That was a pretty interesting read, as I'd heard those "Plutonium is bad" talking points all my life. My rebuttal, being pro-nuclear, was also "you really ought not to be in the room with it...
That was a pretty interesting read, as I'd heard those "Plutonium is bad" talking points all my life. My rebuttal, being pro-nuclear, was also "you really ought not to be in the room with it anyway."
Turns out a sub-critical mass is basically as risky to handle as lead, don't inhale it, mix a Plutonium solvent too quickly, or lower a tungsten carbide shield fully on to it and it's more or less okay.
To borrow an XKCD joke about swimming in reactors, the lead you'll rapidly receive trying to clandestinely procure Plutonium seems to be the dangerous part. Or maybe if the Libyans will find your time-travelling DeLorean experiment.
Yeah, radiation danger is one of those things that is massively magnified in the public consciousness by a combination of ignorance (in the literal, non-judgmental sense) and lack of personal...
Yeah, radiation danger is one of those things that is massively magnified in the public consciousness by a combination of ignorance (in the literal, non-judgmental sense) and lack of personal control. There's decent research to suggest that the act of evacuating Fukushima led to worse overall health outcomes than leaving pretty much everyone in place would have done, for example.
As someone with a physics background, I've taken great joy over the years showing people a faintly glowing tritium key fob and explaining that yes, it really is radioactive and no, it won't do me any harm/set off airport detectors/randomly consume us all in a fiery explosion of death. Radiation deserves respect, and in a lot of ways I wish more other industrial processes were regulated that stringently, but it's a shame that it goes hand in hand with such significant and widespread fear.
Does it though? AFAICT, the LNT model talks mainly about long-term effects. 6Sv might be enough for lethal acute radiation syndrome, but it's not enough to "guarantee" cancer because that's...
The central hypothesis that guides our nuclear regulatory policy is called the linear no-threshold model (LNT). LNT claims that radiation harm depends only on the total dose – that it does not matter whether you get that dose in 20 seconds or 20 years. According to LNT, Stevens should have been dead ten times over.
Does it though? AFAICT, the LNT model talks mainly about long-term effects. 6Sv might be enough for lethal acute radiation syndrome, but it's not enough to "guarantee" cancer because that's impossible. It's also impossible for cancer to kill you within 9 days of exposure to the carcinogen. This is mixing up two very different ways radiation can kill you.
The Manhattan Project did do a number of much less deplorable plutonium experiments. The most important was the UPPU (U P Pu – you pee Plutonium) Club. This was a group of 26 workers who had the highest level of plutonium in their urine of all the people on the Manhattan Project.
Great club name aside, considering we see some outcomes significantly better than the expectation ("seven of the group had died compared with an expected 16 deaths based on mortality rates of U.S. white males." - were they all white though, and did they account for the obvious ones like socioeconomic status?) and some outcomes that sound like the author is weaseling out of saying they're worse ("Eight of the 26 workers had been diagnosed as having one or more cancers, which is within the expected range."), I'm going to have to question the statistical significance of these findings. It's not impossible the exposition had no or a negligible effect, but I wouldn't go there from just 26 samples.
Plutonium is a weird one to pick for this argument, imo. I'm not familiar with any of the negative statements about Pu quoted at the beginning of the article. However, because it's synthetic, hard to get, hard to absorb a significant amount, it seems like studying the effects of radiation, in particular the LNT model vs its competing hyptheses, would be extremely difficult when focusing on Plutonium, because you'd always get low case numbers. I'm very interested in an actual scientific work-up of that problem, whereas Pu in particular is kind of boring. Thus, this article feels a bit like a strawman attack on LNT by way of Pu.
That was a pretty interesting read, as I'd heard those "Plutonium is bad" talking points all my life. My rebuttal, being pro-nuclear, was also "you really ought not to be in the room with it anyway."
Turns out a sub-critical mass is basically as risky to handle as lead, don't inhale it, mix a Plutonium solvent too quickly, or lower a tungsten carbide shield fully on to it and it's more or less okay.
To borrow an XKCD joke about swimming in reactors, the lead you'll rapidly receive trying to clandestinely procure Plutonium seems to be the dangerous part. Or maybe if the Libyans will find your time-travelling DeLorean experiment.
Yeah, radiation danger is one of those things that is massively magnified in the public consciousness by a combination of ignorance (in the literal, non-judgmental sense) and lack of personal control. There's decent research to suggest that the act of evacuating Fukushima led to worse overall health outcomes than leaving pretty much everyone in place would have done, for example.
As someone with a physics background, I've taken great joy over the years showing people a faintly glowing tritium key fob and explaining that yes, it really is radioactive and no, it won't do me any harm/set off airport detectors/randomly consume us all in a fiery explosion of death. Radiation deserves respect, and in a lot of ways I wish more other industrial processes were regulated that stringently, but it's a shame that it goes hand in hand with such significant and widespread fear.
Does it though? AFAICT, the LNT model talks mainly about long-term effects. 6Sv might be enough for lethal acute radiation syndrome, but it's not enough to "guarantee" cancer because that's impossible. It's also impossible for cancer to kill you within 9 days of exposure to the carcinogen. This is mixing up two very different ways radiation can kill you.
Great club name aside, considering we see some outcomes significantly better than the expectation ("seven of the group had died compared with an expected 16 deaths based on mortality rates of U.S. white males." - were they all white though, and did they account for the obvious ones like socioeconomic status?) and some outcomes that sound like the author is weaseling out of saying they're worse ("Eight of the 26 workers had been diagnosed as having one or more cancers, which is within the expected range."), I'm going to have to question the statistical significance of these findings. It's not impossible the exposition had no or a negligible effect, but I wouldn't go there from just 26 samples.
Plutonium is a weird one to pick for this argument, imo. I'm not familiar with any of the negative statements about Pu quoted at the beginning of the article. However, because it's synthetic, hard to get, hard to absorb a significant amount, it seems like studying the effects of radiation, in particular the LNT model vs its competing hyptheses, would be extremely difficult when focusing on Plutonium, because you'd always get low case numbers. I'm very interested in an actual scientific work-up of that problem, whereas Pu in particular is kind of boring. Thus, this article feels a bit like a strawman attack on LNT by way of Pu.
"In 1950, Manhattan Project doctors injected 18 people..."
Should be 1945.
Huh. I wondered about that but didn't follow up. According to this page it was "[b]etween April 1945 and July 1947".