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) 
 > 
 > 
  
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