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)