4 ms·
This is the nature of highly radioactive materials. Walk past it? No problem. Walk on the crushed capsule, brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe, eat
by phyzome 4y ago
This is the nature of highly radioactive materials. Walk past it? No problem. Walk on the crushed capsule, brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe, eat a sandwich? Die horribly.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoHyperbole. "the equivalent of 10 X-rays in an hour" So no, walk on it and you would never know. Nobody dies, not without carrying it around for days. Then they get burns. It's important to understand the numbers - and the magnitude of this radiation source is concerning but not dire.
- colanderman 4y ago> crushed capsule is key here -- leading to ingestion, which is much more dangerous than brief proximity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose#Physical_factor...
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago"An hour of exposure at about a meter away is the equivalent of having 10 X-rays, and prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer, they said." Ingesting is of course a completely different story and will indeed kill you horribly.
- cwillu 4y ago“Walk on the crushed capsule [and then] brush your hand against the bottom of your shoe [and then] eat a sandwich? Die horribly.” is the intended reading.
- SamPatt 4y agoThat's one meter away. Inside your body? Another story.
- phyzome 4y agoThe point is that the danger depends on how people interact with it. That's why they're doing this PSA (and trying to recover it). It would be very easy for that little canister to get ruptured, and loose radioactive material is a very different game from nicely-packaged-in-a-capsule material.