Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
In order to cause damage, alpha emitters like plutonium must come in intimate contact with a material, such as the tissues of your lungs or bones or the inside of your favorite memory chip. A billionth of a gram of plutonium inhaled or swallowed is something to seriously worry about, but you can hold a lump of the stuff in your hand as long as it is covered with a leakproof cladding or vitrified into a ceramic. It is in this sense that plutonium is extremely toxic and hazardous to the environment, while at the same time not being particularly radioactive. Heavy shielding is not required between you and it. My understanding is that the heavy metal toxicity of Pu exceeds the radioactive toxicity by several (10?) orders of magnitude. In other words, the fact that Pu is an alpha emitter is irrelevant to the risk -- it's simply like lead poisoning only several billion times worse. Simple arithmetic yields that the amount of alpha exposure from a billionth of a gram of an alpha emitter with a half-life measured in thousands of years is infinitismal. - kitten
Patrick Juola <juola@suod.cs.colorado.edu> writes:
My understanding is that the heavy metal toxicity of Pu exceeds the radioactive toxicity by several (10?) orders of magnitude. In other words, the fact that Pu is an alpha emitter is irrelevant to the risk -- it's simply like lead poisoning only several billion times worse.
Simple arithmetic yields that the amount of alpha exposure from a billionth of a gram of an alpha emitter with a half-life measured in thousands of years is infinitismal.
The danger stems not from the radiation effects of the alpha exposure, which are not significant, but from the fact that continuous long term internal exposure will eventually cause your cells to undergo malignant transformation. This may take several decades, but it will kill you just as surely in the end. With regard to this risk, internal contamination with even a billionth of a gram of plutonium is something to worry about. Some believe, for instance, that a good part of the risk of lung cancer from smoking comes from inhaling alpha-emitting isotopes of polonium and other elements that are concentrated by the tobacco plant. I don't know enough about this theory to agree or disagree with it, but it has been around for a number of years. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $
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Patrick Juola