XPost: alt.engineering.nuclear   
   From: admin@microsoft.com   
      
   On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 02:53:03 +0000, Gregory L. Hansen wrote:   
      
   > 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.   
      
   As an actinide, I'd think it's probably fairly *chemically* poisonous,   
   regardless of its radiological properties...   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)