About that time when young Queen Elizabeth was pawing the plutonium.

[NNadir]

One doesn't hear the Ralph Nader canard that "plutonium is the most toxic substance known" very much anymore. Like most other Naderisms, from his 1976 statement that "the world will be 100% solar powered by 2000" to his more famous 2000 statement that "Bush is the same as Gore," this one has suffered from exposure to some often vague concept known as reality.

To some extent, the full potential of the nuclear age, which is now leaving the mystic inspired doldrums, was influenced by urban myths like these.

As we embark on the second nuclear era, we are instructed by what the pioneers of the nuclear era did not have, history and experience. Guided by these, we can both be realistic about both the drawbacks and opportunities, the need for sobriety and an honest appraisal of the opportunity.

After writing a post here this morning, I was inspired to Google for more information on the unique phase transitions of plutonium metal and came across this fun reference to somewhat unrelated topic of the toxicity of plutonium.

On Thursday 12 July 1945 a US Army sedan drove Philip Morrison the 210 miles from Los Alamos to Alamagordo with the plutonium core of the world’s first nuclear weapon on his lap. At dawn four days later the priceless hemispheres the physicist had helped forge, then assembled, vanished in the highly successful Trinity nuclear test. The scientists who witnessed the test estimated the energy released equivalent to 18,600t of TNT.

Morrison, like many intimately involved in the debut of this new metal, lived to a ripe old age. He died earlier this year, aged 89. Hans Bethe, who led the physicists who had conceived the new weapon, died in March, aged 98. Glenn Seaborg, the radiochemist who discovered plutonium in 1941 and wrote the rules for working with it, lived to 87. Edward Teller, who used plutonium to trigger a thermonuclear reaction for his H-bomb, died aged 94.

Almost always the toxicity of a substance comes to light when people drop dead, but the radiotoxicity of plutonium was known to Seaborg before he discovered it...

...As the late John Fremlin, professor of radioactivity at Birmingham University, famously advised that public inquiry, plutonium can be sat upon safely by someone wearing only a stout pair of jeans. At Harwell in the 1950s the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth was handed a lump of plutonium in a plastic bag and invited to feel how warm it was. Morrison had been protected from alpha rays from his hemispheres by nickel plating. The Aldermaston scientists used gold foil...

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=188&storyCode=2029280



In spite of handling the plutonium, the old battle-axe soldiers on, a latter day Victoria without the sullen jubilees, making old Prince Charlie a latter day Prince Albert, although the later Edward VII would seem rather tame by comparison with the titillating would be king and sanitary napkin.

Returning to the question of the plutonium though, there's this interesting tidbit:

What was perhaps the world’s most exclusive club comprised a handful of Americans who became contaminated in accidents with plutonium in the scramble to make the first plutonium weapons. All were young white males who had been working under laboratory conditions acknowledged to have been “extraordinarily crude” in 1944-5, on one of four chemical processes: purification, fluorination, metal reduction and recovery. The kinds of accident they suffered included chemical burns by plutonium salt solutions. Members were enrolled by medics at Los Alamos because they were judged to have experienced the highest exposures to plutonium of all people engaged in the Manhattan Project. The chosen 26 were excreting the highest levels of plutonium in their urine. In 1952, when the club was formed, each was estimated to be contaminated with between 0.1-1.2µg of plutonium...

...By 1979, when George L Voelz and his colleagues published their 32-year medical follow-up of club members, two had died: the first from a heart attack in 1959, aged 36; and another from a road accident in 1975, aged 52. The surviving 24 had suffered no cancers other than two skin cancers “that have no history or basis that relate them to plutonium exposure”, they reported. They found the diseases and physical changes in club members were “characteristic of a male population in their 50s and 60s”. The mortality rate of the club was about 50% of the expected deaths among white American males at that time.

The moral of this story is not, of course, that plutonium is good for you, but that it’s nowhere near as deadly as it’s been cracked up to be...

[Warpy]

1. It's exactly as deadly as it's cracked up to be

when it's reduced to dust and inhaled or when it's imploded in the center of a nuclear warhead and reaches critical mass.

