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I want to make a McGuffin of sorts, a compound called BAP. Its slang as fuel. It's composition is BiAtPu. Would I need to add elements to make it stable? (If I can't make it stable, I'll need to not focus on the composition of the compound, which isn't my preference.)

The reason for the slang is that BAP is worth more than gold and there are tons of miners out west trying to make it rich. The three elements picked are radioactive, so that leads the BAP sickness, radioactive poisoning. Stability matters for the transportation of the mined compound, how it is mined and if it is unstable enough, ease of sabotage of stockpiles.

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  • $\begingroup$ @JBH, fixed the question and clarified need for answer. $\endgroup$
    – Sage Grant
    Oct 12 at 2:05
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    $\begingroup$ Bismuth and plutonium are metals; I'd expect them to alloy just fine, and it'd probably be possible to mix in a bit of astatine as well without compromising its structural stability- if astatine weren't hellaciously radioactive, with a half-life around eight hours. Any amount worth bothering with would melt the BiPu very quickly, unless you've got tons of cooling... and since it decays so fast, I don't see how it'd be useful as a fuel. You'd be constantly replacing your fuel rods. $\endgroup$
    – Someone Else 37
    Oct 12 at 3:05
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    $\begingroup$ On top of the existing comments, plutonium does not occur (in quantities that are measurable without some really advanced chemistry equipment) in nature. So you're never going to have a Plutonium Rush with miners gettin' out their pickaxes, because there's no such thing as a plutonium mine. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Oct 12 at 5:25
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    $\begingroup$ I made a minor edit to help people understand that you're not looking for a story-based answer (changing the "or should I just not focus on..." to the issue being a consequence of the inability to stabilize the chemistry). Other than that, you did a great job. +1. Note that if worse comes to worst, you can simply say, "and stabilizing chemistry" or some such to handwave the issue. I like the idea and the chemical combination is a choice that begs imagination. (When's the last time I heard of Astatine being combined with anything? Wonderful!) $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Oct 12 at 15:14
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    $\begingroup$ @PastychomperthanksMonica - I wouldn't get the OP's hopes up: natural nuclear "reactors" can only operate on young planets (where there's sufficient undecayed U235), and over a hundred-million-year operating period, the biggest one we know of only fissioned about five tonnes of U235. That's not going to create enough neutron flux to generate more than a few grams of Pu238 per year, scattered through a deposit half the size of a mountain. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Oct 12 at 16:11

2 Answers 2

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Make it Raluminium

Aluminium is surprisingly feisty for something you can find in your kitchen. You can turn it into foil, or airplanes, or thermite. It's been investigated as a laboratory reducing agent, and it'll make iodides, hydrides, and plenty in between, while alloying well with other metals -- and it'll dissolve in both acids and bases!

What's its secret? Aluminium is so reactive that it readily forms an oxide layer, which turns out to passivate it really well and preserve the pure metal underneath. It's like a wonderful chemical banana that automatically rewraps itself after every bite!

The catch is, Earth's geological history has been long enough to oxidize practically all of it into (relatively) chemically inert ore, which is why when aluminium was first discovered it was pricier than gold. It wanted its oxygens so bad, you could only get them off by whacking alumina with elemental sodium or potassium! People tried electrolysing salt solutions, but the aluminium produced that way would throw its electrons right back into the water and cook off hydrogen gas.

If you could melt aluminium oxide and electrolyse that you'd be home free -- but the thing melts at 2072 °C. But, it turns out, if you mix it with another aluminium compound (cryolite), that turns its melting point down a thousand degrees or so (just like how mixing salt with water lowers its melting point). That enabled the Hall-Heroult process to finally produce industrial quantities of aluminium metal, albeit at tremendous costs of energy and pollution.

(Recycle your aluminium cans, folks! They're still full of hard-won pure metal goodness under that oxide skin!)

I think what you're looking for is a setting shortly after the discovery of something like the Hall-Heroult process. With enough alternate-historying you could cook up an "aluminium rush" with all the juicy minerals vs ethics you can imagine (and still see today, for rare earth minerals, another possible reference to consider), with newfound smelting technology turning aluminium from a rare wonder into a pioneer's dream.

And guess what! It has a radioactive isotope! Of course actual aluminium-26's half-life is far too short for you to make dangerous radioactive alumina piles, but you can always handwavium it up into the billions of years and still have realistic chemistry. It makes sense that people would only discover its radioactivity once they were motivated enough to mine and refine it industrially (uranium oxides were used peripherally for two thousand years before people discovered radioactivity).

So there you go. Make it radioactive aluminium, or Raluminium. Have fun!

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    $\begingroup$ Your biggest remaining handwavium problem is: why would people want to use Raluminium as a power source if they have enough power to, well, refine Raluminium? After all we needed fossil fuels to refine aluminium, and fossil fuels continue to be a far more versatile energy source than aluminium. That's an economic and historical question for you to solve, though, not a chemical one. $\endgroup$
    – Shern Ren Tee
    Oct 12 at 5:40
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    $\begingroup$ Good news. Aluminium is recycled in a large proportion; about three quarters of all aluminium ever made is still in use. The world makes about 64 million tonnes of new aluminium per year, and in the same year reuses about 200 million tonnes of old recycled aluminium. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Oct 12 at 9:09
  • $\begingroup$ Aluminum is a great replacement for Astatine, and you also offered a great reason for pioneers as well. $\endgroup$
    – Sage Grant
    Oct 13 at 0:00
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    $\begingroup$ Funfacts: as an oxydizable power source, aluminum has roughly the energy density of wood. I did a project where I was working out the challenges of using leftover aluminum as a power source, and it just didn't rank. Aluminum does have a long-term radioactive isotope (Al<sub>27</sub>) with a half life in tens of thousands of years. This puts it in the running with Plutonium, but also means it's almost non-existent naturally. If you came up with a way to make it magically abundant, you would have a lot of magnesium in the mix. $\endgroup$
    – Robert Rapplean
    Oct 14 at 17:18
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The mixture of elements would certainly not be stable. The longest lived isotope of Astatine is At-210 at 8.1 hours. The amount of energy released by something with such a short half life would be staggering in any significant macroscopic sample and likely cause the disintegration and vaporization of the material. In addition the decay product Polonium is itself also radioactive and has a different electron configuration and valence number to Astatine so would not bond in the same way as Astatine does.

There is zero chance of any macroscopic quantity of such a substance occurring naturally or of anyone mining such a material. It is unlikely that artificiality produced material would be able to be assembled into any macroscopic sample. Of course there is nothing to stop you from proposing it and for the bulk of your readership to be none the wiser as to the half life of Astatine.

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    $\begingroup$ It's too bad we can't imagine a means of creating/storing/using an At-210 cartridge to power a Traveller-esque FGMP-15 energy weapon. That'd be a heckuva bang. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Oct 12 at 21:40
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    $\begingroup$ Yes! But although rather old fashioned I think things like Chlorine Trifluoride have been under rated. Although difficult to handle it is explosively good at destroying things. It sets fire to concrete, asbestos and sand. It is spontaneously flammable in contact with most organic matter and in the process generates fluorene and hydrofluoric acid which themselves can also cause huge damage (don't try this at home). $\endgroup$
    – Slarty
    Oct 13 at 10:53

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