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> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium. Except everyone who knows anything about it. Pluto

> While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium. Except everyone who knows anything about it. Plutonium is a hot topic because it's what you need to build a nuke, but the public perception that it is a significant as nuclear waste is simply completely misguided. Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you. It oxidizes easily, and it's oxides are heavy and non-soluble, so when it is released to the environment, it just tends to fall down and stay there. There is negligible biological uptake through eating, and while there is some uptake through breathing, plutonium does not tend to stay airborne. Various people have denounced environmental plutonium as something capable of killing billions. The toxicity of plutonium in humans is not known, simply because not enough people have died of it. There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body (and that's a long and horrible story), and there were a lot of people who worked coated in plutonium dust for a long time. Of the people who were injected with plutonium, most died of other causes. Suffice to say, plutonium is sufficiently non-radioactive that it's chemical toxicity is considered significant in it's lethality. Or, in other words, it's fine to consider toxicity of environmental plutonium as you would consider lead or other heavy metals. To put it short, plutonium being toxic is simply not a concern as far as nuclear waste is concerned. If all the plutonium produced by civilian nuclear power was pulverized and spread in populated areas, it would not make nuclear reactors as dangerous to people as wind power. (Somewhat ironically, because of the thorium that is released into the environment while separating the REE for the magnets.) Taking all the plutonium produced in a plant and dumping it in one spot doesn't make that spot as dangerous as the ground near a typical fuel station that was in use for the period leaded gas was used. Nuclear waste is really bad, but that's because of short-lived isotopes, which decay more often, and thus are more radioactive, and light radioactive materials, which are often soluble in water, have high biological uptake, and can stay in the atmosphere. Plutonium needs to be tracked really closely, but that is not because it's toxic, it's because it can be used to make a bomb. The more you know.

