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Plutonium: The most dangerous substance known to man?
- cperciva 4y agoThere is one substance for which an apple-sized quantity could (appropriately delivered) kill all of humanity: The naturally occurring organic substance known as botulinum toxin, which has an estimated LD50 of about 1.5 ng/kg.
- LadyCailin 4y agoAll natural and organic!
- stavros 4y agoAnd we routinely pay to inject it into our faces!
- Mumps 4y agoOne of my favourite writeups: https://www.the-angry-chef.com/blog/the-worlds-deadliest-thing https://www.the-angry-chef.com/blog/the-worlds-deadliest-thi...
- 29athrowaway 4y agoTritiated water may be more dangerous. Is like water but radioactive.
- yummypaint 4y agoIf I had to choose a radioactive isotope to imbibe, tritium would be my top pick. Unlike many actinides it isn't a "bone seeker" and is readily excreted alongside all the other water that passes through us. Realistically you drink alot of water and beer and you'll be fine. Also its decay products are very low energy and gentle compared to most.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoWhat I meant is if you drink highly tritiated water, it looks like water but it is corrosive.
- hinkley 4y ago“Sarah this is medicinal, leave me the fuck alone!”
- kenned3 4y agoThis sort of perpetuates the same myth about Plutonium being dangerous covered in the article. If you have the right plutonium isotope, in the correct shape and compress it just right.. it is a very dangerous metal. if you have a small piece of it, it is rather harmless given it is an alpha emitter and can be stopped via single sheet of paper. Tritium falls under the same category. If you have a nuclear device, and put tritium in it, the tritium participates in the reaction and effectively "boosts" the yield. If you have some Tritium, it is a weak beta emitter and you will either exhale it out (Tritium gas) or urinate it if it is in liquid form. Like all radioactive material it does increase your chances of cancer, but you would need a fair amount of it. Given Tritium is an isotope of Hydrogen, it isn't "like water" it IS water..but radioactive. water - H2O Heavy water - D2O Super heavy water - T2O
- Gordonjcp 4y ago> if you have a small piece of it, it is rather harmless given it is an alpha emitter and can be stopped via single sheet of paper. Thing with alpha emitters is, if you get it on you the outer layers of skin will stop it before it does much damage. If you get it *in* you, where there's living tissue way closer to the surface like in your mouth or your lungs, it'll give you an absolute rip-roaring tumour.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThe most important decontamination procedure is a shower. I think case with plutonium is helped by the fact that we do not normally eat lumps of metal.
- kennend3 4y agoMost adults stopped putting strange things in their mouths a long time ago. But agree, Alpha emitters are a problem if taken internally, which is why i stated breathing/drinking tritium increases cancer risks. there is not a clear line between "alpha exposure" and "rip-roarding tumour"... See "nuclear medicine", "radioactive tracers" etc for examples of where alpha emitters are intentionally given to patients.
- kris-nova 4y agoMoney
- 123pie123 4y agoyup - if you define dangerous as the most people killed by/ in pursuit of it. but money to me, enables greed, which kills
- smabie 4y agoMoney isn't a substance tho, it's an idea/concept.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zamnos 4y agoactually, life is what kills everybody in the end. Even those that aren't greedy. But that's kinda useless as a conversation point.
- quickthrower2 4y agoYou can also blame physics, and time
- maxbond 4y agoThe main thing about money, Bud - it makes you do things you don't want to do. https://youtu.be/XCSOsFe42P8?t=95 https://youtu.be/XCSOsFe42P8?t=95
- anonporridge 4y agoMoney is one of the most powerful tools for enabling cooperation ever devised, perhaps only rivaled by spoken and written language. Like all tools, mass cooperation through money is a double edged sword. It's behind every war, every genocide, every enslavement. It's also behind every medical treatment, every piece of food in the grocery store, every act of emergency aid. Without money, yes, we wouldn't have large scale devastation and consciously inflicted suffering. But we would also all still be living in huts and caves regularly dying of dysentery and starvation and would be lucky to see 2-3 of our 12 children make it to adulthood.
