• ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Depends on the isotope, of course. There are different ways it can hurt you.

    • If you put together a critical mass of ²³⁵U, it undergoes fission and you die in seconds without needing to ingest it.
    • Naturally ocurring uranium (²³³U-²³⁸U, mostly ²³⁸U) has a half-life of billions of years, so it’s very weakly radioactive. It would take a lot of it to harm you from decay radiation. Or very little if you pick a very unstable synthetic isotope outside the 233-238 range (but every element “has” such radioactive isotopes, though not in nature).
    • Uranium is chemically toxic, which is whal will kill you if you ingest a small amount of a common isotope.
    • Liz@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      If you’ve got more than 52 kg of uranium 235 on your hands, I would be alarmed to learn you didn’t understand how criticality worked. Although now that I think of it, there’s probably an awful lot of people who indirectly handle that much when they move around a nuclear warhead and most of them probably only had a single lecture on the concept.

      The thing that always blows my mind is just how freaking dense uranium is. A sphere weighing 52 kg is only 17 cm across.