I was thinking about the reactions of the elements to one another and doesn't it look like Francium and Fluoride want to come together really bad? I don't know how a nuke utilizes uranium or plutonium but I wonder if a francium flouride bomb would be more powerful than a nuke.

Probably not, as it would exist by now.

A Francium Fluoride bomb would have to be an exothermic chemical reaction. Nukes use exothermic nuclear reactions. Nuclear and chemical reactions are totally different things, much much more energy is released in a nuclear reaction than in chemical reactions.

Thanks for the information. Is there a reaction stronger than a nuclear reaction?

Anti-matter/Matter reaction would quite possibly be the strongest thing known to man. But good luck getting your hands on some anti-matter. I heard the Iraqi insurgents have three barrels of it hidden somewhere in Fallujah. You might want to talk to them.

If a person could hold in their possession any amount of Francium, they would have the rarest of rare, naturally occuring elements in existance.

This should tell a little something about it's properties.

Francium's longest lasting isotope has a half life of something like twenty minutes, so it might be hard to bomb anything with it, equally hard to find a decent pile of it as...
pearl1.lanl.gov...

But if you wanted to kill people with flouride, the best way to do that would be to put it in people's toothpaste and drinking water...

damn, we have fluoride in the water here.
Hey they advertise fluoride in toothpaste because it is supposedly good for your teeth. I guess not then.

Well fluoride is good for your teeth.

Fifty years ago the US Government added fluoride to the public water supplies because it reduced cavities. Two-thirds of the American water supply is fluoridated.

Fluoride is also a key chemical in atomic bombs.

So take your pick...

[edit on 11/15/2004 by Simulacra]

flouride is dangerous to our health isnt it?
even if we are brushing our teeth, it is not
good to even ingest a small amount of it.

Yeah, bomb would literally "decay" before its use.

www.lbl.gov...

In chemical reaction mass doesn't disappear, it's just rearranging of atoms.

encarta.msn.com...

Doesnt francium and flouride make glass porous?

Oh and you can get some of it if you make a good deal with the government lol

keep in mind that the fluoride in our toothpaste and water is often fluoride ions. fluoride ions are a lot different than fluoride gas.

i use to work a lot with conc. HF. It's mean stuff too. The fluoride complexes with the calcium in your body. Permeates your skin within seconds. There has been a death documented from having about 100 mL spilt onto someone's thigh, he was dead in a matter of hours. I believe that death can result from 10% of your skin being HF burned.

I would think that the very small amount of fluoride ions in water and toothpaste would remove the very top layer of calcium from our teeth. Our saliva helps to regenerate that calcium over time also. It reminds me of a metal polish, removing the outer dirty layer to reveal fresh clean metal.

As for killing people, fluorine gas will do it, but it's much easier to create chlorine gas due to the high electronegativity of fluorine. It's stingy.

Another thing, about the glass, fluoride ions will dissolve glass by complexing with the silicon forming silicon hexafluoride.

[edit on 18-11-2004 by speedmojo]

lets say we found out how to alter the chemical compositions of elements.

If we took Fluoride and made it want to gain an electron even more.

And then we took Francium and made it want to lose an electron even more and making its half life much longer...

How big of an explosion would this chemical reaction create?

Just having few atoms "willing to trade electrons" isn't enough to create explosion, there have to be enough material and reaction has to very fast and it has to release enough energy.

Most of explosives have complex molecular structures so that break up of that molecular structure and "rearranging" of atoms can release maximum amount of energy. (more "denser" molecule with bigger amount of atoms and bonds between them > bigger amount of energy stored)

Or what you think about these names of some molecules: Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine
Cyclotetramethylene-tetranitramine
Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane

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Of course there are "multi-component" explosives which have "fuel" and oxidizer as separate molecules. (like black powder)

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en.wikipedia.org...

people.howstuffworks.com...

What makes you say Fr and F want to join?
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The Uranium Plutonium analagy is also confusing


Altering the nucleus of an element would be a nuclear reaction, I don't think it'd be called a chemical alteration. Differently charged particles do result from chemical reactions tho.


I don't think gaining an electron would affect its half life. I don't think ions /anions have longer or shorter half lives than non charged particles. Adding or removing neutrons would alter the stability, but thats what makes up the different isotopes.

As ideas go, it is an imaginative one, but also not very practical.

First off, to make a chemical react enough, you'll need a decent supply of the stuff. This would be a problem; Francium is the 2nd rarest element on Earth; according to Wikipedia, there is only about 30g on Earth at one time.

Secondly, Franciums most stable isotope has a halflife of only 22 minutes. The most francium ever collected is about 100,000,000 atoms. This would make a bomb nigh impossible; scientists extract francium then hold it in place with lasers.

This brings us to the last point: cost. Fluorine is rather common, even chlorine would be good enough to use. Francium, rare as it is, would cost a bundle to buy and/or make. Then you would actually have to design a bomb specially... it all adds up.

As I said, it's a good idea in theory, but in reality it just can't be done

Francium Flourine Bomb? Yeah not gona happen. a) Its short half life, would have to collect huge amounts so that tby the time you got the bomb into place there was still a decent amount of francium left.
b) When you mix francium and flourine, if a reaction took place It would probably form some type of ionic compound(Because this is what happens when atoms of vastly different electronegativities do, Francium; roughly 0.7 and flourine roughly 4) This would be an exothermic reaction most likely but would release tiny amounts of energy when cmpared to a nuclear reaction. The formation of new compounds is a rearrangement in the electromagnetic field(due to nuclei getting closer and electrons entering more stable, lower energy orbits) while nuclear reactions are rearrangements in the nuclear field, ie forming more stable nuclei, and since the strong nuclear force(governing the attraction of nucleons) is hundreds of time stronger than the electromagnetic force, this is why nuclear reactions release so much more energy...
Also the reaction wouldnt produce many gases(if any at all) which is what conventional explosives do. They get small volumes of explosive which react and produce lots of gases such as CO2 NO2 H2O(vapour), which all expands rapidly creating a shock wave which is what does the damage.

reply to post by Yarnos

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First of all, the element is called fluorine, not fluoride. And second, fluorine can be used for a lot of good stuff, like toothpaste because it is good for your teeth, and it's also used in teflon pans to prevent any sticking from happening. It is a useful element, but I think what you were talking about was chlorine, because chlorine is used in drinking waters to kill any present bacteria. I never heard anything about fluorine in drinking water...or maybe I'm mistaken...

So the study funded by Alcoa tells us. Alcoa is the world's largest manufacturer of aluminum. A by product of aluminum smelting is fluoride, which is a toxic substance. Very expensive to dispose of. No imagine if you can get someone to pay you to take it off your hands because it is good for our teeth and they want to put 1 part per million in our water supply.

I have a question. If one part per million is good for us, wouldn't two parts per million be twice as good for us? 1 part per million of a toxic substabce is one part too many.