Hello Thought Emporium, This is Xenotime, and I'm a science yt'er! I've been hugely inspired by you and what you and your team do. While in Montreal, as one does, I made some Plutonium. I irradiated depleted uranium with neutrons from a homemade 0.5mCi Po-Be neutron source in a chamber with a moderator and shielding, and I built a homemade gamma spectrometer to try and detect any sign of the reaction happening. I did! It's not *great* experimental confirmation but there is evidence of U-239 --> Np-239 and Np-239 --> Pu-239. All of this was done, to the best of my knowledge, legally (a lot of things we're done weirdly to make it legal lol). In Canada, the Plutonium is a component of a sensing element in quantities of well under 5g, so it shouldn't be regulated as special nuclear material and the activity is low enough for it to be exempt quantity. I'm going to make a video about this project eventually but it will probably be a month or so. In the US, however, owning or making even a single atom of Plutonium is very illegal. This is not a very scientifically-sound law ofc (for example cosmic rays have a tiny chance of transmuting the Am-241 in smoke detectors into Pu lol), but that's how it is. Cody's Lab and all that. Wanting to do it legally is why I went to all the trouble of doing this in Canada (I don't live there). But it also means that I can't take the Plutonium home with me, I have either throw it away (I think is legally allowed but I do not want to), or give my little prize to someone else in Canada. Ideally someone who would both appreciate the amateur science and who I would be comfortable giving 10g of depleted uranium with a little dash of transuranium elements to. You've been a huge inspiration for me to both do cool science things and to make videos and share such cool science things with the world. I might not be going to uni for Physics, working in a nuclear medicine lab, or doing crazy amateur experiments without your videos. I learned what a gamma spectrometer was from your videos on the stupid radioactive pendants and antimatter from bananas, well before I showed up to physics lab class and they taught us how to use them. So thank you, and I guess consider this a gift of sorts. Just don't take it outside of Canada :3 As far as I know, this is the first time someone has made detectable amounts of Plutonium, without university/lab resources/equipment, just because they we're curious about it. The budget for this project was like $500 and half of that went to the Po-210 source which I can continue using for other things. Maybe someone did it before and I just don't know about it but it's just a fun little thing. Nothing has inspired me more to do science, at uni or in my dorm room, than doing things and exploring the natural world just because I'm curious about it. You've been a huge inspiration and a not-insignificant part of that story. Thanks for all that you've done, and I hope you enjoy this little trinket, holding a tiny quantity of a rather special element. All the best, Xeno yt: @xenotimeyt twc: @xenotimevt bsky: @xenoti.me fedi: @xeno@hexokina.se email: hkxeno@proton.me github: @xnotime discord: @x_notime P.S. If you receive this it would be great if you could contact me somehow (ideally over discord but email or anything else would probably work too) just to let me know it was received. P.P.S. The return address is not where I live just to clarify. P.P.P.S. Technically, "weapons-grade" is defined by how much Pu-240 contamination there is, which since this was such a small-scale production, is basically none. This is therefore, technically, Weapons-Grade Plutonium :3