I feel like such an underachiever

[womzilla]

I mean, when I was a teenager, I was just noodling around on the net using a stolen university password.

The Radioactive Boy Scout, Harper's Magazine, Nov. 1998

Frustrated at his inability to isolate sufficient supplies of uranium, David turned his attention to thorium-232, which when bombarded with neutrons produces uranium-233, a man-made fissionable element (and, although he might not have known it then, one that can be substituted for plutonium in breeder reactors). Discovered in 1828 and named after the Norse god Thor, thorium has a very high melting point, and is thus used in the manufacture of airplane engine parts that reach extremely high temperatures. David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the "mantle" used in commercial gas lanterns--the part that looks like a doll's stocking and conducts the flame--is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash.

David still had to isolate the thorium-232 from the ash. Fortunately, he remembered reading in one of his dad's chemistry books that lithium is prone to binding with oxygen--meaning, in this context, that it would rob thorium dioxide of its oxygen content and leave a cleaner form of thorium. David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David's method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.

At this point, David could have used his americium neutron gun to transform thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. But the americium he had was not capable of producing enough neutrons, so he began preparing radium for an improved irradiating gun.

Link courtesy of Greg Morrow's Frothing at the Mouth.

Comments

[sraun]

That is a great story! I've seen it before - I should save this pointer.

Holy crap!

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

Now that's something I'd have stuck with a chemistry major for!

What A Slacker I Was

[mattapp.livejournal.com]

After reading the whole article, it makes me realize just how time I was wasting during my teenage years by collecting baseball cards, playing Nintendo, reading 2-3 sf novels/week and trying to write programs in BASIC for my Commodore 64.