Bismuth

Bismuth is an extremely rare heavy element commonly used to make versatile chipsets and other late-tier items. It is a post-RBMK material.

Production

Bismuth is found in the decay chains of most nuclear waste, short-lived and long-lived nuclear waste, most of which consist of 15% bismuth with a few exceptions: neptunium fuel produces absolutely no bismuth and decayed highly enriched plutonium-241 fuel waste consists of 55% bismuth.

Bismuth can be bred more directly using bismuth zirconium fast breeders which yields 43.3% Bismuth fully depleted, with an initial investment of 1 bismuth nugget per billet, making a total of 8 nuggets in investment per rod to potentially get ~20-21 nuggets (assuming average normal distribution).

Bismuth can be obtained from decaying lead-209, produced by spent low enriched australium fuel.

Bismuth can also be made by processing heavy metal bedrock ore with high-performance solvent.

Bismuth has very specialized uses in chipsets, as stated, which are used in the control cores of the fusion reactor and even the DFC. Also bismuth used for making vacuum refinery and hydrotreater.

It is also used to make moderated fuel and control rods for the RBMK, which allows for more compact designs that use slow neutron fuels, SiOX cancer medication to eliminate lung diseases, a tier 5 anvil, and the bismuth pickaxe.

In real life, bismuth has numerous applications all varying from each other.
- This includes medicine (Pepto-Bismol), cosmetic pigmentations, alloys, and non-toxic lead replacements.
- As stated, it is used to replace Lead in some applications, this is due to it being relatively non-toxic, despite being a heavy element right between lead and polonium of all things.
It is not particularly rare or hard to come by in real life.
Although non-radioactive in game and often considered so in many places, bismuth is actually radioactive, just with a ridiculously long half-life.
- Its half-life is 2.01×10¹⁹ years, which is 20,100,000,000,000,000,000 or twenty quintillion one hundred quadrillion years.
  - This is a relatively recent discovery, as this half-life is well over a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe.