[HN Gopher] A Critical Problem (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
A Critical Problem (2017)
Author : samwillis
Score : 240 points
Date : 2023-08-09 06:55 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nucleardiner.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nucleardiner.wordpress.com)
| wqqwdfsaadd wrote:
| [dead]
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| The title needs a (2017) since it discusses then-recent history.
| defrost wrote:
| That history being the release of this report?
|
| _Nuclear Negligence_ (June 26, 2017)
|
| https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/
| In the summer of 2011, Los Alamos National Laboratory presented
| a happy self-portrait to the public. But that
| year something alarming happened at Los Alamos that the lab
| kept quiet. A pair of workers with cavalier attitudes nearly
| doomed a room full of colleagues by stuffing so much plutonium
| into a small space that they came close to triggering an
| accidental nuclear chain reaction, all to get some photos.
|
| https://apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence/about-th...
| doingtheiroming wrote:
| It's worth reading about refineries and chemical plants. We've
| all heard of Bhopal and other disasters but it's worth bearing in
| mind just how few disasters happen in these fearsomely complex
| and dangerous plants. Almost all are managed successfully by the
| private sector.
|
| There was an interview with Jim Radcliffe recently in which he
| described Ineos' approach to safety. It's a variation on what's
| described my Steven J. Spears in his case study of Alcoa. The
| truth is that the private sector has innovated much of what's
| best in modern safety practice in a way that has made
| monumentally dangerous industrial processes routine.
|
| There are perhaps good reasons to keep nuclear weapons management
| in the public sector. Canards about the safety record of the
| private sector are not though.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Almost all are managed successfully by the private sector._
|
| Yes, because of a mix government regulations forcing them to
| not cut too many corners for the sake of saving expenses, and
| people like the author of the article pushing back against
| higher-ups who try to do so anyway.
|
| Let's not pretend that workers didn't die needlessly in factory
| fires a century ago because the factory owners locked the
| doors.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's not just government regulations. It's also a functioning
| judiciary and legal system where individuals can sue
| corporations and win.
|
| As a random example where a non-functioning judiciary
| resulted in a catastrophe, take a look at the 2020 Beirut
| port explosion, which a lot of people saw coming a mile off,
| but were unable to do anything about because of inept and
| corrupt judges that couldn't make a decision.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I would say under technically, this is government
| regulation.
| dmbche wrote:
| The Bends were discovered when mysteriously, during the
| construction of the Brooklyn bridge, the underwater welders
| kept dying when coming out of the water.
|
| After scientists found what happened and saturation diving
| was theorised - companies kept their protocols of not
| decompressing when coming back, and kept killing their
| divers.
| Loic wrote:
| For the chemical plants and refineries, I _really_ recommend
| looking at the videos of the CSB[0]. They are doing postmortem
| analysis of all the majors incidents in the US. They are
| extremely well done.
|
| [0]: https://www.csb.gov/ U.S. Chemical Safety Board
| Titan2189 wrote:
| Agreed, I've been subscribed for years
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB
| dmbche wrote:
| You made me realise that Canada does not seem to have
| something similar - we just have a transportation safety
| bureau that handles trains, pipelines and the likes. And the
| Titan thing that happened a few weeks back.
|
| I'm a little worried.
| superchroma wrote:
| Seeing as we still see tiktoks of mud-covered men manually
| assembling or dissembling drilling equipment with no PPE,
| (intended to goad women about how the genders are unequal), I
| think additional government scrutiny can't hurt in this space.
| hgomersall wrote:
| It's a shame they don't apply the same concern for safety to
| their externalities.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| I mean, there are incidents in refineries and plants. It's just
| hard to know how common they are because many go unreported or
| just don't reach wide public knowledge.