- jldugger 4y ago> Of ingested plutonium, 99.99 percent will be excreted in a day or two.3 The experimenters had to figure out a way around this.1 Their solution was reprehensible. > > In 1950, Manhattan Project doctors injected 18 people, ages 4–69, with plutonium without their knowledge. _Yikes_.
- wolpoli 4y agoNow I finally understand the pre-recorded messages in Portal 2.
- bobsmooth 4y agoAnd even then none died from the radiation.
- mannykannot 4y agoOh, that's all right, then.
- mc32 4y agoAnd evidently they lived longer than the median for their industry colleagues as well as the general population. So a couple of things could contribute: the healthiest of fit people were chosen, their jobs drove them to be healthier than their peers or somehow ingesting the stuff had a positive effect on them. The last one is dubious but without evidence to the contrary should be considered.
- ajuc 4y agoTheir health was monitored more closely because of these experiments giving them much better than average health outcomes.
- jmyeet 4y agotl;dr the article is refuting 1970s (and earlier) era claims about how lethal plutonium is by citing anecdotes and pointing out the maximum toxicity requires a totally unrealistic delivery mechanism. As an aside, I believe Plonium-210 [1] is widely viewed as more toxic than plutonium. The only thing more toxic than that is fentanyl and that's only if you're a cop [2]. Anyway, so this is just a pro-nuclear power piece. Do with that what you will. I'll just point out that with incidents like the East Palestine derailment you will often find that the companies responsible have their liability limited by law. In the case of nuclear power plant operators, their potential liability is strictly limited by the Price-Anderson Act [3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium-210 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium-210 [2]: https://www.grid.news/story/misinformation/2022/12/23/the-dangers-of-fentanyl-misinformation-why-the-myth-that-police-are-overdosing-by-touching-the-drug-keeps-going/ https://www.grid.news/story/misinformation/2022/12/23/the-da... [3]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:text=The%20Price%2DAnderson%20Act%20authorizes,to%20members%20of%20the%20public https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....
- effie 4y agoThe article is citing real experiments, names and numbers, and is very well argued.
- butlerm 4y agoThe press regularly repeats claims that a relatively small amount of fentanyl seized in a drug bust or something would be enough to kill a large fraction of the population of United States. Such claims may be wildly overstated however because the LD50 of fentanyl in humans is unknown. The estimated value is basically a guess.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI expected this to be about organic mercury.
- cperciva 4y agoAt 20-60 mg/kg, the LD50 of methylmercury is 3000000x higher than botulinum toxin.
- ceejayoz 4y agoDose isn't the only aspect of danger, though. You'll find botulinum toxin at dental, neurology, plastic surgery, etc. offices being safely used regularly. You're unlikely to find methymercury.
- java-man 4y agoOr FOOF [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride [1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-dioxygen-difluoride https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
- Gordonjcp 4y agoThing with FOOF is you'd notice your bones dissolving almost immediately. Poor old Karen Wetterhahn didn't even show symptoms for a year, from a milligram drop of it.
- stavros 4y agoThat's a tragic story, she was taking all precautions and thought she was safe, but it turned out they were inadequate.
- slackdog 4y ago> Thing with FOOF is you'd notice your bones dissolving almost immediately. I'm not sure about FOOF, but that's definitely not the case with hydrofluoric acid. With hydrofluoric acid, depending on the concentration, burn symptoms can take several hours to manifest, luring victims of accidents into a false sense of security and causing them to delay seeking treatment.
- lofatdairy 4y ago>I have worked in a plant where I had half a critical mass in this hand, barehanded and dressed in street clothes, and half in this hand, wearing a lab coat, and I’d put this half in a pocket on this side and this half in a pocket on this side and walk down the hall. If those two ever got together, there’d be a blue flash. They never got together because I was between them. There's "our design docs are photos of whiteboards" normalization of deviance and there's whatever the hell this is. Absolutely bonkers that there wasn't a demon core-like incident.
