When I was at the NIST IBE workshop, I happened to notice the NIST
standard reference material (SRM) catalog.
Leafing through it, I noticed you could order a bunch of cool stuff,
like, for instance, Plutonium-239.
So, interesting question: could you order enough fissile material to
make a bomb? Unsurprisingly, the answer appears to be "no."
NIST's Pu-239 SRM is 220 Bq and costs you about $1000 ($937).
Plutonium's activity is about
4.4x10^{-10} g/Bq, so the SRM consists of about 10^{-7} g.
Critical mass of plutonium is about
10 kg (10^4 grams), so you would need need 10^{11} samples, for a price of $10^{14} (100 trillion).
Seems a bit spendy.
I should probably mention that the samples are 5 ml each, so this would be 5x10^8
liters of fluid, which might be a bit much to manage. Also, I suspect that NIST would
notice when you called to place your order.

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