|
| Eg. Y12 criticality incident - https://youtu.be/HaOc8FhMdWc
| [deleted]
| mock-possum wrote:
| My fun little factoid about criticality is: sometimes it just
| happens naturally, on earth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
|
| > The natural nuclear reactor formed when a uranium-rich mineral
| deposit became inundated with groundwater, which could act as a
| moderator for the neutrons produced by nuclear fission. A chain
| reaction took place, producing heat that caused the groundwater
| to boil away; without a moderator that could slow the neutrons,
| however, the reaction slowed or stopped. The reactor thus had a
| negative void coefficient of reactivity, something employed as a
| safety mechanism in human-made light water reactors.
|
| > After cooling of the mineral deposit, the water returned, and
| the reaction restarted, completing a full cycle every 3 hours.
| The fission reaction cycles continued for hundreds of thousands
| of years and ended when the ever-decreasing fissile materials,
| coupled with the build-up of neutron poisons, no longer could
| sustain a chain reaction.
|
| What a wild story!
| defrost wrote:
| It was a different time then approximately
| 1.7 billion years ago, during the Statherian period of the
| Paleoproterozoic, and continued for a few hundred thousand
| years, probably averaging less than 100 kW of thermal power
| during that time.
| danparsonson wrote:
| At least we now know how early life kept their devices
| charged.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Interestingly, the -oid suffix usually refers to things that
| only _resemble_ the thing, so an andr-oid is not really a man,
| a meteor-oid is not really a meteor, and fact-oid... might not
| really be a fact.
|
| However the _really_ amusing bit is that that everybody can
| agree--for different reasons--that:
|
| > Here is a factoid: A factoid is a small fact.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Similarly, 'factitious' sounds like it should be an antonym
| to 'fictitious', but it very much isn't. And 'factious' is
| another thing entirely.
| danielbln wrote:
| The correct word would be a factlet, but factoid has been
| defacto taken its place. The fluidity of language, I suppose.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| But is the collective noun for fully-grown factlets "facti"
| or "factodes"?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The octolets will get back to you.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I wonder if anyone's done studies to measure and quantify
| the "distance" of slang (in years or generations) before an
| older person feels instinctive linguistic revulsion...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a continuous value, that is visibly different from
| zero almost immediately; children will experience it in a
| few contexts.
| cafard wrote:
| My recollection from many years ago is that Norman Mailer
| coined "factoid" to refer that what looked like facts, were
| offered as facts, but weren't facts.
| Linosaurus wrote:
| Yes, both meanings exists in dictionaries.
|
| Fortunately usage has consolidated. In my experience a
| factoid is generally intended to be true in (American?)
| English, but untrue in Swedish.
| taneq wrote:
| The letter u is a void. ;)
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, the -oid suffix is cognate with words like video and
| vision, referring to sight, so X-oid means something that
| looks like X.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Schizoid?
| HPsquared wrote:
| "Resembling schizophrenia but less severe"... seems to
| fit.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| The previous incidents the article mentions are about the aptly
| named Demon Core.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
| rwmj wrote:
| Reminds me of this Japanese incident: https://world-
| nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a nice example of the prevention paradox at work. You do
| your work well. Nothing happens for a while. You get laid off.
| Then eventually something happens...
| 2rsf wrote:
| A senior software tester here, welcome to my life
| el_oni wrote:
| We hate you when the bug reports roll in, but appreciate you
| when the product ships in a much cleaner state
| jacquesm wrote:
| > We hate you when the bug reports roll in
|
| Nothing has changed since the times of Plutarch.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
| mnw21cam wrote:
| If ever there was the need for Chesterton's Fence, this is it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It looks like amount wise they got lucky. I wonder how they
| were transported for that photograph. And whether or not the
| person that made it knew how far away from something really
| bad they were. _That_ gives me the creeps.
| casey2 wrote:
| To put this in perspective 22.54 per 100,000 would die due to
| motor vehicles in the same year that Slotin died. The average car
| (especially on US roads) is much more deadly and can become
| deadly in a blink, much faster than plutonium.
