That’s what you get for not casting it on the “This is not a place of honour” sign near the jagged black obelisks after encountering the colony of glowing cats
It’s only glowing blue because there are orcs nearby.
Cobalt 60 has a half life of 5.27 years. Assuming that a language lost to time is at least 500 years old, the rod should be fairly safe to handle. Heck, even after only 100 years less than 0.01% of the original amount of radioactive material would be left.
But that aside - One of the items that can be found in the video game series Avernum is Uranium bars, which give you a nice unhealthy glow :)
What if it was stored in a fridge
Does temperature affect nuclear decay?
Technically, maybe, but the effect is negligible.
Isotopes only have a “worst by” date unfortunately
They do have a use by date. The nastier they are the shorter their use by date
Somebody casted Repair on the rod
i cast mending on the pile of lead, giving me a solid cubic foot of weapons grade plutonium.
giving me a solid cubic foot of weapons grade plutonium
Briefly
hey DM what’s the range of mending? as long as it’s over a few kilometers i should be fine
Range: touch (d&d 5e)
Range: 10’ (d&d 3.5e)
Perhaps you want it as a contingent spell activated upon your death
Sadly I got around to looking up decay chains and the isotope of lead that is at the bottom of the chain containing [plutonium 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium] ends at lead 207 which is only 22% of the lead on Earth, so you’re unlikely to get anything instantly dangerous. Though if your lead came from an ancient natural reactor your chances are much better
If it’s actively glowing blue, I don’t think it’s safe to handle.
If it’s actively glowing blue it means it’s under water producing Cherenkov radiation and the water should shield you from the alpha particles.
Ah, I remember this story:
on September 24, Ivo, Devair’s brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on the floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother.
What a horrible way to die :(
My favorite podcast did an episode about that!
Highly recommend if you like leftism, and also want to listen to an engineer talk at length about what this blue glowing powder is, the series of bad decisions that led to some scrap collectors finding it, and the even longer series of even worse decisions people made regarding what to do with this blue glowing powder
You can skip the Goddamn News if you want, discussion of the spicy rocks starts at 20:28
I love Well There’s Your Problem, highly recommend that episode as well
But if it’s a blue flash, that’s a completely different effect and there was a criticality accident and you’re probably going to die.
Ok love this one XD
“This is not a place of honour…
There’s always a relevant xkcd.
With 3,174 comics and counting - it’s becoming more and more probable!
Just like how The Simpsons can be credited with predicting a whole bunch of things; volume is key!
wizard: i cast firebolt
https://inis.iaea.org/records/5hxba-wnv29
“Drop & Run” by IAEA.
Isn’t the blue glow only present under water (or other transparent medium with a similarly high index of refraction)?
It’s technically slightly visible in air; if actually visible at all in air it means the level of radiation is ludicrously deadly
It’s not so much that it’s visible in air, it’s just that your eyes have water in them
So yeah, if you can see Cherenkov radiation outside of a pool of water, then that means the only thing attenuating the radiation is your eyeballs
This forest of thorns looks really cool, I bet deeds are commemorated here
I wonder what the damage would be holding it for 15 seconds.
I asked Chat GPT:
Approximate unshielded dose rates:
At 1 m: ≈ 5.2×10^4 Sv/h (≈51,800 Sv/h) — fatal essentially instantaneously (seconds or less).
At 3 m: ≈ 5.8×10^3 Sv/h — fatal within seconds.
At 10 m: ≈ 5.18×10^2 Sv/h — fatal within tens of seconds.
At 30 m: ≈ 5.8×10^1 Sv/h — severe, life‑threatening in minutes.
At 100 m: ≈ 5.2 Sv/h — dangerous; a few hours would produce fatal/serious acute radiation syndrome.
(For perspective: an acute whole‑body dose of ~4–5 Sv often causes death without intensive medical care; 1 Sv already causes significant radiation sickness.)
These are conservative, point‑source, unshielded estimates for whole‑body dose from the gammas. Being closer, or in contact, or staying in the field increases dose proportionally.
