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It 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 radioact
by sgc 3y ago
It 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoWe evolved elaborate error-correction mechanisms instead.
- dragonwriter 3y 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”.