|
| How many people died of not just plutonium, but all criticality
| events? Less than 22, total (most of those Soviet). There is
| little reason to believe that even if these were household
| materials that they would be more dangerous than cars in the USA.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > To put this in perspective 22.54 per 100,000 would die due to
| motor vehicles in the same year that Slotin died.
|
| This is an incorrect perspective. If the same number of people
| as those driving cars had been playing with enriched uranium or
| plutonium, the casualties would have been much worse.
| n4r9 wrote:
| You're comparing a small number of objects handled by expert
| technicians in highly controlled environments against a large
| number of objects driven by average people in much more chaotic
| environments.
| cycomanic wrote:
| By the same logic, many more kids have died of chocking on toys
| than of radiation poisoning by plutonium, so we really should
| give kids plutonium to play instead of toys.
|
| Did you not realise how ridiculous your comparison was?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Whilst I agree with your conclusion that cars are involved in
| more loss of life, I don't think it's fair to only look at
| criticality events and ignore other radiation based deaths.
| Also, it's the drivers, not the cars that cause the danger.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > it's the drivers, not the cars that cause the danger
|
| "People kill people, not guns".
|
| You can kill me by throwing a person at me at 30mph; but it's
| easier to kill me by throwing a ton of iron at me at 30mph.
|
| If you're right, then there are no driving accidents, and all
| injuries result from negligence or incompetence. In fact, the
| driving environment is so complex and chaotic that accidents
| are inevitable, even for the competent and attentive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Numerous "self driving" cars have been in crashes. I
| believe under defined law it could be considered industrial
| accident when that occurs but is still open for litigation
| and definition.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's recommended to not call them "accidents" anymore as
| that implies a completely unpreventable incident which
| carries no blame. Road Traffic Incidents or Road Traffic
| Collisions are the preferred neutral terms.
|
| The vast majority of RTCs are indeed due to the inattention
| of a driver or not looking sufficiently (e.g. not taking
| care to move your head so that the A-pillar does not
| obstruct your view of pedestrians/cyclists etc).
|
| I would consider accidental RTCs to be mainly due to either
| mechanical failures (which could be argued is due to lack
| of maintenance) or previously unknown medical issues.
|
| It's interesting the difference in use of language between
| RTCs and shooting incidents. News reports will often make
| no mention of the driver and will make statements such as
| "car hits a building", but to use the same style with
| shootings would be risible e.g. "multiple bullets hit man
| resisting arrest". Of course, the car industry has been
| exerting control over media reporting of RTCs for about a
| century now, so it's very ingrained.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > to use the same style with shootings would be risible
| e.g. "multiple bullets hit man resisting arrest".
|
| Except that media use a different, equally bad
| construction. The so-called "cop-speak".
| <https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-
| police...>
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > It's recommended to not call them "accidents" anymore
|
| Perhaps I've misread you; you seem to be asserting what I
| said you were - that there are no accidents.
|
| Also, why the passive voice? Who makes this
| recommendation?
|
| [Edit]
|
| > The vast majority of RTCs are indeed due to the
| inattention of a driver
|
| Arguably, _all_ RTCs are the result of inadequate
| attention from someone or other. But attentive, well-
| trained drivers have collisions too. Perhaps their
| attention lapsed? They 're human - human attention
| wanders, they're not focused 24/7 on the task, because
| they're not machines.
|
| Cars are all very well on roads that carry light traffic.
| But not many roads are like that nowadays: most driving
| environments are way too complicated for even an expert
| to negotiate completely safely.
|
| There are too many cars.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Well, it depends on exactly how you define accident. In
| general, it would mean an unintended consequence, but
| arguably, driving whilst drunk and hitting something may
| be unintended, but not surprising - I wouldn't classify
| that as an accident as it was preventable and a known
| consequence of driving under the influence. If a careful
| driver suddenly has a heart attack and loses control,
| then I would classify that as an accident.
|
| Reporting recommendations:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2021/05/17/its-
| cras...
|
| https://road.cc/content/news/media-guidelines-launched-
| repor...
