[IROC]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

It's not my gig, so I didn't look closely yesterday, but apparently the thread was started by a manager and the topic was one of our periodic Weapons Working Group meetings "Results from Recent Focused Plutonium Experiments".

(engaging lecture mode to provide background) Like most heavy elements Pu is strange - its closest-packed crystal structure is its least dense phase, some phases have a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, its solid floats on its liquid (like water/ice) and many other solid phases have crystal structures more familiar to geologists than metallurgists. We're still torturing it with various fancy machines to understand how the stuff works.

While the WWG is a cool tradition of openness and collaboration dating back to Oppenheimer, Fermi and Feynman in the Manhattan Project, it seems like replying-all might be our new tradition. 82 emails in under 20 mins until somebody stopped the flood.

82 emails. Hilarious. Pu is very interesting. I've read up on the fires/etc. at Rocky Flats and gained some insight into its weird behavior.