Back to me again. I’m sorry my radioactive physics game is weak and I had to speculatively look it up. That’s a lot of downvotes, yet no one decided to share the math themselves.
I asked my toddler about the radiation and she said “nana” and then with emphasis “nana” once more.
The downvotes are because our two methods of finding an answer are roughly equally likely to returning a reliable answer.
Mine is slightly better for the climate, maybe. That will likely change as she grows up and uses up more resources. I’ll ask her to do the math on that one later, she is busy eating a book right now.
She’s absolutely right!
NANA, you dopes!
Roll for speed
ChatGPT is a text generator. Any “information” it delivers is only correct by chance, if at all. Without the knowledge to check the answers yourself, you can’t possibly tell whether you’re falling for random error.
More in-depth, ChatGPT has learned how likely certain word patterns are in combination. Something like “1+1=” will most often be followed by “2”. ChatGPT has no concept of truth or mathematical relationship, so it doesn’t “understand” why this combination occurs like that, it just imitates it.
You can actually see the slight randomisation in the inconsistent way 5.18 is rounded to 5.2 instead. If this was correct – I’m not qualified to comment on that – and written by a human, you’d expect them to be more consequent with the precision. It’s likely that ChatGPT learned these number-words from different sources using different precision and randomly picks which one to go with for each new line.
So what happens when it decides a word combination seems plausible, but it doesn’t actually make sense? Well, for example, lawyers get slapped with a fine for ChatGPT citing case law that doesn’t exist. They sounded valid, because that’s what ChatGPT is made for: generating plausible word combinations. It doesn’t know what a legal case is or how it imposes critical restrictions on what’s actually valid in this context.
There’s an open access paper on the proclivity of LLMs to bullshit, available for download from Springer. The short version is that it’s entirely indifferent to truth. It doesn’t and can’t care or even know whether the figures it spits out are correct.
Use it to generate texts, if you must, but don’t use it to generate facts. It’s not looking them up, it’s not researching, it’s not doing the math – it’s making them up to sound right.
You’re not getting downvoted. ChatGPT is getting downvoted, and you just happened to be in the way.
These guys, the 2nd google link after AI, say that a 3540 Ci/130 TBq source would be around 500 Sv/h at 30 cm. Even Wikipedia says 45 Sv/h at 1m
Oh thank god! I guess this is the “find the right answer by posting the wrong answer.”
find the right answer by posting the wrong answer.”
Cunningham’s Law FTW
If the rod is glowing, probably a fuckton.
Nothing would happen it is so incredibly dangerous for its short half life time and reasonable amount of energy that’s freed by its decay.
Its just fucking lead, bro.(Well, nickel)
Hopefully there’s one of these around: Material Safety Data Sheet for cobalt 60.
I’m not feeling creative today so I’ll just write “Dildo joke”.
Haha good one. “Punny answer.”
“Something something - anything if you’re brave enough”
If your vial of Cobalt 60 doesn’t have a flared base…well…I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Have fun!
I am curious where this drop and run source comes from.
Typically, they’re sealed in a shielded box, where you can open a small windows that the gamma say can escape and are used for field radiography when inspecting bridge/pipeline solder. Definitely not a drop and run thing
I’m guessing it’s short for “If you don’t know what this is and you find it outside of any shielded box, shit has gone very wrong and you should not be near this, let alone touch it”. The probably best way to get people to stop touching it is to suggest that it poses an acute threat, hence the urgency in the phrasing “drop and run”.
So if you’re operating a device wherein it’s properly contained, you don’t see the label. If you’re removing it while protected appropriately, you already know the label doesn’t apply to you. If you know how to handle it, you don’t need instructions.
I am guessing the idea is to induce terror in the holder such that, if they did not intend to hold a vial of Co 60, they would not mess with it further. It conveys the appropriate level of danger, if not an appropriate set of handling instructions.
Edit: So I looked it up and I misunderstood: if you can read that (especially by the blue glow) then its rapidly killing you. I really don’t understand how dangerous some radiation is lmao.
Time for a rewatch of Chernobyl.
If your are very lucky, you can find one by the side of the road in Australia.
