XPost: alt.engineering.nuclear   
   From: glhansen@steel.ucs.indiana.edu   
      
   In article ,   
   daestrom  wrote:   
   >   
   >"Harlan Osier"  wrote in message   
   >news:89ec59b9.0407121648.7b99eb5e@posting.google.com...   
   >> You can eat it and nothing will happen !   
   >   
   >Sure, encase it in stainless steel and it passes through the GI track about   
   >as fast as your last meal.  And the steel shields any alpha.  But lodge a   
   >'raw' chunk of it in your lung where it will irradiate lung tissue for years   
   >and you're likely to develop a cancer.  Inject it into your blood stream (or   
   >through an open wound) and it may find its way to some bone marrow (another   
   >cancer).   
      
   As I recall, according to the BEIR-IV, plutonium workers had been tracked   
   for more than 50 years, and the risk above background is apparantly low   
   enough that there's no epidemiological data that can determine it.  So the   
   risk due to plutonium remains theoretical, based on extrapolation of   
   animal studies and other types of exposures in humans.   
      
      
   --   
   "The result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use   
   statistics."  (Overheard at international physics conference)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)