|
| https://www.rc-rg.com/guidelines
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Arguably, all RTCs are the result of inadequate
| attention from someone or other. But attentive, well-
| trained drivers have collisions too. Perhaps their
| attention lapsed? They're human - human attention
| wanders, they're not focused 24/7 on the task, because
| they're not machines.
|
| I'd say most of them. It's possible to be driving along
| with a clear road ahead and have a person or object
| suddenly appear in front of you. I recall a case where a
| child was riding a bike on the pavement (sidewalk in the
| U.S.?) and for some reason lost control and fell into the
| road. The driver had been adhering to the speed limits
| and was paying attention but unfortunately was unable to
| stop in time and the child ended up dying.
|
| There's lots of edge cases with driving which is why
| there's a bunch of recommendations regarding speed and
| leaving space so that when something unexpected happens,
| there's more chance for a careful driver to be able to
| stop or avoid the incident.
|
| And yes, I totally agree about too many cars.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > on the pavement (sidewalk in the U.S.?)
|
| Pedantically (i.e. according to the Highway Code) the
| part reserved for pedestrians is the 'footway'; the part
| for carriages ('things with wheels', roughly) is the
| carriageway.
|
| I suppose that between them they comprise the pavement.
|
| I've taken to referring to them as carriageway and
| footway; it's unambiguous, and it even makes sense if
| you're shouting across the Great Pond.
| willprice89 wrote:
| A better comparison might be fatalities among NASCAR drivers
| during races - i.e. professionals operating in a dangerous
| environment using tools engineered for safety.
|
| Google claims a total of 29 drivers have died during races, so
| the number of deaths in comparable, but I don't know how the
| total person-hours compare between NASCAR drivers and nuclear
| materials handling worldwide.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The difference is that the Newtonian physics of driving a car
| are mostly intuitive and that cars serve an obvious purpose
| making the risk both understandable and acceptable.
|
| Handling highly radioactive materials serves no obvious
| immediate purpose and the dangers are very abstract until you
| get it wrong.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think the driving risks are common but not exactly obvious.
| I've never hydroplaned when running.
| IAmNotAFix wrote:
| That's because there are more people who drive cars than people
| who handle plutonium. A more sensible statistics would be the
| number of death per hour of usage (which might still be in
| favor of handling plutonium).
| jacklin123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Ginger-Pickles wrote:
| Detailed article on this and other criticality incidents:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...
| sriku wrote:
| Deadly nightshade as in this?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum
|
| Is there a specific variety the author knows that's toxic? ...
| Because this (manathakkali or "fragrant tomato") features in
| South Indian cuisine and is rather yummy.
| tleb_ wrote:
| This Wikipedia page mentions the following, with a link to the
| toxic plant that is probably described by the article author:
|
| > Sometimes S. nigrum is confused for the more toxic deadly
| nightshade (Atropa belladonna)
| samwillis wrote:
| Nope, this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna
|
| > Atropa belladonna, commonly known as belladonna or _deadly
| nightshade_ , is a toxic perennial herbaceous plant in the
| nightshade family Solanaceae
|
| > The foliage and berries are extremely toxic when ingested,
| containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine,
| scopolamine, and hyoscyamine, which cause delirium and
| hallucinations
|
| When I was a kid my Dad spotted it growing in my school
| grounds...
| meibo wrote:
| I get this same feeling when looking at some of the code people
| commit the day before a release.
| belter wrote:
| Probably pushed by some recently rotated manager or new CEO
| dropped out of a recent acquisition...sometimes the code pushes
| the system over critically, sometimes it's just a code broken
| arrow event. Something to tell in the privacy of your next off
| the record interview or in your biography...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| The solution to that problem is to release every day. I'm not
| even kidding.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| And release branches. Commit away to main all you like!
| makapuf wrote:
| Critical staging code amount. Like that.
| fouc wrote:
| Guess that doesn't apply to places with peer code reviews &
| continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment
| (CI/CD).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It doesn't for release but it does for merging things to the
| main branch and seeing if it fails or not (cf. "not rocket
| science"[1]).
