Cesium: Fill & Download for Free

That's not so fast. An iPhone has a clock rate of 1.8 billion cycles per second. That's not quite as fast as cesium, but an iPhone can do 1.8 billion computations in one second.Light travels one foot in one billionth of a second. So the light from a cesium atom oscillates 9 times as it travels one foot. That changes what seems impossible (9 billion times per second) into something that is easily measurable, a little over an inch per cycle.In a computer you have to take into account the fact that light travels so slowly. Approximate the clock rate of a computer at 2 billion per second, and that means that in one cycle, the light travels only 6 inches. If the components are too far apart (and signals in wires go slower than light), the signal will arrive a cycle or more late.

Cesium (or Caesium) is element 55 in the periodic table. It is a member of the alkali metals with similar properties to lithium, sodium, potassium and rubidium. It melts at only 28.5 degrees C (83 degrees F), making it one of only 5 metals which are liquid at near room temperatures.The crust of the Earth contains about 3 parts per million of cesium - making it 3000 times more abundant than gold.It has only a few limited uses. The largest use is in the oil drilling industry where cesium formate is added to drilling fluids to increase density. There are other specialized uses, such as in atomic clocks.Because of its limited uses, there are only a few producers.The largest producer of cesium is the Tanco Mine at Bernic Lake in Manitoba, Canada. With annual global demand running at 30 tons per year, Tanco has enough reserves to last 3,000 years. The cesium bearing mineral is pollucite.Pollucite - which contains about 20% cesium also has value as a mineral specimen and as a gem.Annual global gold production is about 100 times larger than cesium production.It is wrong to say it is more expensive than gold. For example the site Cesium, 99.8% (metals basis) offers 50 gram ampoules for $892 - or $17.84 per gram. By comparison gold at its current price of $1294 per ounce is worth $41.4 per gram.Cesium is also a highly dangerous component of waste from nuclear power plants and is one of the biggest hazards in nuclear accidents. Cesium 137 has a half life of 30 years. Naturally occurring cesium however is 100% cesium 133 and is not radioactive.

One of my high school chemistry teachers only lasted 1 year at the first school in which he taught. He didn't exactly share this with everyone, when he came to my school the next year, but I worked as a teacher's aide in the chemistry department my senior year and we got to be decent friends.One afternoon, after doing some classroom demonstrations on the reactivity of Cesium, he began wondering how cool it would be to react a large chunk of Cesium in a 5 gallon bucket of water. How big of a bang/splash/fireball would it make?So he cleared all the desks to the edges of the room and placed a 5 gallon bucket in the center. He then cut a large piece of Cesium and wiped off the excess oil intended to prevent it from unexpectedly reacting while in storage. He placed the metal on a spatula and flicked it into the bucket. It sputtered, popped and danced around the surface of the water for a few moments then suddenly exploded and blew a large hole out the side of the bucket, spilling about 4 gallons of water all over the floor.OK, cool, no real harm done, he just needed to mop up the water and chunks of bucket. But shortly after he started mopping, his mop burst into flames. So he put it out and tried again, but it burst into flames once again.So he switched to paper towels and recruited another chemistry teacher to assist. But they couldn't make progress on the cleanup because the paper towels also began to randomly catch fire. They determined that the large chunk of Cesium had not reacted completely and had blown itself apart, scattering tiny grains of it all over the classroom. Every time they attempted to clean, the mop or paper towels burst into flames when the wet surface hit an un-reacted fragment from the chunk of Cesium. In the end, the school had to call in a HazMat cleanup crew to get the classroom ready before the next school day.Honestly, I'm not sure if he actually got fired or just resigned out of embarrassment.