4 ms·
A nuclear engineer once told me that you could eat more plutonium than you could caffeine, because the caffeine would instantly kill you, but the half life of p
by pfarnsworth 10y ago
A nuclear engineer once told me that you could eat more plutonium than you could caffeine, because the caffeine would instantly kill you, but the half life of plutonium was much longer and it would pass in and out of you before anything actually happened.
- rosser 10y agoThat claim is usually sourced to a guy named Bernard Cohen, who once volunteered to eat as much pure plutonium as Ralph Nader did caffeine. Nader demurred, and most people disavow Cohen, because who'd actually do that? That said, consider Albert Stevens. He was (unknowingly) injected with 131 kBq of Pu, accumulating a lifetime dose of ~64 Sv, and died of heart disease some 20 years later.