[Darryl1]

I'm giving a Nerd Nite (www.nerdnite.com) talk in a month or so about how one can theoretically make plutonium from common household items. I assure you all, it is completely theoretical. I am not dumb enough to ever actually try it. Furthermore, if anyone were ever crazy enough to give this a try, the amount of plutonium would be many magnitudes below anything close to critical.  This mainly came about from a scene in a movie UHF, and then years later reading the book 'The Radioactive Boy Scout' by Ken Silverstein.

Anyway, the neutron source is easy and I've worked all that out.  For the uranium source, I was thinking depression glass since it's up to 25% uranium (although realistically much closer to 1 or 2%) .  Turn the depression glass into liquid sodium silicate using molten lye. My question is, what happens to the uranium salt?  I would think it kind of precipitates out because I believe heavy metal salts tend to be insoluble - especially in basic solutions.
If this is the case, then it's just a matter of collecting the precipitate and continuing on.

BTW, I won't even bother trying to separate out the plutonium, I don't think it can be done with "household" items. Unless you consider anything you can buy on Amazon household.

Thanks, and if you'd like to hear the talk, let me know and I can get you more info once I get the date for it.

-d