XPost: alt.engineering.nuclear   
   From: aji@cmandt.co.uk   
      
   Actually, Plutonium should not stay in your lungs for ever because your   
   lungs produce mucous to remove the dust in the air. I have been told it   
   stays in for a month or two. However, if you work in a Plut facility that is   
   not ventilated, your could be breathing it in all the time. AJI   
      
   "Gregory L. Hansen"  wrote in message   
   news:cd4rif$m1s$3@hood.uits.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   
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