Thee's a reason Mother Earth didn't put it here for us to find.

[jpak]

3. Booooo!!! plutonium is good for you! Babies thrive on it!

Get with the plan...

:sarcasm:

Also - we should remember that the US was predicted to have ~1000 reactors by the year 2000.

Unfortunately, more reactors were CANCELED (110) than ever built (currently 103 in operation) in the US and the stranded costs of those cancelled plants were ~$112 billion dollars.

...and despite all the hype, and BILLIONS in GOP/Cheney subsidies, not one reactor has been ordered in the US since 1973.

And I say "thank you Ralph Nader" for the seat belts, shoulder straps and airbags in my car, that is "safe at any speed" thanks to your efforts...

:)

[Warpy]

7. Right, because after 50 years, we still don't know

what to do with the garbage, the waste that plants produce that can be deadly for 100,000 years. Consider where humanity was 100,000 years ago, restricted to part of Africa, small bands of hominids with no ambition to leave their center of origin. Trying to see 100,000 years into the future even geologically is impossible. The truth is that we don't know how to detoxify it and until we do, nuclear power will be an unreasonable option.

[rfkrfk]

20. we don't, but others do know...

how to get rid of the waste -->
use it up as reactor fuel

depends on your definition of 'we', I guess

[NNadir]

4. Um, so your claim is that God opposed the use of nuclear energy?

As an atheist, I find this claim appalling in its implications (but rather typical of modern American discourse), but following it, and ignoring that the article lists facts about scientists and not God, why is it that you suppose "God" created uranium and thorium?

I note in passing that one of the largest sources of aerosol actinides is fly ash from coal fired plants.

[Warpy]

6. Honey, I said Mother Earth

Plutonium doesn't occur natually on this planet.

There is a reason for that called physics.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Well, it does...

It's part of the the uranium decay chain, so there's some in uranium ores - and quite a bit around the oklo site. But it has a short half-life (relative to the age of the planet!), so there's not as much natural Pu as the stuff made by us.

The half-lives of ²³⁸Pu and ²³⁹Pu (the stuff we normally worry about, and make bombs out of) are thousands of years - peanuts compared to the millions of years before the damn CO₂ returns to normal.

[NNadir]

9. I have yet to see a physics monograph that discussed the physics

of "mother earth." Of course, I actually read physics monographs, so I would know that, Honey.

Polypropylene doesn't occur naturally on this planet, and so I suppose that you don't believe in the use of polypropylene. Aluminum metal also doesn't occur, so I assume you don't believe that Mother Earth allows us to use metallic aluminum.

Actually plutonium does occur on the earth. In fact in the early history of the earth, it is believed that the core of the earth contained significant amounts of this element, in the form of the 244 isotope. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/280/5365/877

Some very old thorium ores in California have been shown to contain Pu-244, and small amounts of plutonium also occur in many uranium ores owing to the neutron flux therein, Honey.

Considerable amounts of plutonium were created in the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that operated in Oklo, Gabon about 2 billion years ago, Honey. In the intervening period, billions of years, it has been shown that the plutonium migrated less than 100 meters.

http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Please tell me beer occurs naturally...

...and pizza. I'd hate to give them up because they're evil and unnatural. :scared:

[Oerdin]

11. LOL

Do you honestly think uranium doesn't occur naturally? If you are that scientifically illiterate then our schools are worse then I thought.

[hobbit709]

2. It's like a lot of toxins

If it's not inside your body, its fairly safe. But any amount inside your body is quite deadly. The hard part is keeping it from getting in you.

[NNadir]

5. Any info on injuries from mercury toxicity as compared to plutonium?

Mercury contamination associated with coal has resulted in measurable concentrations of that element for most people on earth, especially those who eat fish.

The energy density of coal is low compared with that from plutonium, assuring that mercury will be widely distributed. In fact, the amount of mercury released by coal burning into the environment dwarfs the amount of plutonium that has ever existed.