|
| [1] https://graydon.livejournal.com/186550.html
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Why does one of the cylinders have childish scribbling over it?
| Titan2189 wrote:
| It's quite hard to write on / engrave into a cylinder
| mjd wrote:
| And the scribbling would have been done by someone wearing
| heavy gloves, probably while the rod was in a glovebox.
| fmajid wrote:
| Scribing the rods probably releases plutonium particles, a
| vicious carcinogen, as would more professional looking laser
| engraving. A Sharpie would be safer.
| fouc wrote:
| Plutonium is 2.5X as dense as steel. Also it's normally kept in
| a glove box so the workers are probably wearing thick gloves
| when doing the engraving.
| fastneutron wrote:
| Nuclear criticality safety was one of my favorite courses back
| during my nuclear engineering degree. The failure modes, like the
| article mentions, can be incredibly non-intuitive. Swirling
| vortices, firefighting foam, and even the mere presence of a
| human body can lead to a fatal power excursion. A lot of complex
| computational modeling and simulation goes into determining
| safety limits for fissile systems, as well as a lot of sheer
| imagination.
|
| The most important thing I took away from that experience is the
| concept of _engineered_ compliance. People will break
| administrative rules and regulations all the time if they get int
| the way of work, so you need to engineer the physical system to
| account for that (e.g. flat or skinny geometry, or lots of
| neutron absorbers). This can apply to any compliance activity
| related to safety and security, so the lessons are universal.
|
| Los Alamos published a good survey on various worldwide
| criticality accidents (PDF):
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003731912.pdf. Worth a read for
| all the various ways things can go wrong.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| This is a good place to add to the reading list: strongly
| recommend Command and Control as well, by Eric Schlosser:
| https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > People will break administrative rules and regulations all
| the time if they get in the way of work
|
| The example I like to use is that the more paperwork you
| require for something like "obtain an internal use certificate
| for API endpoints" then the _direct consequence_ will be less
| encryption of internal API endpoints.
|
| Note that I didn't say "there may be", or "I predict that". No.
| It's a guaranteed consequence, like gradient descent making AIs
| better at meeting loss function. Except that it's gradient
| ascent, and you're making it steeper and expecting people to
| climb harder instead of just going around your pointless
| obstacle.
|
| "More paperwork" -> "Less security"
|
| "Less paperwork" -> "More security"
|
| Choose.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Another typical example is charging internal applications for
| IDPs, guess what, people are just gonna use LDAP/AD directly,
| at a not-so-small detriment to application and user security.
|
| These are things where cost center accounting just plainly
| hurts the company. (There are many cases where it works well
| and aligns incentives).
| pixl97 wrote:
| That's why you monitor and block every non encrypted API as
| quickly as possible.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That's a career-limiting move in most places.
|
| If actually enforced this way, then the next consequence is
| that people will use a credit card to spin their service up
| in some random cloud that you don't control and won't
| break.
|
| ... where all API endpoints are encrypted _by default_ with
| zero paperwork required.
|
| Get it? Forcing people to climb steeper slopes never ever
| works.
|
| You need to make sure they fall into the pit of success
| even if they're stumbling around in the dark with their
| eyes closed.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" More paperwork" -> "Less security"
|
| "Less paperwork" -> "More security"_
|
| That's almost an axiom in some circumstances but with
| criticality accidents there's a difference--first, the stakes
| don't get much higher, at close quarters death's a certainty
| and it's about as unpleasant as it gets; second, it's all
| over and irreversible in milliseconds.
|
| There is no time to think, the body-brain reaction time is
| far too slow to take corrective action no matter how
| effective it may be when deployed.
|
| That's different to giving consideration to a course of
| action based on the difficulty of obstacles in one's way--
| choosing the path of least resistance, etc.
