Never put in just the tip. Always go as deep as you can. It’s a rule that evolution has chiselled into every brain, and yet…
People working on the Manhattan Project in the freezing desert used to warm their hands by holding lumps of uranium. A lot of life shortening moves available.
The Soviets deployed a lot of nuclear heaters across their empire. I think they even had nuclear buoys. These units can also produce electricity, which is why capitalist countries also used them, but for space probes too far from the sun for solar.
That stuff got forgotten and abandoned after 1991. It’s caused some rather nasty injuries, that we know about.
I mean, as an alpha emitter the radiation can’t penetrate your skin. As long as you wash your hands afterwards it’s probably fine. You wouldn’t see me trying it though
The First Nations people in the Northern Territory in Australia called an area “sickness country” and didn’t live there (that their history is about 60,000 to 70,000 years). In the mid 1900s it was developed to be a major uranium mining area. It seems that the first people decided that living too close to uranium was not a good thing.
People used to use uranium for all sorts of quack medical purposes, up to including taking pills of the stuff.
Isotopes was a wild field back then
Up and at them!
Armed with my screwdriver
Life is never a bore
I study and research
Data galore
Nothing can stop me
Accolades and more
Now let me prop open
The Demon CoreCould have come straight out of Doctor Who
Objection! Alchemists are the ancestors to chemists, not physicists. I would argue that something like “Aethermancer” would be a better fantasy version. Or if we want to be historical accurate then “Natural Philosphers” but that’s not as exotic sounding.
*physicists about to get massive radiation poisoning from a sphere of plutonium after a cowboy slips his tip.
FTFY
Make sure you keep it at crotch level for maximum effect!
The immense power of a screwdriver.
<[{(explaining the joke kills the joke)}]>
A comedian explaining the joke is like Dr. Louis Slotin explaining nuclear fission with a subcritical mass of plutonium, two beryllium reflectors, and a screw driver. It will eventually end their career (becuase Dr. Slotin died of acute radiation syndrome after the screw driver slipped, the beryllium reflectors touched, and the plutonium underwent nuclear fission, delivering a lethal dose of radiation in under a second).