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 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. There also have been people willing to eat DDT for breakfast, just to show it's harmless. 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. But the Internet is loaded with literature for anyone who wants to do a survey, of varying degrees of reliability, of coures. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos