One day...I SO have to drop a whopping great lump of potassium into a bog and run like hell. As it happens, theres a spare toilet available that isn't installed. Just need to get the power supply up and running again or buy a new one to make the potassium. I'd do it with rubidium but its incredibly expensive, as is caesium. Pity, because I've seen a video where somebody threw caesium into a bathtub of water. Result? scratch one bath tub, blasted to smithereens and a veritable mushroom cloud of smoke and water. Or break a vial of NaK alloy (a mixture of sodium and potassium, its liquid at room temperature, I've produced a little via electrolysis of mixed sodium/potassium hydroxide but the stuff is so damnably reactive that I'll have to build a fully contained inert gas chamber running under positive pressure, or do it in a vacuum chamber because I've never managed to even isolate the stuff, it ignites the microsecond it hits air, even under a jet of argon to displace as much air as possible, and with the crucible surrounded by a cylindrical shield. It ignited in showers of sparks instantly as it was produced at the anode. And the mixture of NaOH and caustic potash is MUCH more aggressive than molten NaOH alone. Sodium is doable, it just takes a little persistence in design of the electrolytic cell. It can, with a continual inert gas supply, even be isolated in the open air if using low temperature eutectic salt mixtures. A mixture of NaOH and KOH melts at around 200 degrees 'C but its aggressive as hell and whilst the nickel alloy anode used for NaOH melt electrolysis was fine after a 12 hour period immersed in molten caustic soda, in the NaOH/KOH melt it got corroded so severely that within hours it had sharpened itself to a needle-point tip and a razor sharp edge.
Going to try carbon electrodes next.