Plutonium is widely used in power plants now, in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. You say that it is "difficult" to keep plutonium from getting inside of you. You must therefore be aware of people who are seriously contaminated with plutonium and are suffering serious health effects as a result. Presumably they are more contaminated than the fellows, the chemical pioneers of plutonium chemistry of the Manhattan Project, who accidentally contaminated themselves, as described in the article, who lived for many years with ingested micrograms of plutonium. We would be very interested in your accounts of these people, presumably French, who have this contamination level.

It would be interesting to compare the morbidity and mortality associated with the cases you will produce here with the morbidity and mortality associated, say, with air pollution, heavy metal contamination from fly ash. We'll leave global climate change out of the equation for now, since we will be appealing to data.

[depakid]

12. This article and it's almost cheerleading like tone

Reminds me of a discussion I had (if you could call it a discussion) with some Republicans on another board.

Their claim echoed the propaganda they'd been served by Richard Pombo and his allies in the coal industry that mercury isn't poisonous. Their "reasoning" was that they had played with elemental mercury as kids and seemingly suffered no ill effects. Trying to explain the origin of the term "mad as a hatter" (poisoning from mercury vapor) or the difference between elemental mercury and organic mercury was pointless.

Similarly, this article makes similar statements, including some ridiculous ones:

"In the worst imaginable circumstances plutonium lodged in the body might cause cancer 20 years later." LOL.

Run some Pub Med or google scholar searches on plutonium toxicity you'll get a very different picture.

What this really boils down to is risk communication- and that's a tricky thing indeed. Ask someone whether it's more likely to be bitten by a poisonous snake or struck by lightning. They'll almost always choose the snake, because that's what they're most afraid of. In fact, you're much more likely to be struck by lightening.

Similarly plutonium is highly toxic, but the risk of exposure is very low (although that risk increases substantially as the stuff proliferates- it isn't just "useful" in reactors). Mercury on the other hand is far less toxic, but the risk of harmful exposure- especially among indigenous people in the North is growing intolerably high.

It's the relative risks that people might be able to clue in on- maybe- with a properly tailored message (read: theory driven message, using behavioral psychology). That's the nuclear industry's biggest challenge- and thus far, they've not been very successful, to the extent they've even tried.

[jpak]

13. I attended a nuclear power debate back in the late '70's

The pronuclear dude was a professor of nuclear engineering from GA Tech.

At one point during the debate, he thumped his chest and proclaimed he would swallow a gram of plutonium without batting an eye...

(note: Pu is not adsorbed by the human GI track)

During the Q&A, I asked him if he would grind that gram of Pu into sub-micron particles and snort it.

he did not like the question...

:)

He jumped out of his chair and a pointed his finger at me yelling..."I said I'd swallow it.!!!..I said I'd swallow it!!!"

I pointed out to him that if he ingested Pu particles into his respiratory system, he would not live long enough to die of cancer. The Pu would induce fibrosis of the lung and he would be dead within a few months.

He didn't reply - he just kept yelling and called me a Bad Name...

(sound familiar ????)

:evilgrin:

[Dead_Parrot]

14. Would you snort silicon?

OK, he lost his rag and he's a muppet. But really, how many people inhale Pu on a daily basis?

[jpak]

15. Two words

Rocky Flats...

[Dead_Parrot]

16. Hmmm

OK, that was (in hindsight) a dumb-ass question: Unfortunately I tend not to think about weapons that much - which is why I've managed to get this far in a thread about plutonium without thinking about nuclear bombs, just decay products.

I hearby nominate myself for "muppet of the week".

But then, human nature is as much to blame as my own naïveté: When I think of silicon, I think of PV or my own PC - not missile guidance chips; When I think of steel, I think of wind turbines and wave farms - not disembowelment by a claymore; and when I think biomass and wood, I don't think of Agincourt or Crécy.

Unfortunately, there is a meme around the words "nuclear" and "atomic" that makes everybody else think of weapons. Hell, no-one equates sunlight to hydrogen bombs - because we don't think of the sun as being a nuclear, atomic power source.

Maybe I'm lucky, or just a bit simple. But I can't think of many things we don't use to kill each other: So maybe it depends on your outlook, as much as physics?

[jpak]

23. So more words...

"Windscale"

"Dounreay"

"Chelyabinsk (aka "Mayak")"

and of course...

"Chernobyl"

[depakid]

19. Must be a late 70's thing.

Back during the Alsea studies that linked miscarraiges of women in a small logging town with the herbicide 2-4-5 T (Agent Orange- they sprayed it in our forests too)- a professor at Oregon State quaffed a beaker of the solution, to "prove" how non-toxic it was.

Never did hear what happened to that guy....

[NNadir]

17. Your discussions with Republicans aside, how toxic do you suppose

plutonium is?

Do you have any evidence for your claim that "mercury is far less toxic?" How is the toxicity related to the chemical form of the element? How does the toxicity of metallic mercury compare with the toxicity of dimethyl mercury for instance? How does this toxicity compare with the toxicity of say plutonium (IV) oxide? Any ideas from pub med on the LD50 for either compound? What about the isotopic mixture of plutonium? What effects might that have?

The exposure of various workers and deliberate exposure of various people to plutonium are documented in Eileen Welsome's book "Plutonium Files." In it she - and one gets the impression that she isn't a wild eyed apologist for plutonium use - documents that many people are still living decades after exposure to microgram and even milligram quantities of plutonium.

Here's some rather graphic depictions in an interview with one of the scientists involved in some of those experiments:

http://www.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/histories/0459/0459toc.html#Developing

Don Mastick, Manhattan Project Chemist, had almost the entire world supply (then) of plutonium blow up in his face, about 11 milligrams in 1944. An undetermined amount ended up in his mouth. What, in your opinion would be the effect on a chemist working with 11 mg of dimethyl mercury did the same thing?

(Don Mastick, by the way, was interviewed about his experience in 1995.)

So exactly what does your "very different picture" include specifically?

(Can anyone interview Dartmouth Chemist Karen Wetterhahn about her accident with milligram quantities of dimethyl mercury - or do we need an afterlife medium to help us with that one?)

It happens, by the way, that dimethyl mercury actually ends up being the form into which most environmental mercury is transformed by the action of bacteria. When you open a can of tuna and eat it, dimethyl mercury is what you're eating. Methyl mercury is a liquid that freely flows in the nation's waterways, ending up in it's fish.

Plutonium in general has far less mobility in the environment, although it is believed that in some oxidation states plutonium can be mobilized, albeit slightly, in some kinds of soil under some kinds of conditions. The subject is covered for instance in Environ. Sci. Technol., 40 (2), 443 -448, 2006, an experiment in a lysimeter in which plutonium was exposed in Savannah River soils to natural rain for 11 years. In that period, it was found that 5% of the plutonium so exposed had migrated in the soil at a rate of 0.9 cm-yr^-1. This means that in the period of one half life of plutonium-239, 24,500 years, 5% in the South Carolina rain would migrate a little over 200 meters. In 5 half lives it could go a whole km.

Of course, each year would give a fractionation of 95% of the plutonium in theory, meaning the hemispherical region through which the plutonium would move would have only a few atoms (if that) of the plutonium available at the edge after migrating for one half-life. (This is consistent with the data found at Oklo.)

All of this data, of course, will be meaningless if large portions of South Carolina are either desertified or submerged by the effects of global climate change.

Given this type of data, though, from my perspective it is somewhat amazing that people are so much obsessed with the toxicity of plutonium and so indifferent to the toxicity of mercury. One matter is not so serious and the other is clearly serious.

[depakid]

18. Two different types of toxins

They act in completely different ways, so side by side comparisons are tricky. The chemical analogy that comes to mind is dioxin.

Now, toxocologist are pretty damn well sure that President Yushchenko's going to die from his poisoning- but we don't know when or how (although you could probably pick any of a dozen clinical pathways).

What's the LD50 for TCDD in humans? It's hard to know for sure.

You can try to extrapolate from animal models- but the animals vary pretty widely. No more than 0.0006 milligram of TCDD per kilogram of body weight will kill half of any given population of guinea pigs. Yet, the LD50 for hamsters is 0.045 milligrams per kilogram- making them thousands of times more resistant to TCDD than guinea pigs! Why is that?

