--- mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx wrote:
Mensaje citado por: John McCarthy <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU>:
Bernard Cohen, Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and sometime President of the Health Physics Society, offered to eat a gram of plutonium oxide or breathe a liter of plutonium oxide particles that could stay suspended in air for one minute. He said the additional hazard would be equivalent to taking a six month sabbatical in Denver.
Denver has enough plutonium of its own, thank you! For many years the
There was another side to this offer. Ralph Nader or Amory Lovins or some such would have to ingest an energy equivalent amount of fossil fuel. Would you rather drink 1 µg of plutonium or 5 g of gasoline? It has been known for over a decade that small amounts of radiation are beneficial, the optimum exposure being about 10 rem/year. The reason may be the stimulation of DNA repair mechanisms, which then go on and continue to repair DNA damaged through other causes.
Rocky Flats Arsenal near Boulder used to make triggers for thermonuclear weapons, but in recent years they have been trying to clean the place up a little bit.
Has anyone even tried to clean up a coal ash waste dump? It seems like the disposal of nuclear waste is far more tightly regulated than the disposal of coal waste, even though the latter contains heavy metals that remain toxic forever, compared to fission products which have a half-life of a few decades. Burning coal releases its embedded radon (from the decay of the 1 ppm uranium it contains); a coal burning plant releases more radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant. If the Nuclear Regulartory Commission were in charge of Grand Central Station, they would have to shut it down; the uranium in its granite structure exposes to public to unpermissible amounts of radiation. Reference: Petr Beckmann, "The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear".
There also have been people willing to eat DDT for breakfast, just to show it's harmless.
Arthur Robinson asserts that in fact DDT is harmless, and that the allegation that it is responsible for the death of birds due to thin egg shells is bogus. He claims there is no scientific evidence for this. Challange: Prove Robinson is wrong by providing citations to the primary scientific literature.
There is this unfortunate tendency to exaggerate all kinds of real or perceived dangers, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. If I recall, there were some experiments at Rochester University (maybe somewhere else) where studies were made on the matabolism of plutonium. I think the conclusion was that it is dangerous.
Every chemical is toxic. For sucrose the LD50 (the dosage which kills 50% of the subjects) for a 170 pound rat is 5 kg. Even too much water (1 gal is too much) causes death by hyponatremia. There doesn't seem to be a problem with public exposure to plutonium. But I remember Cambridge MA from 26 years ago. The air was full of awful smelling industrial effluents. [That's one place I hope never to visit again.]
But the Internet is loaded with literature for anyone who wants to do a survey, of varying degrees of reliability, of coures.
- hvm
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