability, and, exposed to air, frequently the oxidation states will change.

Plutonium metal is typically silvery and soft in its common phases.

One isotope, the one used on spacecraft such as Voyager, New Horizons, and Cassini, actually glows red from the internally generated heat.

[Call Me Wesley]

9. :)

Thank you! :thumbsup:

[begin_within]

2. Should I bake it, boil it, or nuke it?

[NNadir]

5. I wouldn't bake it. It's pyrrophoric and can, if finely divided, ignite.

Plutonium metal's boiling point is very high, over 3,000C. However in its most common application, generation of nuclear power, plutonium is often in the presence of boiling water. Plutonium metal has been boiled, all too frequently. The explosion of a nuclear weapon obviously contains plutonium that first melts, then boils, and finally transitions to a plasma, all in incredibly small fractions of a second.

Plutonium nukes itself, inasmuch as it is possible to create a critical mass of it. It also self-irradiates, and is always undergoing irradiation.

[bridgit]

3. if i apply it to my eyelids will my eyelids glow...

[NNadir]

7. Only if you use certain isotopes.

Only plutonium-238, plutonium-241, and plutonium-236 are radioactive enough to glow in quantities smaller than the critical mass.

I don't recommend trying this at home though. You will burn your eyelids.

[arwalden]

6. How Did Plutonium Get It's Name?

:hi:

[Blue-Jay]

8. The discoverer was a Disney fan.

[NNadir]

10. If you are referring to the element's name, it was named after the planet.

The discoverer of uranium named that element after the then newly discovered planet Uranus. When the next element in the periodic table, element 93 was discovered, it was named after the next planet, Neptune. It followed to name plutonium after the planet Pluto, although, ironically, Pluto is often derided as to whether it has true planetary status by modern scientists.

The elements named afterwards have either been named for places connected with nuclear research or famous scientists. The elements named after places are Californium, Berkelium, because of the University of California and its most famous campus, and Dubnium, named for the Soviet research institute at Dubna, where much ground breaking work in nuclear chemistry was undertaken.

Seaborgium is the only element in the periodic table to have been named for a living scientist. Einsteinium was named for Einstein a few months after he died. Many of them are named for nuclear scientists, including two women, Madame Curie, a rare winner of two Nobel Prizes, and Lise Meitner, who was unjustly denied the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission.

[Blue-Jay]

11. I was making a joke. Next time I'll use a smiley.

[NNadir]

12. I know.

Here's my smiley: ;-)

For all I know, Glenn Seaborg really liked cartoons and maybe even Disneyland.

There is no Disneylandium however, although some elements remain to be discovered and there's no law against naming Disneylandium.

We can be sure they'll be no Bushium though.

[Kellanved]

15. What would happen, should Pluto loses it's planet status?

Would plutonium get renamed? And what about Mickey's dog?

[NNadir]

18. I think the name of the element would be unchanged, but a historical

footnote might be attached to descriptions of the element.

Personally I like to regard Pluto as a planet.

[begin_within]

13. Want fries with it?

[NNadir]

17. That would be better than being fried with it.

[jobycom]

14. How come he doesn't speak but Goofy does?

[NNadir]

16. It involves a speech defect. Pluto's writings however, are profound.

Goofy is mostly a celebrity, and not particularly known for his thought.

Although Pluto was apparently born without a voice box, he has, when not appearing in films, created a body of work that will almost certainly have a more profound impact than any of his thespian efforts.

It is a little known fact that Pluto's written works represented some of the clearest elucidation of Spinoza's criticism of the noumenal underpinnings of religion. Writers indebted to Pluto include Sarte, Sarte's girlfriend, "good-looks" Beauvoir, and, Camus, especially in Camus' famous treatise on human perseverance in the face of the absurd, "The Myth of Sisyphus."

In popular culture, Pluto's derisive term, "Mickey Mouse," referring to less than credible efforts, has been widely employed. Originally he was describing the thinking of George Will, but the term, reflected his problematic relationship with the stupid star of most of Pluto's movies.

In the sciences, besides his better known work in astronomy and orbital dynamics, particularly those determining Kuiper bodies, Pluto published many papers, in chemistry, on molecular orbital approaches to certain types of lanthanide and actinide complexes as well as, in comparative biology, a standard reference on canine diseases and syndromes and their cross species occurrence. In the last area, he was regretfully unable to determine the etiology of his own condition.

Pluto died in Warburg Germany in 1978 where he was working on his thirteenth book exploring the relationship of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ludwig Boltzmann, a little known chapter in the history of both physical chemistry and philosophy, areas in which the polymathic Pluto was, although it is little known, was clearly expert.

Not one of the actors attempting to substitute for Pluto in Disney films since has measured up to Pluto's stature in my opinion. Most of the other Disney characters have been notorious sybarites of inconsequential measure.

[jobycom]

19. George Will?

Wow. :applause:

I rarely say this, but I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!

[NNadir]

20. Wow, I got 9 posts out of this thread. I'll probably reach 10,000 before

I die.

[liontamer]

21. I've heard you can eat ounce for ounce

more plutonium than caffeine, how much plutonium can you eat and what are the side effects of ingesting it? (both short and long term)

[NNadir]

22. You can eat more plutonium that caffeine. The route of ingestion is

important, and plays a big role.

Plutonium exhibits many oxidation states and these have some bearing on the ultimate fate. To some extent plutonium can pass right through a person, particularly if it in an insoluble form, such as an oxide. However plutonium IV very much mimics the chemistry of iron, and thus, to the extent it is absorbed can be present in the blood as a complex of an iron carrying protein known as transferrin. Ultimately plutonium that has complexed with transferrin will result in deposition in the bone, or liver. Plutonium is generally not excreted well by the kidney when it is complexed with transferrin, and thus it is advisable to treat patients who may have ingested plutonium with a complexing agent allowing it to be excreted.

Unlike uranium, plutonium is more of a radiation hazard than a chemical hazard. Much of the risk is associated with the distribution of plutonium isotopes in the ingested sample. One for instance face a much greater risk with plutonium-238 than with the more common isotope-239. Plutonium-244, which has a half-life of 80 million years would be relatively benign, but this isotope is very rare.

The main disease associated with plutonium is bone cancer. Typically the disease takes decades to develop. The number of cases of plutonium induced cancer are relatively small, and most were connected with deliberate plutonium experiments carried out by the United States government in the 1940's and 1950's.

A fascinating account of these experiments can be found in the book The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome. I have read this book and it gives a pretty clear picture of the kinds of effects associated with plutonium.

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0385319541/701-3089326-3267527?v=product-description&n=916520

Aerosol plutonium represents a long term lung cancer risk.

The chemical toxicity of plutonium is largely unknown, but like uranium, it can be expected to exhibit nephrotoxicity.

Multi-metric ton quantities of plutonium were areosolized in nuclear weapons tests that primarily were carried out in the 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's.

Some of the very first samples of visible plutonium, much of the (then) world supply in fact, were ingested by a scientist working with it by the name of Don Mastick. Basically people were more concerned with the loss of the plutonium, because it was so precious, than they were with the possible loss of Don Mastick, who nonetheless went on to live a full life. (He was interviewed about this event 50 years later.)

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/welsome-plutonium.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Plutonium that escapes into the environment is typically immobilized and does not easily find its way into the food chain. However there is some evidence that this effect is not absolute.

It is known from the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that operated at Oklo in Gabon about 2 billion years ago that plutonium does not migrate very far in geological formations. Most of the plutonium formed in that reactor did not travel very much further than a few meters over billions of years. This is a happy circumstance.

The geological chemistry of neptunium is far more problematic.

[liontamer]

23. thanks, but now I'm very curious about neptunium.

[NNadir]

24. Among the actinides, neptunium is the only element that demonstrates

significant solubility and mobility.

The chemistry of neptunium is complex. Like its neighbors in the periodic table, uranium and plutonium, it exhibits multiple oxidation states dominated by oxo ions. Like plutonium, its chemistry is generally associated in most systems with the (V) and (IV) oxidation state. Unlike plutonium, however, the neptunium oxo ions have many soluble compounds.

The main source of neptunium is nuclear reactors, where it is formed in gram quantities diluted by tons of metal, mostly uranium.

Most often neptunium is recovered for the purpose of making plutonium-238 for RTGs for spacecraft.

Neptunium, being mobile, is more easily excreted than plutonium and uranium, and about 50% is excreted in 24 hours. However, like plutonium, neptunium is frequently taken up in skeletal tissues where it remains, having a hazard profile much like that of plutonium.

Neptunium if ingested deliberately has a cancer dose per gram that is reported as 0.139, meaning that if one ingested several grams, cancer would be almost certain. However the probability of ingesting such an amount is small, given that the processes by which the neptunium moves in the environment necessarily result in dilution. Since the amount of neptunium is never really very large, this has some mitigating effect. However, such mitigation is not the same as the elimination of risk, but rather the amelioration of risk. Neptunium is generally agreed to represent the largest risk of all the actinides, although this risk is comparatively small when compared with risks associated with other fuels, like gasoline, for instance.

Recycling nuclear fuel, including the uranium in it, will result in an equilibrium concentration (on many recycles) of about 5% neptunium in thermal spectrum reactors, and about 0.75% in fast reactors where the percentage refers to the equilibrium amounts of fuel obtained in the systems. (cf. William Stacy Nuclear Reactor Physics, Wiley, 2001, pg 234.) Thus a potential for the recovery of multiple ton quantities of neptunium are easy to envision. Theoretically it may be possible to use neptunium as a fuel in a reactor depending on geometry, but as a practical matter, because there is so little of it, this is unlikely.

Fortunately it is not necessary to dispose of such neptunium as may result, but it is largely preferred to transmute into plutonium. This would offer some advantages in terms of resource utilization as well as non-proliferation security.

To the extent that robotic spacecraft travel beyond the orbit of Mars, such craft will represent a neptunium sink. In fast reactors, about half of the neptunium is directly fissioned and half is transmuted into the useful Pu-238 isotope.

[liontamer]

25. thanks again

usually i hate on physicists, but you're pretty cool.

[NNadir]

26. Truth be told I'm a chemist, not a physicist, but I play a physicist on DU

sometimes.

;-)

[liontamer]

27. hey I know a chemist who won a nobel prize in physics

nobody can really tell your two fields apart ;)

[NNadir]

28. Personally?

If so which one?

Ideally chemistry can be seen as a sub-disipline of physics, which in turn, is a sub-disipline of applied mathematics.

Ideally, biology should be regarded as a subdisipline of chemistry.

But I'm sure you'd get folks in all these fields to disagree on these descriptions.