And when's Yushchenko's going to die from his huge exposure? No real way to know- and he could easily die of something else (a bullet maybe) before anyone finds out.

The effects of organic mercury we know all too well from experience and we can gauge the LD50 (the better measure here would be the LCt50 where C is concentration and t is time).

Or maybe better still, use the LOAEL (Lowest Observable Adverse Effects Level, and march "up" the pathology list from there). Gets a little complicated to do that on a board, tho- so let's stick with LD50, which the EPA pegs at 5-50 mg/kg.

Very toxic stuff. That's why I'm careful about the fish I eat- and why public health authorities have to issue warnings (that should be heeded by every pregnant women).

Plutonium operates in a completely different way- elemental plutonium is itself less toxic in some senses than lots of things, like messing with elemental mercury- or even swallowing it, which someone could probably do- but that's a completely misleading point.

As I'm sure you know better than I, plutonium isotopes emit alpha radiation, which (as was mentioned in the original post) can be blocked relatively easily- maybe even with a sturdy pair of jeans and the callouses on your butt ). However, when it's ingested- or especially when it's inhaled, it irradiates internal organs- and the skeleton.

That's how the extremely high toxicity come into play. How much radiation does it take to kill and over how much time? Hard to say.

Incredibly, the major benchmarks in radiation epidemiology come from the LSS- the Life Span Study of the A-Bomb survivors and not from occupational studies (where we should be looking, but for political reasons over the years- have not). The LSS has tons of weaknesses, so we're left again with animal studies- though in passing I would not that both Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin were lethally dosed while working on Plutonium cores.

Here's a snip from a characteristic animal study that shows where toxicity levels are generally thought to be (Beagles seem to be the unfortunate dog of choice for much of this research):

Biological effects of inhaled 238PuO2 in beagles.

Beagle dogs exposed to 238PuO2 aerosols (136 dogs, 13-22 per group, mean initial lung depositions of 0.0, 0.13, 0.68, 3.1, 13, 52 and 210 kBq) were observed throughout life to determine tissues at risk and dose-effect relationships....

....The average percentages of final body burden found in lung, skeleton, liver and thoracic lymph nodes in the 30 longest-surviving dogs (mean survival 14 years) were 1, 46, 42 and 6%, respectively. Of 116 beagles exposed to plutonium, 34 (29%) developed bone tumors, 31 (27%) developed lung tumors, and 8 (7%) developed liver tumors. Although lungs accumulated a higher average radiation dose than skeleton, more deaths were due to bone tumors than to lung tumors."

Of course, there were also other nasty symptomatologies....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9339953&query_hl=3&itool=pubmed_docsum

In terms of toxicity here we're talking microgram sized particles- not milligrams, to produce the becquerel's of radiation in these studies, making plutonium in this sense far more toxic than methyl mercury.

Note of course that these comparative figures aren't close to all you'd be looking at with an environmental health risk assessment- much less the risk management stuff, where public perceptions come into play.

[NNadir]

21. While noting that Don Mastick lived 50 years after 11 mg of Pu blew up

in his face, and presumbaly it was an aerosol, and the dogs in your study lived an average of 14 years - not bad for a dog - I will concede that if you grind plutonium up into a fine powder, put it in a fan, and blow it around the room in the presense of people, those people may suffer from toxic effects. We don't know of course, how long the beagles would have survived (and yes, you can provide survival rates for animals) had they been exposed to microgram quantities of methyl mercury.

We do know many tons of aerosol plutonium have been deliberately released into the environment in the form of open air nuclear explosions. I am against repeating this experiment, but plutonium is found all over the world as a result. Ralph Nader types made a huge stink about the toxicity of plutonium when the Cassini mission to Saturn was launched, and less of a stink for New Horizons to Pluto, ignoring all the time that this experiment of releasing plutonium in the high atmosphere had been repeated hundreds of times around the world without killing anywhere near the number of people about whom they so fretted.

However, in terms of loss of life per MW-hr of generated electricity, plutonium is far more safely handled than coal, that is clear. It is also clear that, as stated, plutonium is not as toxic as it is often advertised to be. Your one article on the beagles does little, if anything, to disprove this point.

