Bitcoin to plutonium-238: how much Pu-238 does 1 BTC buy?
Illustrative price. This commodity has no public spot market; the figure is a composite estimate sourced from public reports — see /methodology.
One bitcoin currently buys roughly 12.7 g of plutonium-238 at a composite material-cost estimate of about $5,000 per gram. This is an illustrative price — Pu-238 has no public spot market — derived from DOE Office of Nuclear Energy publications, NASA Planetary Science Division reports on the Pu-238 production program (~$150M/year for ~1.5 kg/year), and the Cassini OIG report from 1997. The full methodology is at /methodology.
Pu-238 is the radioisotope that powers radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) — the heat-and-electricity sources on Voyager 1 and 2, Cassini, New Horizons, Curiosity, and Perseverance. It is non-fissile, not weapons material, and decays primarily by alpha emission with a specific activity around 17 Ci/g. It is also one of the most expensive materials anyone routinely manufactures.
Open the interactive viewer → — scrub the slider from 1 sat to 21 M BTC, or drag the date back to 2013 to see how the cube grows and shrinks across history.
About plutonium-238 and bitcoin
Pu-238 is dense — 19.8 g/cm³, slightly denser than gold — so a million-dollar position fits in a small cube the size of a sugar cube. The cube renderer on this page draws the cube to true scale next to the universal Shiba Inu reference, and applies a faint blackbody glow overlay because Pu-238 actually runs warm to hot at scale (a single 150 W RTG cluster glows visibly).
Because Pu-238 is an illustrative composite price rather than a market close, it is not in the machine-readable /data archive. The illustrative price lives in src/lib/illustrative-prices.json with provenance, sources, and an uncertainty band of roughly ±60%. A separately cited fully-loaded program cost (~$100,000/g) reflects the facility maintenance and regulatory infrastructure required for production but is less directly comparable to other commodities and so is not used for the headline BTC equivalence.
Frequently asked questions
- How much plutonium-238 does 1 bitcoin buy today?
- About 12.7 g at the illustrative material-cost estimate of ~$5,000 per gram. The estimate carries roughly ±60% uncertainty; see /methodology for the source decomposition.
- Why is Pu-238 so expensive?
- It's not naturally occurring at useful concentrations and has to be bred in reactors, then chemically separated and ceramicised — a multi-year, highly regulated process. The DOE/NASA production program runs at roughly $150M/year for about 1.5 kg of finished oxide. The per-gram price reflects that scarcity.
- Is Pu-238 weapons-usable?
- No. Pu-238 has too high a spontaneous-fission rate and decay heat to be useful as fissile weapons material — those properties are exactly what make it useful as a long-lived heat source instead. It is not subject to the same proliferation controls as Pu-239.
- Where does the $5,000/g figure come from?
- It's the midpoint of a $4,000–$8,000 per gram range derived from DOE/NASA program economics, the Cassini OIG report ($1,968/g in 1997 dollars, escalated to ~$3,800/g in 2024), and Atomic Insights analysis of RTG heat-source costs. /methodology has the full source list.
- Is this in the downloadable dataset?
- No — only commodities with a public spot market are in the /data archive (BTC, gold, silver, platinum, copper, Brent crude, wheat, coffee). Pu-238 appears on the visualisation as an illustrative reference.