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Comment by NavinF | Hacker News Reader

>Phillip’s professor has said that the design would likely work, but his design was not actually built

Ok so it's not really $2k nor is it an atom bomb.

I'm not sure if I follow. It was a design for an A bomb that would cost $2k, ergo, a $2k A bomb. Obviously have to adjust for time and inflation.

It's like a $5 meal kit for a "BBQ meat feast" that has the recipe, spices, but doesn't include the meat. So once you've visited the specialist butcher and spent a lot more money, now you have the $5 feast.

The research was not sold for 2k. It was expected BOM for ingredients listed in the recipe.

If this paper (that none of us can ever see) really included the plutonium in that BOM then it would be interesting to know how he derived a price for it, since it's not really a openly traded commodity.

Funny enough, Pu-238 was on the market at one point (with plenty of restrictions). It was used to power pacemakers. It's still used for spacecraft.

I'm not sure how expensive it was in the '70s but it is very expensive now. American production is supposed to be scaling up, but only to about 1.5 kg a year.

But Pu-239 is presumably the stuff for this hobby project? The one-click price for that is hard to find, even if you bring your own take-out container.

Yes, I was looking for a point of comparison. Pu-239 is probably also quite expensive, as both isotopes are prepared by using a reactor to irradiate stuff. Only way I can see a "$2k" cost as relevant is if it's the cost to someone who's already acquired the nuclear material.

https://osrp.lanl.gov/pacemakers.shtml

I'd love to see the BOM for that.

Badam tsk.

err... good?

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