If one insists on risk free energy, one should simply live in darkness each night, something that will include its own risks.

[depakid]

22. There's actually a whole line of research

on plutonium toxicty & beagles (and other animals as well) that point to similar conclusions, namely that plutonium is extremely toxic in aerosol form- and also pretty damm nasty when ingested. No need to pile on the cites, people can run the searches for themselves.

I agree that in terms of megawatt hours, nuclear is in the aggregate, far safer and preferable to coal- though like others who've considered the issue, I'm greatly concerned about proliferation- particularly with plutonium, because of the nature of the risk. Small probablity for events maybe- but huge potential adverse impacts. It doesn't comfort me at night knowing that India, for example- or Russia- are pursuing breeder technology.

Japan worries me less- though others aren't so sure. Their new facility just went on line last month:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/securitynet/controversial-japanese.html

There's no free lunch with energy generation- active solar produces highly toxic waste; dams deplete fish stocks (among other things) and wind farms kill a lot of birds- the list goes on.

The problem the nuclear people have is trying change people's perception and appreciations of the risks. My thoughts on that remain: it's more important to drill the message home about the consequences of burning filthy coal first, before going into the "our friend the atom" bit...

On another note, this thread also reminds me of Oliver Sacks's autobiography, My Uncle Tungsten, where he talks about childhood experiments involving tossing 3lb of sodium into a local pond, where it 'took fire immediately and sped around on the surface like a demented meteor with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it'. As a child, he was able to get hold of potassium, rubidium and caesium(!) for his own private use.

Impressive that he lived into adulthood... and he's still out there, too. http://www.oliversacks.com/

[NNadir]

24. We (the nuclear people) have been drilling the topic of coal for some time

I know I have.

Recently there was a letter in the New York Times that I linked here which perfectly sums my attitude not only about energy, but everything:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=210704

The letter writer merely noted that Americans do not want to hear the truth. Jimmy Carter told the truth. Al Gore told the truth. People vilified them for doing so.

As for "our friend, the atom," I note that there are almost no technologies that have offered so much energy for so little risk. If nuclear energy is not an environmentally friendly technology, then no such technology exists.

The nuclear industry is the only energy industry in the history of the world that systematically evaluated it's own risk before expanding into the commercial sphere. Of course, when this analysis took place in the 1940's and 1950's, there was no commercial experience, no experimental evidence, to back up these theoretical analyses. However there are many examples of the pioneers, including Enrico Fermi, John Wheeler and Alvin Weinberg, contemplating the matter of public acceptance of the storage of radioactive materials.

I'll offer my opinion of what came of this analysis: The public took this theory, looked at it in an extremely jaundiced way, completely misapprehended what was being said and extracted, by very tortured reasoning, the exactly wrong conclusion.

This was not a winner in any way.

The fact is that up until very recently, no comparative analysis of risk for any other form of energy existed. While some data has been available in selected scientific journals, and while some public figures like Hans Bethe continued speaking out on the matter, there was no systematic detailed analysis until that provided by the European Union in the ExternE reports. People, in an act of spectacular avoidance of critical thinking, concluded that the absence of sytematic risk analysis for fossil fuels meant that fossil fuels were risk free.

I have been arguing publicly and privately for nuclear energy since shortly after the Chernobyl accident, which to my surprise, did not kill vast proportions of the European or even the Belorussian or Ukrainian population. I know the kind of rote thinking that accompanies the issue; I frequently point it out and am frequently exasperated by the kind of twisted thinking I hear spouted in response.

I would guess that at least 400 of my 8000 posts on this website consist of asking people who themselves ask, on hearing anything about the relative risks of nuclear energy, "What do we do with nuclear waste?" the question, "Do you know what to do with carbon dioxide waste?" or "Can you name one person in the United States who has been injured by the storage of so called 'nuclear waste?'"

I can tell you with some authority that there is a huge subset of people in this country who only hear what they want to hear. They are wasted. I assume they are high from sniffing too many fumes. The mere fact that we are debating the question of whether nuclear or coal are preferable today at all is simply a measure of how deeply entrenched stupidity is.