XPost: alt.engineering.nuclear   
   From: richard.pickworth@btopenworld.com   
      
   I'd rather not.   
   Richard   
   "aji"  wrote in message   
   news:S6qdnfzvyMPsnpffRVnysw@brightview.com...   
   > 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   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)