• Question: Is there a more dangerous metal than uranium and if so what is it and will it ever be used

    Asked by mk47 to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 20 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Danger is a relative term, obviously, but if you mean dangerous in terms of damage if you put it in a bomb, plutonium is worse and yes, it has been used.
      It would be even more dangerous if you could make matter-antimatter bombs but thankfully Dan Brown might be a good writer but he’s rubbish at science – you couldn’t make a bomb out of it, it would take billions of years to even make a single gram of antimatter!!

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      It depends what you mean by dangerous! Uranium comes in many different forms (known as isotopes) and each varies in radioactivity. I you want some of the most radioactive elements, they include isotopes of Plutonium and Polonium. Some of these isotopes aren’t radioactive for long (they have a short half-life), but emit a lot of radiation. Some Plutonium isotopes have half-lives of about 70 years which is very short lived, but are very radioactive too. We are worried about the radiation in Japan at the moment because the isotopes that are in the power plant’s reactor core are very long lived – so if they got out they would not only be radioactive, but they would be radioactive for a long time too!

      If you mean use of weapons, plutonium is easily convertable to uranium which is what most nuclear weapons use.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      I’m not sure the answer to this, but I guess anything can be dangerous if used in the wrong way!! And we might just find more dangerous things in the future, you just don’t know!

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