mikeash 13y ago
"In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed radioactive oatmeal in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company." What the fuck. The bit about Quaker is really nuts. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files for anyone who doesn't feel like googling it.
- joezydeco 13y ago
  Christ, I used to live a block from Quaker's R&D facility in the Chicago suburbs. They never mentioned anything about radioactive research there. I bet there's all kinds of skeletons buried in the backyard. Oh wait, now there's a Gatorade workout field on top of it...
- mseebach 13y ago
  "In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent." This - and not the plutonium - is the bad part. Your comment is completely irrelevant to argument the parent makes.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Of course it's relevant, he was elaborating on the experiments that OP was alluding to and expressing his shock. They aren't having a debate.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Excuse me? I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent, and I don't see how discussing a particularly egregious case of what was presented could possibly be "completely irrelevant".
    - anonymfus 13y ago
      >I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent Your comment reminds me old joke: "Doctor, you forgot about anaesthesia before surgical operation!" — "Don't worry, patient is mute.". There are many kinds of development disabilities. It was not ever said anything about mental disabilities.
comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield. The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices. That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt. If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.
- caf 13y ago
  The first two devices that North Korea has tested are thought to have been Plutonium-based (the third is inconclusive). North Korea is known to have produced and reprocessed Pu at its Yongbyon complex.
  - VladRussian2 13y ago
    as history and physics show there is no point in testing uranium bombs.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      Although the Little Boy design wasn't tested before use as it was a very conservative design, there have been quite a few tests of uranium based bombs - both implosion and gun type designs.
klapinat0r 13y ago
> The more you know. Thanks for an insightful post. While procrastinating for an exam a while back, I decided to read up on the Chernobyl accident. It always remembered it as a horrible accident (which it was), significantly due to the errors involved, and the massive impact it had on the victims involved. If I read your post correctly, it should not be attributed to plutonium. Would you mind elaborating on what kind of radioactive fumes/waste this could've been? While the number of victims may be high, the number of casualties is impossible to determine: could range from 50s to 200,000s. In either case, I assume this is due to other radioactive waste (airborne?), or am I mistaken?
- lostlogin 13y ago
  I too went down the Chernobyl history rabbit hole during so-called study. It's absolutely incredible. The big thing that gets me (which seems to happen at work in rather less cataclysmic style, and in every industry all the time) is the way that every misstep was followed by those involved making the worst possible decision. Then the next thing done compounds the earlier events - often with the chain of events occurring over months. Why do people universally do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, and miss every opportunity for course correction?
  - jcrites 13y ago
    Potentially relevant: "How Complex Systems Fail" http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai... I think the people operating complex systems are regularly making mistakes and then correcting them. When mistakes are recovered, the issue never becomes a problem, and there is no postmortem to come to our attention. It's only the cases where mistakes are made repeatedly over a long period, and the outcome is horrific, that the incident comes to our attention. It's a form of selection bias.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      In aviation, we call that the "swiss cheese model". There are holes distributed within it, and accidents happen when all the holes are aligned. The corollary is that you must fix the holes as soon as you find them, so they won't all align in your path. And you do find the problems before a disaster, but people don't like to fix things.
Tichy 13y ago
How is wind power dangerous to people? Because the production of wind wheels pollutes the environment? Or it diverts thunderstorms? Maybe people die in the construction of the turbines? But then, wouldn't people die in mining Plutonium and constructing nuclear power plants? Somehow my faith into that kind of number juggling to make nuclear power look good has not yet been 100% established.
- jws 13y ago
  Apparently about a dozen people a year are killed installing or maintaining wind turbines, however the post in question was referring to byproducts of refining the rare earths ultimately used for the magnets in the generators. http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf (Solar is fairly deadly too. Mostly installers falling from roofs.)
  - thwarted 13y ago
    (getting off topic here...) That pdf seems to be missing one crucial piece of information: the total number of turbines installed per year (or I can't find it). A 16x increase in (documented) accidents (not all of which are of equal threat) over 16 years does sound pretty dire and damning, unless the rate of installations has been growing at a larger rate. Do you know of any resource that provides that? I can only find megawatt rate of growth (which is a useful metric too, but not as usefully comparable since the events in this pdf seem to be primarily related to installations, not the output of the installations). Nothing is going to be completely safe. It's valuable to get accidents and events as close to zero as possible, but I suspect that's being done by increasing the denominator rather than reducing the numerator.
    - jws 13y ago
      Yeah, the PDF is not well written. I can't even tell if it means worldwide, or just in the UK. But it is probably accurate to an order of magnitude or so.
  - MichaelSalib 13y ago
mhartl 13y ago
This is an excellent and insightful comment. One quick note: it's and its are different words. I count ten occurrences of "it's", four of which should be "its": it's what you need [correct in original] its half-life it's only mildly radioactive [correct in original] It's an alpha emitter [correct in original] its oxides its lethality its *chemical toxicity* it's fine [correct in original] it's toxic, it's because [correct in original]
ekianjo 13y ago
Btw, for people out there who know nothing apart from the media gibberish on nuclear energy, the ongoing nuclear energy course by Larry Foulke on Coursera is a good place to start to better under all aspects of nuclear reactors and radioactivity.
rorrr2 13y ago
> Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you "if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose drops to the order of 5ug/kg" That basically makes it one of the most toxic substances that we know of.
- waps 13y ago
  Where does this information come from ? Wikipedia has much lower toxicity figures : > Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium.[91] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[96][97] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity Not that I expect wikipedia to be very trustworthy on contentious issues, but still, the references do seem to lead to relatively non-political websites.
rsync 13y ago
"There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body" False. The "demon core" killed two people in two separate incidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core ... and it was not injected, as you'll see.
- swamp40 13y ago
  It's also impossible to track all the exposures that lead to cancer that then killed the person. A "benign" form of radiation is a hard sell these days - I'm not buying it.

mikeash 13y ago

"In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed radioactive oatmeal in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company." What the fuck. The bit about Quaker is really nuts. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files for anyone who doesn't feel like googling it.

joezydeco 13y ago
Christ, I used to live a block from Quaker's R&D facility in the Chicago suburbs. They never mentioned anything about radioactive research there. I bet there's all kinds of skeletons buried in the backyard. Oh wait, now there's a Gatorade workout field on top of it...
mseebach 13y ago
"In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent." This - and not the plutonium - is the bad part. Your comment is completely irrelevant to argument the parent makes.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Of course it's relevant, he was elaborating on the experiments that OP was alluding to and expressing his shock. They aren't having a debate.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Excuse me? I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent, and I don't see how discussing a particularly egregious case of what was presented could possibly be "completely irrelevant".
  - anonymfus 13y ago
    >I'm pretty sure that the "developmentally disabled children" bit precludes informed consent Your comment reminds me old joke: "Doctor, you forgot about anaesthesia before surgical operation!" — "Don't worry, patient is mute.". There are many kinds of development disabilities. It was not ever said anything about mental disabilities.

