Subject: Well, since you're not a compound...
Author:
Posted on: 2018-08-17 20:42:00 UTC

... I guess you must be a mixture. And that means I can refer to the world's foremost authority on chemistry, nay, on science as a whole:



What If? is an excellent book which I highly recommend. Down on page 35, xkcd's Randall sets out to answer the question:

What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?

Working through your name, in order of atomic number, these are his comments:

-The cube of hydrogen would rise upward and disperse, like a balloon without a balloon.

-The... nitrogen drift[s] around, slowly dispersing.

-[No specific comment on Molybdenum. It's pretty stable stuff.]

-[Actually no comment on Holmium, either. It apparently changes colour depending on lighting conditions, from yellow to red.]


So far, so good, but Es is a 7th-row element:

-[On the sixth row] you would die from what we might call "extremely acute radiation poisoning" - that is, you would be cooked.

The seventh row would be much worse.

[...]

Unfortunately for our project, the transuranic elements don't vanish quietly. They decay radioactively. And most of them decay into things that also decay. A cube of any of the highest-numbered elements would decay within seconds, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.

The result wouldn't be like a nuclear explosion - it would be a nuclear explosion.


...

At this point, I was going to reveal that you actually have an ace up your sleeve that might save you. Holmium, you see, is an aggressive neutron scavenger - it's actually used to poison nuclear reactors, to stop the chain reaction from running. So I was thinking it would dampen the explosion for you.

Except... Einsteinium decay isn't a chain reaction. It's just an everything-explodes-at-once reaction. So while the Ho would probably cut down on some of the elemental shrapnel, the Es is still gonna just go boom. :)

(Now, if I had the Ho, it would really help with my Uranium and Radon. Actually, Indium can fulfil the same purpose... but I've got the same Es as you, so I'm going to go boom anyway.)

hS

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