- littlestymaar 4y ago> They never got together because I was between them. I don't know how confident I would be about this, given that our body is mostly made out of a very good neutron moderator (water)…
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoAlpha radiation can’t penetrate the skin
- littlestymaar 4y agoThis has nothing to do with alpha rays (which are helium nuclei), but with neutrons, and fast neutrons are much less prone to generate a fission than thermal neutrons, so having a moderator in between your fissile material parts reduces the amount of fissile material you need to achieve criticality. That's how nuclear reactor work, by the way. And this is also what happened to John Bistline on the 4th of June 1945 at Los Alamos. Edit: in fact the first ever recorded criticality accident ever recorded involved the water in the body of a scientist (Otto Frisch), though the water was acting as a neutron reflector here, and not as a moderator.
- avidiax 4y agoPeople walk around with a loaded gun in their pants. They just (usually) carefully manage not to pull the trigger. Would it be better to walk down the hall twice? Slightly, sure. Turns out it wouldn't have made a difference that we know of.
- gmuslera 4y agoFor fictional substances known to man, I would pick red matter (from Star Trek, a drop could turn a planet or star into a black hole) or Ice9 (from Cat's Cradle, a form of solid water that would turn all water in contact with it into Ice9). A very small mass of them is enough to kill all life in a planet. I suppose the next one in the scale is grey matter, that with a bit more than a Kg could kill all life in the planet in the right conditions.
- gs17 4y agoThe game 999 has an even worse version of Ice-9 hypothesized, which doesn't even need to come into contact with other water to convert it all.
- kadoban 4y agoSome theorized variations of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay are essentially an unstoppable bubble of complete destruction (not even known physics remains intact) spreading in every direction at the speed of light.
- hinkley 4y ago> A number of theories suggest that cosmic inflation may be an effect of a false vacuum decaying into the true vacuum. The inflation itself may be the consequence of the Higgs field trapped in a false vacuum state. Basically the Big Bang may be younger than the matter in the universe.
- orlp 4y agoStrange Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet) is conjectured to convert regular matter into it upon contact.
- chasil 4y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo
- geocrasher 4y agoAll I can say is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core The article actually mentions it (not by name). But I think that the difference between the Demon Core and your average chunk of Plutonium (non-critical) is not well understood by most people. Which is why people are afraid of all sharks- A single frame of reference for something that's multi-faceted.
- bombcar 4y agoThere’s certain things that it’s better to “incorrectly” have people be scared of than trying to be precise. Just like the “treat every gun as loaded” rule - for those not directly involved in nuclear science, treat all nuclear vessels as demon cores and remain decently far away.
- h2odragon 4y agoIn terms of humans actually killed, water might be the most dangerous substance we know.
- Spooky23 4y agoAbsolutely, dihydrogen monoxide kills millions, but is stored openly in every daycare.
- h2odragon 4y agoThe rivers are absolutely filthy with the stuff.
- rich_sasha 4y agoWe're doing a good job filtering it out and only leaving the other stuff. Much of it organic!
- devoutsalsa 4y agoHydrogen hydroxide is arguably just as dangerous.
- tonymillion 4y agoIts unreported use in homeopathy in concentrations higher than 99.9% is truly criminal. Not to mention archeology scholars have suggested it was the cause of the destruction of Atlantis.
- wincy 4y agoI think we’ve all heard stories of senseless deaths of people who’ve died of dihydrogen monoxide poisoning. Even more damning of the modern factory farming complex, did you know that dihydrogen monoxide is by far the most commonly used industrial solvent in not only industrial but also agricultural processes, used on a scale that would absolutely shock the average person. The rice and bottled water industries are examples of especially egregious offender in this respect. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a factory or farm anywhere not using it. They put it in our food, the water we drink, and even more shocking, they aren’t required by US law that it be labeled as one of the ingredients, so people can’t even make an informed decision about whether or not to avoid it! Personally, I’ve been on a multi day abstention from dihydrogen monoxide in my diet. I’ve been drinking only grain alcohol instead and based on the burning and tingling sensations I’ve been feeling I’m fairly certain my body is finally purging all the toxins I wasn’t able to when I was addicted to dihydrogen monoxide. I’ll make sure to post another update as I gather more data. If you’d like to learn more about this important subject that’s gone under the radar for too long, I’ve attached the MDS [0] about dihydrogen monoxide. We really need to ask our congresspeople to pass regulations and fund research investigating the potential harms of dihydrogen monoxide before it’s too late. [0] https://www.dhmo.org/msds/MSDS-DHMO-Kemp.pdf https://www.dhmo.org/msds/MSDS-DHMO-Kemp.pdf
- el_jay 4y agoFair warning to any folks who went in expecting a read about dimethylmercury: the article is about plutonium.