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago

The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield. The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices. That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt. If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.

caf 13y ago
The first two devices that North Korea has tested are thought to have been Plutonium-based (the third is inconclusive). North Korea is known to have produced and reprocessed Pu at its Yongbyon complex.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  as history and physics show there is no point in testing uranium bombs.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Although the Little Boy design wasn't tested before use as it was a very conservative design, there have been quite a few tests of uranium based bombs - both implosion and gun type designs.

klapinat0r 13y ago

> The more you know. Thanks for an insightful post. While procrastinating for an exam a while back, I decided to read up on the Chernobyl accident. It always remembered it as a horrible accident (which it was), significantly due to the errors involved, and the massive impact it had on the victims involved. If I read your post correctly, it should not be attributed to plutonium. Would you mind elaborating on what kind of radioactive fumes/waste this could've been? While the number of victims may be high, the number of casualties is impossible to determine: could range from 50s to 200,000s. In either case, I assume this is due to other radioactive waste (airborne?), or am I mistaken?

lostlogin 13y ago
I too went down the Chernobyl history rabbit hole during so-called study. It's absolutely incredible. The big thing that gets me (which seems to happen at work in rather less cataclysmic style, and in every industry all the time) is the way that every misstep was followed by those involved making the worst possible decision. Then the next thing done compounds the earlier events - often with the chain of events occurring over months. Why do people universally do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, and miss every opportunity for course correction?
- jcrites 13y ago
  Potentially relevant: "How Complex Systems Fail" http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf http://www.ctlab.org/documents/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fai... I think the people operating complex systems are regularly making mistakes and then correcting them. When mistakes are recovered, the issue never becomes a problem, and there is no postmortem to come to our attention. It's only the cases where mistakes are made repeatedly over a long period, and the outcome is horrific, that the incident comes to our attention. It's a form of selection bias.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    In aviation, we call that the "swiss cheese model". There are holes distributed within it, and accidents happen when all the holes are aligned. The corollary is that you must fix the holes as soon as you find them, so they won't all align in your path. And you do find the problems before a disaster, but people don't like to fix things.

Tichy 13y ago

How is wind power dangerous to people? Because the production of wind wheels pollutes the environment? Or it diverts thunderstorms? Maybe people die in the construction of the turbines? But then, wouldn't people die in mining Plutonium and constructing nuclear power plants? Somehow my faith into that kind of number juggling to make nuclear power look good has not yet been 100% established.

jws 13y ago
Apparently about a dozen people a year are killed installing or maintaining wind turbines, however the post in question was referring to byproducts of refining the rare earths ultimately used for the magnets in the generators. http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf (Solar is fairly deadly too. Mostly installers falling from roofs.)
- thwarted 13y ago
  (getting off topic here...) That pdf seems to be missing one crucial piece of information: the total number of turbines installed per year (or I can't find it). A 16x increase in (documented) accidents (not all of which are of equal threat) over 16 years does sound pretty dire and damning, unless the rate of installations has been growing at a larger rate. Do you know of any resource that provides that? I can only find megawatt rate of growth (which is a useful metric too, but not as usefully comparable since the events in this pdf seem to be primarily related to installations, not the output of the installations). Nothing is going to be completely safe. It's valuable to get accidents and events as close to zero as possible, but I suspect that's being done by increasing the denominator rather than reducing the numerator.
  - jws 13y ago
    Yeah, the PDF is not well written. I can't even tell if it means worldwide, or just in the UK. But it is probably accurate to an order of magnitude or so.
- MichaelSalib 13y ago

mhartl 13y ago

This is an excellent and insightful comment. One quick note: it's and its are different words. I count ten occurrences of "it's", four of which should be "its": it's what you need [correct in original] its half-life it's only mildly radioactive [correct in original] It's an alpha emitter [correct in original] its oxides its lethality its *chemical toxicity* it's fine [correct in original] it's toxic, it's because [correct in original]

ekianjo 13y ago

Btw, for people out there who know nothing apart from the media gibberish on nuclear energy, the ongoing nuclear energy course by Larry Foulke on Coursera is a good place to start to better under all aspects of nuclear reactors and radioactivity.

rorrr2 13y ago

> Because it's half-life is so long, it's only mildly radioactive. It's an alpha emitter, so plutonium not in your body is not a risk to you "if inhaled or digested, however, plutonium's effects due to radioactivity overwhelm the effects of plutonium's chemical interactions with the body, and the LD50 dose drops to the order of 5ug/kg" That basically makes it one of the most toxic substances that we know of.

waps 13y ago
Where does this information come from ? Wikipedia has much lower toxicity figures : > Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium.[91] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."[96][97] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity Not that I expect wikipedia to be very trustworthy on contentious issues, but still, the references do seem to lead to relatively non-political websites.

rsync 13y ago

"There is no-one in the world who has died of plutonium exposure who did not have it injected into his body" False. The "demon core" killed two people in two separate incidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core ... and it was not injected, as you'll see.

swamp40 13y ago
It's also impossible to track all the exposures that lead to cancer that then killed the person. A "benign" form of radiation is a hard sell these days - I'm not buying it.