|
| The issues with that infamous photo are different, there was
| no obvious _logical if_ decision to be made--it was all very
| straightforward, lay the Pu out and photograph it. The
| problems, however, are multifold: (a) those involved didn 't
| have sufficient understanding of the possible consequences
| (of the physics involved), (b) they were poorly trained in
| safety procedures, and (c), the work environment wasn't
| 'engineered' to ensure compliance--that is, nothing stopped
| them from doing it.
|
| As I pointed out in my earlier post, training is crucial and
| it cannot be just theoretical. When the stakes are this high
| training has to be ingrained to such a degree that certain
| procedures are automatic, similarly, dangerous situations
| don't just become obvious after thinking about them, they are
| so the instant the brain responds. For instance, one
| recognizes the danger as quickly as one would if one tripped
| over a snake.
|
| That's what the military does with training, one
| automatically reacts to a situation with the correct response
| without thinking. And that takes practice until one's
| perfect.
|
| It works, it's a damn long time since I did any military
| training and I can stil carry out certain actions and
| procedures I learned decades ago and do so automatically and
| without a moment's thought. The people who set up and took
| those photos should have been trained to a similar level of
| discipline.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Same thing with problem reports and maintenance requests. The
| more work you make them, the more people will put up with
| things that kind of halfway work. That's bad for the
| productivity of the organization as a whole, though, no
| matter whether the more cumbersome process makes things more
| convenient for IT or management or auditors.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It should not have been possible for that photo to have been
| taken anytime or anywhere since 1946, even during Manhattan with
| war deadlines it should not have been possible. That it was and
| as late as 2011 is of grave concern. Frankly, I find it very
| difficult to fathom.
|
| Years ago when I approached my first reading of the full accounts
| of Slotin and Daghlian I did so as with any other info, since
| then I have forced myself to reread them several times as a
| reminder--as both the accounts and photos are grim. They ought to
| be part of compulsory safety training for anyone vaguely
| associated with the nuclear game.
|
| Perhaps, as part of that training there should be more acting out
| roles with dummy materials similar to military exercises where
| adjudicators tag one as dead for making a 'lethal' mistake and
| can play no further role in the exercise. This may seem trite but
| it's not, being forced to play dead on the battlefield whilst the
| exercise continues because of one's incompetence is both
| formative and embarrassing (I speak from experience).
|
| Moreover, like military training, the exercises should be
| practiced until one's actions are automatic.
|
| That said, such training ought to be a second-line defense--as
| _fastneutron_ rightly points out--as such work environments ought
| to be engineered to force compliance.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Is the problem that plutonium doesn't look particularly scary
| on its own? It's just a chunk of gray metal. It's not fuming,
| it's not warm (I assume), it's not glowing, it's not
| particularly ugly, it's not a bright color. Very few people
| have experienced radiation poisoning and have a visceral
| understanding of the horror involved. None of our self-
| preservation instincts understand the danger.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's probably a bit like handling electric wiring. It doesn't
| look dangerous, until you short the terminals together or
| touch a high voltage contact.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or watch some YouTube videos about arc-flash.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| A pretty good analogy.
| cyberax wrote:
| Weapons grade plutonium is slightly warm to touch.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Your question implies I've firsthand experience working with
| the stuff but that isn't so. It's true I've worked in the
| nuclear industry and keeping the stuff safe and out of harm's
| way was in my job description but I wasn't alone, many
| hundreds of us were (and are) involved in doing so. Luckily
| there were people between me and those who worked with the
| stuff and I'm very happy about that.
|
| Still, you're right it's a silvery gray metal much like many
| others that oxidizes quickly in air to give it that dullish
| look. If you were to pick it up you'd notice it's very dense.
| It's marginally heavier than gold by about 0.5g/cc^3 at about
| 19.8g/cc^3. That it looks so boring could easily generate
| complacency when handling it.
|
| _Edit: the 238 isotope is much more radioactive than 239, so
| much so it 'd be hot to touch. But you'd be mad to do so._
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-09 23:03 UTC)