Man Sat on Hunk of Uranium.

"The man’s got some balls (though soon afterwards, they probably fell off!)"

HAHA! What a crazy guy.

Naturally occurring uranium is only very slightly radioactive, but the difference between naturally occurring uranium and what is often termed "highly enriched" uranium (HEU) is night and day.

100 kilos of HEU has a high chance (due to nucleic decay) of reaching critical mass on its own at any given moment. Natural Uranium... meh... not so much. In fact the stuff is reasonably okay to be around, although you don't want to eat it or be exposed to it for long periods of time.

2 billion years ago (much longer than the half-life of U235) there were a few natural nuclear meltdowns when huge deposits of Uranium surpassed the decay limits. This type of thing can't happen today because so much of the U is depleted in the earth's crust.

The guy in the picture probably lived a long life and if I had to bet didn't die of cancer. If anything he is pretty lucky to be one of the few humans on earth to come across such a large deposit of such an exceedingly rare element. Uranium is almost as rare as gold.

Mrgoodbar said it for me already and better. It's the enriched stuff that unembiggens the balls.

With balls like that he could send his wife to smithereens.

Wouldn't the radiation from the uranium cause the film to expose making the picture impossible to take?

I wonder how heavy that chunk of rock is...

I love how the guy in the lower right corner seems to be in blackface. :)

All I know is that I saw the word 'uranium' and saw this guy sitting on it and went "Aaaaaargh! Get him off! Get him off there!"

Thanks for pointing out the difference between HEU and Natural Uranium mrgoodbar.

as stated, unenriched uranium is fairly harmless, plus uranium is a good shield for neutrons. it emits fast neutrons which pass thru the body quickly, the slow neutrons are shielded by the uranium. for a criticality to occur you need three things....mass, moderator and geometry.

tempscire: i didn't notice that! he looks SO creepy!

Two questions:

If the caption is right, then doesn't that hunk have the equivalent radioactivity as 2 fissile nuclear weapons' worth?

Also, is natural uranium and depleted uranium almost the same? Either are low on the highly radioactive form U-235, but DU has also been shown to have residual radioactivity and can cause cancer in lab animals.

Alex ... perhaps that rock has the potential or capacity of such?