Slashdot Mirror
Sodium + Private Lake = Fun
travisbean writes "This should be enough to pique your interest. Add to the story that the guy has his own pond and I think we can all see where this is going... 'The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.'"
Bulk metallic sodium runs under a buck per pound (15 cents to a dollar), when you are buying a 300# drum. Prices in smaller lots and higher purity are slightly higher, ranging up to around $35/pound for analytical grade.
The higher purity metal makes little or no difference when you are tossing it into a highly impure natural lake.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
My dad worked for the space program on fuel cells for several years. They often had pounds and pounds of lithium to play with in the lake behind the company. They seemed to enjoy making little boats, packing them with as much lithium as they could hold, shiping them out, and throwing rocks at them until it exploded when the boat capsized. They had sodium too, but lithium made a much bigger and louder explosion.
a guy with weather baloons in a lawnchair? nope, I don't think so.
Snopes.com (an Urban Legends site) respectfully disagrees with you.
Up, Up, and Away!
I recall a story from high school (although it may be apochryphal) that a chemistry teacher at my school had been demonstrating the reactivity of various metals and had a number of small chunks of said metals arrayed along his bench in various jars.
:-)
As usual the sodium was kept in mineral oil - and in the story I heard, one of the other (presumably less reactive) metals was kept under water.
When the most trusted kid in the class was left to clean up at the end, they claimed that he'd inadvertantly placed the lump of sodium back into the jar containing water - but that it had not exploded because it was still coated with oil.
The story goes that some hours later, the oil was finally displaced by the water in the jar and the small chunk of sodium then exploded - shattering the entire row of glass jars and spreading exotic and highly reactive metal chunks all over the room resulting in hundreds of small explosions and fires.
I kinda suspect that this may not be a true story though because I can't find a reasonable candidate for the metal that would have to have been kept under water in order for this to be true. However, there was some kind of an explosion/fire in the lab because I remember chemistry classes being cancelled for about three weeks afterwards.
Chemistry classes back in the mid-1960's were much more dangerous than kids are exposed to these days. I clearly recall being given small amounts of metallic mercury to *play* with!! These days, if you so much as crack a mercury thermometer they evacuate the city for three blocks in every direction.
It's a shame, mercury is incredibly good fun to play with - until the vapours poison your brain of course! It's hard to come to terms with something so heavy that's "just" a liquid - and it's amazing how the droplets 'shatter' when you hit them with the end of a ruler.
www.sjbaker.org
I remember reading in an OSS history book about crude time bombs that were made using wine bottles filled with water and gelatin coated tablets of Na metal and/or Potassium. The method was simple: Pop a couple of tabs in the bottle, roll it under a truck or other igniteable item, and you have a half-hour to get away before the water dissolves the tablet casing. The USAAF dropped cases to the French resistance, who used them to little or no effectiveness- not entirely unexpected French-like bevaior.
It's a good thing I read the PTT site a few days ago linked from the IgNoble Awards, because it's slashdotted all to hell now. If it weren't for that, I'd provide you with a link to the Cesium page.
As for Francium, I think I got to read the page for every element he had, and I don't seem to recall him having any. Some of the cool stuff he did have was some Lite Salt (NaCl/KCl mixture) which was measurably radioactive (!) because of a certain amount of natural Potassium is radioactive, and a Fiestaware bowl (which used Uranium as a dye) which was significantly radioactive and for which he made a cast lead bowl in which to store it.
A little bit of trivia: more than a few of the Wolfram Research folks have purchased samples of Tungsten. Why? Tungsten's symbol is W, representing its name in German: Wolfram.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The teacher who oversaw my senior year independant study in chem had a similar story, though not quite as dangerous. The best part was she had video! Shortly after taking over as head of the chem department she had started to clean out the supply closet of dangerous things that were no longer used (or allowed to be used in many cases) for classes. During this work she found a 2.5lb block of solid sodium in a large oil filled container. Since this was enough to cause a serious explosion she immediately removed it from the school, and after making sure that the container wouldn't leak took it out to the lake behind the adjacent elementary school. She found a .22 rifle and a video camera and made a very educational film, she set the can afloat and rowed about a hundred feet away. There she placed the camera at the bow of the boat and shot the can. About 5 seconds after the can was hit and began to sink there was a massive explosion, so violent that the boat was rocked hard enough to knock the camera back into the bottom of the boat =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Having said that, the shock waves and removal of oxygen can kill or traumatise a lot of fish and any birds near the surface. Which makes this a somewhat redneck experiment: I have no problem with people letting off big bangs, but not when they carelessly kill things in the neighborhood.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.