4 ms·
At this point, I wonder how bad the area is. it has been 60+ years.
by jmclnx 4y ago
At this point, I wonder how bad the area is. it has been 60+ years.
- croes 4y agoIt's Plutonium 239 with a half life of 2.411×10⁴ years, so still bad.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoOnly 24050 years to go.
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoThen only half is gone though
- bombcar 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards seems to indicate most of the hazards have to do with ingestion of the dust vs radiation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sgc 4y agoIt is the radiation of course, but when it it is inhaled or ingested, rather than just being in the vicinity. Of course, that is true for many types of radioactive particles, and they do require cleanup or other remediation.
- rsynnott 4y ago> It is the radiation of course It's not _just_ the radiation; it's also pretty toxic, and, like a lot of heavy metals, the body struggles to get rid of it.
- colechristensen 4y agoPlutonium is particularly dangerous because it essentially does not exist in nature and evolution has had zero opportunity to create mechanisms to handle it.
- brendoelfrendo 4y agoIt's particularly dangerous because it is a heavy metal and an alpha particle emitter. There are plenty of both of those in nature, and evolution can't do a lot against them. Unless you can evolve tiny shields around your chromosomes to protect them from getting bombarded by high-speed particles.
- dTal 4y agoWe evolved elaborate error-correction mechanisms instead.
- dragonwriter 4y agoWhich still suck against ingested nontrivial alpha emitters. There are lots of things that exist in nature, that humans have been exposed to, and which we don’t have particularly good defenses against beyond the intelligence that enables “if a group of humans encounters this problem, some of them will die and the others will observe this and generally avoid it”.
- speed_spread 4y agoActinides (including Pu) oxidizes readily in air, spalling off radioactive PuO2 airborne dust with no external mechanism required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall#Corrosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall#Corrosion
- croes 4y agoDon't forget the inhaling part >It has been estimated that a pound (454 grams) of plutonium inhaled as plutonium oxide dust could give cancer to two million people
- belorn 4y agoThe question as I read it is about how concentrated the plutonium is in that region. Everything start to difuse given enough time.