- _n_b_ 4y agoPlutonium is very pyrophoric, especially dust, powder, fines, shavings, etc. Plutonium metal likes to form a hydride layer that rapidly oxidizes in the presence of any water; this oxide then vigorously reacts with water. Plutonium fires have occurred at several national labs in the US, including two incidents that contaminated the Rocky Flats site. Forget demon cores and use as an elaborate poisoning agent, the stuff is a huge conventional safety hazard. Edit: my vote for actual most dangerous substance known to man, though, goes to chlorine trifluoride[1]. It will vigorously react with sand, bricks, asbestos, and other stuff that is usually reliably inert. [1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoWow. That might be the most reactive chemical that can be stably synthesized and kept at normal temperatures and pressures. I wonder if the Aliens movies got their idea for the blood from this stuff. > There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
- piuantiderp 4y agoIf I recall the detailed story, the workers sued the government for work hazards and they...conveniently added fluoride to toothpaste right around the time. See?! So safe even dentists recommentd it!111 /s
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoChemical bonds matter!
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- emmelaich 4y agoFascinating! Here's a summary of his book from which this article seems to be taken. https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop The book is here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1098308964 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1098308964
- ofrzeta 4y agoRelated (but not as widely known as Slotin/Daghlian): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...
- ttyprintk 4y agoOff-topic, but one thing I wonder about Vinča is how its reactor incidents could have affected the dating of nearby archeology.
- reso 4y agoThe author appears to be subtweeting anti-nuclear activists. But I don't think waste is the issue most people worry about when they think about nuclear these days. Meltdowns are the real fear, and rightfully so.
- taylorius 4y ago"Meltdowns are the real fear, and rightfully so." Just build the plants well, in a safe part of the world (no quakes, tidal waves etc), and have some well paid, high I.Q people running them. They'll be fine. Nuclear power is such a gift to humanity. As much power as we need, and comparatively little waste. But no, some people fear it, so we have to build endless bullshit windmills, and strip mine Africa for the elements required for solar panels (branded as "sustainable energy", though both just go into landfill when they reach the end of their life).
- bazoom42 4y ago> have some well paid, high I.Q people running them Unfortunately even well-paid and high IQ people have been known to cut corners and take risks. Look at the space shuttle among many examples.
- doctor_eval 4y agoYeah I mean, look at that article. High IQ people carrying around subcritical chunks of plutonium. But it’s OK mum, I put them in different pockets! Isn’t physics amazing! What do you mean I picked up the wrong coat? “Just build the plants well” is the civil engineering version of “No True Scotsman”.
- taylorius 4y agoI'm admittedly not a nuclear engineer - but I hear a great deal about how much modern nuclear plant design has advanced since the days of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and that our modern designs would not be susceptible to such catastrophes. Assuming this is somewhat true (I am just assuming that) we are erroneously allowing the ghosts of those terrible old events to stop us from investing in modern, safe nuclear energy.
- larsnystrom 4y agoI don’t know who Nader is, but if he said in 1975 that plutonium, or really anything at all, could kill 8 billion people then he was lying. We can be certain of this because there were only 4 billion people alive back then, so it was literally impossible to kill 8 billion people. Or maybe I’m just not in the mood for this article right now.
- fsh 4y agoAccording to this stackoverflow post, the quote is probably made up: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18236/did-ralph-nader-say-that-a-pound-of-plutonium-could-cause-8-billion-cancers https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18236/did-ralph...
