californium

There's probably a planet of molten Californium somewhere out there being bombarded by Einsteinium asteroids.

But it wanted a more potent in-house system, so in 1974 it acquired a californium neutron flux multiplier, known as a CFX.

Maybe a natural source of Californium which on Earth is only produced in reactors or particle accelerators, and actually has industrial uses?

In californium, I was driving a Tesla in Cueprtino on a fairly busy highway but late at night.

Kodak used small research reactors, including one at Cornell University, and possessed a dollop of californium-252, a radioactive isotope that endlessly sheds neutrons.

Per Wikipedia, the smallest critical mass is 2.73 kilograms, for Californium 252.

I wonder if they mean the same thing other people do when they say that (for me, 90+% U-235), or if the mention of californium means it was blended?

Technically anti-matter would cost orders of magnitude more but there's no demand for it so it's not really valuable, whereas Californium is tightly rationed for scientific research.

> In 1975, Kodak powered up the country’s first californium neutron flux multiplier (CFX)...

) californium was the neutron source and uranium was used in the multiplier.

The ones in the last verse align instead by other means (first you have californium, fermium, berkelium--all named after the same place; then you have mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium--all named after scientists).

You can transport a significant amount of gold on your person, but if you tried that with Californium you would probably lose the dust sized particle that represents your life's savings.

Calcium and californium atoms smashing together to form oganesson would never happen “in nature” without humans using a particle accelerator to drive the process.

Others include curium, used in RTG "nuclear batteries"; americium-241, used in smoke detectors; and californium-252.

If you Google "Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier", you can find links to, among other things, the front page of a Kodak-published paper that talks about the use and acquisition of this source.

Not sure how to get to Californium's radioactive, um, configurations, I typed U-235 into Wikipedia, found a link to "isotopes of" which listed all of Uranium's, then near the bottom was a handy table with all the "isotopes of" links to other elements, Californium's code is apparently Cf so I found the right link and...

I think that would still be Californium.