Am 05.12.2019 um 22:59 schrieb Henry Spencer:
On Thu, 5 Dec 2019, I wrote:You don't want to create a shower of secondary particles on absorption.
...Not only is lead awkwardly soft (although some lead alloys are
stronger), but it's not nearly as dense as tungsten...
A minor elaboration here: Tungsten is about the densest thing you can
buy at a sane price. Its density is similar to gold or uranium, and the
only things that are significantly denser are grossly-expensive
platinum-group metals. It's unfortunately difficult to work with --
terribly hard, somewhat brittle, so heat-resistant that welding is
impractical, etc. Tantalum isn't quite as dense, but rather more
tractable, and still denser than lead.
Henry