- eesmith 4y agoThat link says Nader said "Any use of plutonium, a tiny 0.2 micrograms of which has given lung cancer to animals, must be viewed with utmost caution". That's pretty close. With a bit of Google Scholar search I found David Krieger's 1975 article "Terrorists and nuclear technology" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.1975.11458253 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.1975.11... which says: > Plutonium-239, the product of the nuclear fuel cycle used for the construction of nuclear weapons, is one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is also a substance which occurs rarely in nature and is almost entirely man-made in the nuclear fuel cycle. One microgram of plutonium-239 ingested into the lungs is capable of causing lung cancer. Approximately, one 8,000,000th of a pound of inhaled plutonium has caused lung cancer in animals. Thus, when effectively dispersed, a much smaller quantity of plutonium than would be needed for a nuclear bomb could necessitate the evacuation of dense urban areas. There's the 8 billion. We know that quotes get mis-attributed to more famous people. My guess is that Krieger's comment got rephrased and mis-attributed to Nader, who was, after all, talking about the same topic.
- eesmith 4y agoTurns out I can't math today. 1/(one 8,000,000th) = 8 million, not 8 billion.
- bell-cot 4y agotl;dr; version: "Walter Cronkite, a revered American journalist, told us in 1977 that Plutonium is the most dangerous substance known to man. That statement was widely believed, and widely repeated. But that statement is false. Unless you are really stupid about the critical mass, Plutonium has a quite innocuous MSDS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_data_sheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_data_sheet ), and is almost impossible to poison a person with." The Real Problem: Walter Cronkite's statement was true, but in a big-picture contextual and somewhat poetic sense. The fraction of humanity with any reason to care about the MSDS safety of plutonium is ~0%. The fraction of humanity living in (in 1977, and often since) a world which seems threatened by a hellish large-scale nuclear war is ~100%. Making the "MSDS Argument" to people in the latter group is often a good way to convince them that you're an obnoxious and uncaring little jerk, eager to show off that he read a science textbook at school. Analogy: Read a bit about the lethality of WWI battlefields in Europe, how many millions died on them, and how traumatized European society was by that war. Imagine that someone from that era claimed that the most dangerous substance known to man was the special steel alloy used to make artillery gun barrels and machine gun barrels.
- HPsquared 4y agoOr the "WW1 technology" angle, the example that comes to mind is the invention of the Haber process for ammonia production. This allowed mass production of fertilizer (saving many from starvation) but also enabling mass production of explosives (again with many peaceful civil applications) which enabled industrial scale wars like WW1.
- jbverschoor 4y agoAhhh. Duke Nukem's Plutonium Pack
- denton-scratch 4y ago> TV shows such as Edge of Darkness (1985), which has the principal character Jedburgh dying of radiation sickness following contact with plutonium. Jedburgh actually brings together two subcritical lumps of plutonium in his hands, and causes a criticality incident.
- permo-w 4y agowere Nader and Cronkite not talking about nuclear bombs?
- MarkusWandel 4y agoFor something that debunks other stories, it's not terribly accurate. The Slotin and Daghlian accidents were not bomb assembly and not "bringing together enough Plutoniom". They were about toying with an almost-critical bomb core and neutron reflecting materials. In both cases, familiarity bred contempt and a minor slip-up caused the thing to go critical. Same casual attitude as "carrying half a critical mass on each side in a lab coat pocket". What if once you forget and hang up the coat with the pieces still in the pockets?
- amai 4y agoPlutonium, Schmonium... Have a look at the blog "Things I won't work with": https://www.science.org/action/doSearch?AllField=Things+I+won%27t+work+with https://www.science.org/action/doSearch?AllField=Things+I+wo... One example I recall from the blog is "It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride
- 542458 4y agoI’ve seen the blogpost before, but the Wikipedia article is great. From Wikipedia: > This oxidizing power, surpassing that of oxygen, causes ClF3 to react vigorously with many other materials often thought of as incombustible and refractory. […] In one particular industrial accident, a spill of 900 kg of ClF3 burned through 30 cm of concrete and 90 cm of gravel beneath. Two things: First, the idea of burning (not melting!) through 1.2m of what is effectively stone is wild. Second, somebody had 900kg of this stuff in one place?!