r/whenthe • u/DreadDiana • 13h ago

BRB, destroying the few grams of Californium on Earth

4.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

443

u/Kajetus06 13h ago

And insanely difficult to create

191

u/Red580 13h ago

Getting periodic cramps when walking outside the Large Hadron Collider.

44

u/UX1Z 10h ago

In general the late 90s are set. Berkelium (97) may as well functionally not exist at all. There's about 10 grams of Californium, there's less than a single gram of 97.

16

u/Drakeskulled_Reaper 9h ago edited 6h ago

I'm 89, actinium, it's so rare that the amount extracted in the world, is about the same size as a grain of sand.

It's also very radioactive.

1

u/SlappySausage001 5h ago

82, Lead here

5

u/DearCastiel 5h ago

Superman but not bulletproof...

2

u/retoricalprophylaxis 1h ago

Same...I'd be screwed trying to help the people of Flint.

3

u/deathschemist 9h ago

even the early 90s set are pretty much fine- Thorium, Protactinum, Uranium, Neptunium and Plutonium are all very rare.

1

u/guto8797 6h ago

Also to point out that all people have a weakness to plutonium as default

1

u/deathschemist 5h ago

yeah, and all the other ones too, radiation, as it turns out, will kill you if it's not treated with the utmost care

i mean look at what happened to Marie Curie.

1

u/reverse_chrysopoeia 8h ago

I would still prefer 87, because its most stable isotope will only last 22 minutes.

1

u/Seanvich 50m ago

Hehe- “periodic.”

14

u/TheQuestionMaster8 11h ago

Even a microscopic amount of the most common isotope Californium-252 would be capable of killing a human

13

u/Mother_ma 10h ago

I think I would survive

1

u/TheQuestionMaster8 10h ago

My point is that it is irrelevant as it is extremely dangerous to people anyways if unshielded.

6

u/Outofdepthengineer 9h ago edited 8h ago

Nah he’s built different, he’d tank that shit 

1

u/gibarel1 7h ago

"Nah, I'd survive"

1

u/TheQuestionMaster8 3h ago

Acute radiation syndrome is an awful way to die, so I would recommend other ways to prove that you are built differently

1

u/ALKNST 9h ago

Which is surprising considering it had uses in radio-oncology

4

u/TheQuestionMaster8 9h ago

It is ironic that many of the same things which cause cancer can also treat it through the exact same mechanism of DNA damage.

1

u/YourInnerBidoof 6h ago

It’s difficult to create, Bruce